The year is not quite in the books, but it is late enough that we can have a look-back at this year's weather and climate extremes.
The one variable that stands out among extreme weather is temperature - extreme high temperatures in summer and winter were very high in 2023, both of which contribute to a long-term trend that the IPCC has attributed primarily to the emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
You can see from the figure above that there is no trend in this time series since December 2000, which is counter to what has occurred globally.
The figures above for January and July show clearly that maximum temperatures have increased since 1895 for both winter and summer, as is expected.
Disaster declarations don't tell us anything about climate, but they do tell us something about disaster declarations - 2023 saw 19 flood-related FEMA disaster declarations, which is just about exactly the average from 2000-2022.4 You can dive much deeper into trends in US flood at this recent post.
2023 ends the year just about in the 50th percentile of months since 2000 for area under exceptional and extreme drought.
The figure below shows the proportion of US land area characterized as "Very wet" and "Very dry" from 1895 to 2023.
If you squint, you can see that "Very dry" has declined a bit, with extremes reduced dramatically since the 1950s, while "Very wet" has increased, with more extremes since the 1980s.
The "Very wet" and "Very dry" time series has a lot of month-to-month variability - in 2023 the "Very wet" area ranged from 0.81% of the country to 23.56%, and "Very dry" from 3.36% to 23.07%. Tornados, Hail, Wind.
The figures above show from left to right, tornadoes, hail and wind local storm report counts, based on preliminary data for 2023.
The data shows that tornadoes are a bit above the recent average and hail is a bit below.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/12/20/u-s-climate-2023-year-in-review-in-one-word-normal/#
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