Map showing air temperatures across the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico on June 6, 2024.
An early summer heat wave broke temperature records in Nevada, Arizona, and California in June 2024.
June 2024 saw a severe heat wave in the Southwest, with record temperatures in places like Las Vegas and Phoenix. National Weather Service. That same day, temperatures soared to 112°F in Phoenix, Arizona, and 122°F in Death Valley, California. The Washington Post reported additional locations that either broke or tied temperature records that day, including Fresno, California; Amarillo, Texas; Kanab, Utah; Reno, Nevada; and Flagstaff, Arizona.
Rising Frequency of Heat Waves
Heat waves like this one have become more frequent in the United States in recent decades, according to a team of researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Using a NASA modeling system called MERRA-2 (Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications-2) to analyze long-term trends, the researchers found that summer heat waves in the U.S. roughly doubled in number between 1980 and 2023, increasing from an average of two to four per month.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using GEOS data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC.
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