The National Weather Service is running an active heat advisory over San Antonio and the I-35 corridor through Tuesday evening — heat index values reaching 108–111°F (42–44°C) — and the thermometer shows no awareness that fall arrives in a week. This is what the aftermath of a record summer looks like: not a clean ending, but a long, grinding reluctance to let go.
On Wednesday, September 9, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made the record official. Summer 2026 — June through August — was the hottest meteorological summer in 132 years of US temperature recordkeeping. The national average reached 74.4°F (23.6°C) across the contiguous 48 states, running 3.0°F (1.7°C) above the 20th-century average and edging out the previous record — held jointly by the Dust Bowl summer of 1936 and the summer of 2021 — by four-tenths of a degree.
Four of the five hottest US summers on record have now occurred in the past five years, according to NOAA. The Dust Bowl benchmark that climate scientists once treated as the ceiling for American summer heat has been equaled or surpassed twice in the space of five years…