North Texas Summer Nights Are Heating Up Faster Than the Days

I moved to Texas in 1992. I was seven years old, and I remember that year well. So when I wanted to know whether North Texas summers have really gotten worse, or whether it only feels that way because the bad ones are the ones we remember, 1992 was the obvious place to start counting.

It turns out Texas went easy on me. That first summer, DFW hit 100°F exactly once, on August 10. Only three other years since 1953 had one 100° day or none, and 1992’s average summer high is tied for the third coolest in that whole stretch.

The summers since have been a different story. I pulled every daily reading from the weather station at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport since 1992 and counted, then went back to 1953 for context. The answer surprised me: the hottest afternoons haven’t changed nearly as much as the nights.

The Data #

NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network publishes the daily high, low and rainfall for thousands of weather stations. I used station USW00003927, the official observing site at DFW Airport. Its daily highs start in 1953 (the record before that has only lows), and every summer day since 1953 is there, with nothing missing. Most of this post looks at 1992 on. The last section uses the full record from 1953.

A few choices worth knowing about:

• Summer means June, July and August. 100° days are counted for the whole year, since some land in April, May and September. Summer rainfall is the June-through-August total.
• Temperatures are whole degrees Fahrenheit, as the weather service records them. NOAA stores them in tenths of a degree Celsius, and rounding converts them back exactly.
• Readings NOAA flagged as failing a quality check are left out. Since 1992, none of the summer days were.
• 2026 runs through October 7, the last day in the file when I pulled it. The summer is complete.

The analysis script turns NOAA’s file into the three CSVs behind every chart here. Each chart has a download link and a table of its numbers.

What I Found #

The hot days come in bursts #

Start with the number everyone talks about: days that hit 100°F.

There’s no smooth climb here. 2011 towers over everything, and some of the worst years (1998, 2000, 2006) came early in the record. 2022, 2023 and 2026 were all brutal, but 2025 had only seven. Averaged out, the later half of the record has more 100° days: 26.6 a year from 2009 to 2026, against 18.8 from 1992 to 2008. But the swings from one year to the next are so big that a straight-line trend through these bars isn’t statistically convincing. The afternoons are noisy.

Every summer, day by day #

Here is every summer day since 1992, one row per year, so you can see when the heat arrives and how long it stays.