2015 one of hottest, wettest in US history

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO

Last year was the second warmest and third wettest year on record in the United States, according to a report released Thursday.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) noted that 2015 was a record-breaker for a number of states.

Florida, Montana, Washington and Oregon all experienced their warmest year in recorded history, while Texas and Oklahoma experienced their wettest. Every state in the contiguous U.S. had warmer than average temperatures.

The average national temperature in 2015 was 12.4 degrees Celsius (54.4 degrees Fahrenheit). The only year that was warmer in the U.S. was 2012, with an average temperature of 12.9 degrees Celsius (55.3 degrees Fahrenheit).

Only 1973 and 1983 were wetter than 2015, and all three years saw strong El Nino weather patterns.

Last year followed a string of recent years with several

costly natural disasters including drought in California and wildfires in Alaska.

In 2015, 10 weather and climate events with losses exceeding $1 billion each occurred. Only 2008, 2011 and 2012 had more ultra-expensive disasters.

“The fact is that we live in a warming world,” Deke Arndt, the chief of NOAA’s Climate Monitoring Branch, said in a conference call with reporters. “We’re going to be dealing with more extreme heat events and more extreme rainfall events, and I think that really showed up in the results from the year as a whole.”

NOAA will announce its global temperature report on Jan. 20, when it is expected to reveal that 2015 was the warmest year across the globe on record. Roughly a year ago, NOAA announced that 2014 was Earth’s warmest year since 1880, when the U.S. government began measuring global temperatures.

The last time the globe experienced a record cold year was 1911. Fourteen of the 15 warmest years in recorded history have occurred since 2000.