Since 1869, a weather station in Lawrence, Kansas, has been taking temperature readings. There were only 37 states in the union that year, Ulysses S. Grant was president, and the transcontinental railroad had just been finished. The phonograph had not yet been created by Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell hadn’t called anyone yet. No March in Lawrence had felt as hot as March 2026 in 157 years, despite two world wars, the Great Depression, the Space Age, and everything that followed. Then it did.
The figures have been in the back of people’s minds ever since NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information released its monthly global climate report on April 9. In terms of global records dating back to 1850, March 2026 was the second-warmest March, tied with 2024 and only surpassed by March 2025. In their own evaluations, NASA and the European Copernicus Climate Change Service ranked it fourth; the methodology differed slightly, but the fundamental narrative remained the same. The planet was significantly, nearly evenly, hotter than usual. Only one tiny region of the world, southern Alaska, which makes up less than 1% of the planet’s surface, exhibits cold anomalies on a global temperature map for the month. The rest of the world, including Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Antarctica, was warm.
What transpired in the middle weeks of March in the western and central United States was quite different. The term “heat wave” seems inadequate to describe what transpired. At weather stations throughout the West, more than 2,500 monthly records and more than 12,000 daily temperature records were broken. In just the two peak days of March 18 and 22, 2,010 stations recorded their warmest March temperature ever, and 4,447 stations set daily highs. Yuma in Arizona surpassed the previous state record of 104 degrees by five degrees, reaching 109. At Buttercup and Squaw Lake in California, the temperature hit 112 degrees. Twenty stations in Iowa, a state where March temperatures above 91 degrees had never been recorded, suddenly surpassed that mark, with Little Sioux hitting 97.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that weather stations that have been recording data for over a century account for 544 of those broken monthly records. These instruments were not installed ten years ago. They have institutional memory that dates back to times most people only read about in history books. The significance of Winnemucca, Nevada’s record-breaking March temperature is different from that of a more recent station. Winnemucca has 149 years of records.
If anything, the picture of the drought is more depressing. Although March 2026 was the sixth driest March in contiguous U.S. history, the cumulative total—just 4.79 inches of precipitation nationwide from January through March—is more significant. That is the lowest amount ever measured for that three-month period, surpassing the previous record of 5.27 inches set in 1910, which was set before modern agriculture and widespread irrigation transformed American reliance on water. This exceeds the rainfall deficits noted during the 1930s Dust Bowl, according to some researchers. It’s genuinely unclear if this is an exceptional outlier or the start of a longer dry pattern, but it’s a number that demands attention.
The heat immediately took on a tangible texture on the ground. The intense heat caused Camelback Mountain in Phoenix to close its hiking trails. The well-known Death Valley superbloom, a unique desert spectacle that attracts tourists from all over the nation, was cut short. Ski resorts in California close. These are not abstract concepts. These are the kinds of things that people had intended to do but were unable to.
March marked the official end of La Niña conditions, which had been moderating Atlantic hurricane activity. According to NOAA, there is a 61 percent chance that El Niño will form between May and July 2026, and conditions could last until the end of the year. According to a different forecast from Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, there is a 77 percent chance of El Niño during the August–September–October hurricane season peak. These conditions have historically suppressed Atlantic storm activity by increasing wind shear, but they tend to intensify heat and drought in other parts of the world.
The likelihood that 2026 will be one of the five warmest years ever recorded is extremely high, according to NOAA’s statistical models. As of right now, the first quarter of this year is the fourth-hottest January through March period in recorded history. It’s unclear if the trajectory will soften in the coming months, especially if El Niño patterns change local weather. However, the records set in March, which outlasted the railroad era, the phonograph era, and the invention of the telephone, are not going to be reinstated.
