The United States just had its hottest summer in 132 years of recordkeeping, soundly beating the summer of 1936 — during the Dust Bowl era — as well as the summer of 2021, according to data released Wednesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Previously, those two years had tied for the hottest summer.

The Dust Bowl summer of 1936 has been long been regarded as the benchmark of hottest summers in the US, but has now been equaled or eclipsed twice in the past five years thanks to the influence of human-caused climate change. August 2026 and the June-through-August period both set all-time records, and July was the hottest month of any month on record in the US. The difference between the new and old seasonal records was 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is relatively large for an all-time temperature record.