Summer 2026 Review

Today marks the last full day of astronomical summer. The fall equinox occurs Tuesday at 5:05pm. So I thought it was a good opportunity to look back at our summer. Was it a hot one?

Here’s the temperature ranking for June-July-August across the contiguous 48 states. 




The Four Corners area had its warmest summer on record (going back to 1895), as well as South Florida and San Diego.  Somewhat interesting, since there wasn’t a ton of media attention on a hot summer this year.

For the Northwest, it was warmer than normal, but nothing record breaking.  I’m actually a little surprised by this.  To me, this summer was about average, temperature-wise  I actually prefer to measure a summer by the number of days that reached 90F or hotter.  

  • At Spokane airport the thermometer reached at least 90F on 17 days this summer, compared to an average of 20 such days.  That’s the lowest total since 2019.
  • At Deer Park airport, there were 22 days of at least 90F, compared to a normal of 23 days.  I’m personally kind of shocked that Deer Park had 5 more days of 90F than Spokane airport.  
  • Fun fact: Deer Park airport is actually 150 feet lower than Spokane airport (2205’ vs 2355’).  Using the thumb rule of 5.5F degrees per 1000 feet, that equates to 0.825F degrees warmer at Deer Park due to elevation.  Still, a 5 day difference in 90F days seems like a lot.  
  • In any case, this metric would mean that summer 2026 was a bit on the cool side. Also we never reached triple digits.
On the precipitation side, I think all would agree it was a dry summer.  Here’s the rankings map:


Drier than normal in the West and wetter than normal in the Ohio Valley. If you look closely, you’ll see that Spokane and Whitman counties actually had their driest June-July-August on record, along with a few counties in California.  

Here’s another way to look at it.  It’s the water year accumulation of precipitation at Deer Park.





The green line is the accumulation of precipitation starting 1 October last year, while the brown line is the average.  Both lines were fairly close to each other until about May, when our rainfall started to taper off a bit.  The July-August flat line really put us behind. But the September rainfall shut down our fire season and helped us cut into the rainfall deficit a bit.

So what does the next couple of weeks look like?  We’ll have a front move through on Friday, bringing us some more rain.  This is the average of the computer forecasts.




Temperatures will be knocked down a peg; back into the 60s for next week. A couple more fronts next week to close out the month will bring some more rain chances. Probably Tuesday and Friday. 




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