Arkansas Storm Team Weather Blog: 2023 was the hottest year on record!

If you thought 2023 felt hot, you would be right. The data is out, and 2023 was the hottest year on record in central Arkansas!

Weather data has been recorded in Little Rock since the 1800s! Every day for the last 100+ years the temperature and precipitation data has been written down and archived so we can see how the weather and climate have changed over the years!

The average temperature in 2023 was 66.3°. That number is calculated by taking the average temperatures from each day, adding them all up, and dividing by 365 days.

The temperature of the average year in Little Rock is 62.9°. That number is calculated by taking the average temperature from each of the last 30 years, adding them up, and dividing by 30.

That means that 2023 was 3.4° warmer than normal. That might not seem like much, but it is when talking about the average temperature for an entire year it is.

The previous hottest year on record was 2012. The average annual temperature that year was 65.8°. 2023 ended 0.5° hotter than 2012. Below is a list of Little Rock’s top 10 hottest years on record.

Out of the top 10 hottest years in Little Rock, six of them have occurred since the year 2000. That means 60% of the hottest years on record have been recorded in the last 16% of the data.

Even though it’s at a slower rate than much of the globe, Arkansas’ climate has been slowly warming in the last 100+ years. Little Rock’s average annual temperature has warmed by 0.9° over the last 143 years.

The graph above shows the slight warming trend that Little Rock has seen since 1880.

Overall the climate in Arkansas has been warming for the last 100+ years, but not all seasons are warming at the same rate. Summer has warmed the fastest, with the average temperatures over 3° warmer now than it was in the 1800s. Fall and Spring are warming at a much slower rate, temperatures have only warmed about one-half of a degree. Believe it or not, but winter has cooled over the last 100+ years. The average winter in Central Arkansas is about two-tenths a degree cooler now than it was in the 1800s!

Little Rock broke another record in 2023! We had the warmest yearly minimum temperature on record as well! The coldest the temperature got last year was 25°. The previous record was 24° set back in 1952!

It also got really hot in 2023! We didn’t break an all-time record high, but on August 26th Little Rock recorded a high temperature of 107°! That was the hottest temperature since 2012. The all-time record high in Little Rock is 114° set back in 2011.

As far as precipitation, 2023 ended with above-average precipitation. Little Rock recorded 56.86″ of rainfall and the average is 50.52″. This may come as a surprise because Central Arkansas ended the year with very little rainfall and drought conditions, but 2023 started as one of the hottest years on record and that was enough for the year to end in a surplus.

2023 was a year without any snowfall in Central Arkansas. Locations in Northwest Arkansas saw well over a foot of snow, but Little Rock went the whole year without any measurable snow. Since 1875, there have only been 20 years without any measurable snowfall in Little Rock.

2023 will go down in the history books as a hot, snowless year with a wet and stormy first half and a dry and quiet second half.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KARK.