These Counties Just Had Their Hottest Summers Ever

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24/7 Wall St. Insights

• The U.S. just had its fourth warmest summer on record.
• 113 counties had their hottest summers of all time.
• While many of the hottest parts of the country set records, traditionally cool counties in the Bay Area also set records.
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2024 has been another year of brutal, record-setting temperatures. The average temperature in the contiguous United States from June to August was 73.8°F, 2.5°F warmer than normal and the fourth warmest summer on record. Plagued by brutal heat domes and other intense weather events, much of the country experienced far worse extremes.

In total, 113 counties set records for average daily summer temperature in 2024, representing 11.9% of the U.S. population. Some 55 of those counties are located in the Western U.S., while 31 are in the South and 27 in the Northeast. On average, summer in the West was 3.7°F hotter than normal, while summer temperatures averaged 3.0°F above normal in the Northeast, 2.0°F above normal in the South, and 0.9°F above normal in the Midwest. Summer temperatures averaged over 5.0°F above normal in southern Nevada, Utah’s Dixie region, southeast California, and central to northwestern Arizona.

High temperatures baked a wide swath of the United States this summer, spanning both hot, humid climate regions as well as cooler, drier parts of the country. While the four hottest counties historically – Imperial County, California, La Paz County, Arizona, Yuma County, Arizona, and Maricopa County, Arizona – all set new records for average daily temperature in summer 2024, a sweltering heat wave in the Bay Area pushed summer temperatures in Marin County, California, Monterey County, California, and Santa Clara County, California to new highs. On the other side of the country, cooler climates like Cumberland County, Maine and Sussex County, New Jersey also set records.

While a strong El Niño contributed to above-average heat, experts at NASA believe that human-made climate change was the primary driver of record-breaking heat in summer 2024. And as the effects of climate change worsen, temperatures in the United States will continue to reach new highs at an accelerating pace, with record-breaking highs registering less as statistical anomalies and more as signals of full-on climate breakdown.

To determine the counties that just had their hottest temperatures on record, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed county-level data on average monthly temperatures from the NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information . All counties in the contiguous U.S. were ranked based on the difference in average daily temperature in summer 2024 (June through August) from historical summer averages from 1901 to 2000. Only counties where summer 2024 ranks as the hottest summer on record – going back to 1895 – were included.

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