2023 is officially Orlando’s hottest year. But there’s a twist.

All year long, 2023 looked like a contender for Orlando’s warmest year in history but that’s a hotly contested mark.

Now, with 2023 not quite finished, it has been declared a co-champion, tying with 2015 for the highest average annual temperature ever recorded in Orlando.

The National Weather Service’s climate analyst for Central Florida, Derrick Weitlich, made that call shortly after sunrise Sunday, noting that the coldest temperature for the last day of the year was 43 degrees. He determined that 2023 would end with an average temperature — calculated using the average between daytime highs and nighttime lows each day of the year — of 75.6 degrees.

The planet also had its hottest year on record, which extends back nearly two centuries, and climate scientists are wondering if the pace of global warming is accelerating.

All corners of Florida were on track to have among their hottest or their hottest year recorded. How hot was it here?

For the year, Orlando set 40 records for hottest day or hottest night.

In all of the Orlando portion of Central Florida, not a single cold temperature record was broken, Weitlich said.

For Orlando, every month and every season of 2023 was warmer than normal.

Of the city’s top 10 hottest years, with recordkeeping going back to the late 1800s, six occurred from 2015 through 2023.

“We are just not breaking from this trend,” Weitlich said.