A Review of Summer 2025

As always, folks will differ in their opinion of what the summer weather was like. Was it a hot summer or just right?  Was it dry or wet?

First, let’s start by looking at the entire lower 48 states. For temperatures, it was a little warmer than normal, but nothing outrageous.  The largest anomalies were in the Northwest.

For precipitation, the West was drier than normal while the Midwest and the High Plains were wetter than average.

One notable exception to the dry conditions in the West was California Sierra Nevada as well as southeast Oregon. The monsoon season for Arizona and the Great Basin was a little disappointing. 

A closer look at the summer precipitation of the Northwest shows that the dry conditions were confined largely to the Columbia Basin as well as western Washington and Oregon.  Southwest Oregon and north-central Montana had a wetter than normal summer.  

One notable aspect of the map above is the area in dark red, which indicates the driest summer on record.  This includes Spokane and parts of the Palouse.  But summer rainfall is spotty by nature. The National Weather Service office is about 5 miles away from Spokane International Airport.  It had 4 other summers drier than this year, and records there only started in 1997.

Don’t get me wrong. It was a very dry summer.  But the dryness actually started in late spring. 

Here’s the accumulated precipitation (green line) and normal precipitation (brown line) at Spokane Airport since Jan 1.  Precipitation was tracking very close to normal until sometime in April.  And that flat green line from mid-May through June no doubt had a big impact on dryland crops.  

Below is the same graph as before, but this time with 2024 superimposed in purple.  A very similar signal to this year, with rainfall shutting off around April.  The big difference being that in 2024 you can see a few decent rain events in that mid-May through June time frame. 

As you probably know, in the West we typically look at the precipitation year starting on 1 October.  Below is that graph for Spokane. 

Notice anything interesting?  The two lines meet perfectly at the current date (right side of the graph).  That means when you total up the winter, spring and summer precipitation, it’s exactly equal to what we should normally have.  In other words, no drought.   But as we saw from the previous graphics, we’ve been lacking in rainfall since April.  Sometimes it’s not just how much rain you get, but also when you get it.

One measure I often rely on to measure summer heat is the number of days the temperature reaches 90F or higher. Average in Spokane is 20 days per summer. For much of 2025, we were actually running a little behind. But our heat wave at the end of summer put us solidly in the “hot summer” category with 26 days.  As you can see in the table below, in recent years it’s become common to have 90 degree days.