The heat experienced in El Paso the past two summers is like nothing the city has ever seen. Climate change continues to reshape what Borderland residents regard as “normal.”
El Paso’s average daily temperature the past two summers – defined as June through August for meteorological record keeping – have been far hotter than anything previously recorded in El Paso. This year’s average daily temperature of 88.1 degrees is the second hottest summer recorded, with 2023 setting the record.
Seven of the 10 hottest summers in El Paso weather records, which date to 1879, have come since 2015.
During the summer of 2024, El Paso saw its hottest June and second-hottest August on record. El Paso’s four hottest Augusts have all come since 2019.
June 2024’s average temperature of 89.3 degrees shattered a 40-year-old record for the month.
This year provided “only” the eighth-hottest July ever, and was five degrees cooler than last July, which was by far the hottest month ever recorded in El Paso.
El Paso has had eight months in history where the average daily temperature was 88 degrees or higher. All but two of those months have come since 2016; the only exceptions are June and July of 1994, which used to be the hottest summer ever in El Paso.
Prior to 1994, El Paso only had one month where the average daily temperature exceeded 87 degrees – July 1980.
Even though El Paso is in the Chihuahuan Desert, triple-digit temperature days used to be a rarity, in part because of the city’s 3,800-foot elevation. As recently as 1988, El Paso had only three days between June and August where the temperature topped 100.
In recent years, triple-digit days during the summer have become the norm.
Last year, 60 of the 92 days between June and August topped 100 degrees. This year, it happened 53 times. El Paso’s 113 triple-digit days in the past two summers are more than it had in any 10-year between 1880 and 1950.
But El Paso’s rising average summer temperature isn’t just driven by daytime heat. Nights are also much warmer than they used to be.
In each of the last two years, the average summer overnight low temperature in El Paso exceeded 75 degrees between June and August. That had never happened before.
As recently as 1991, average overnight summer temperatures in El Paso were 10 degrees cooler than they’ve been the past two years.
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