Data from the Kentucky State Climatologist’s office indicates that – in 119 of the state’s 120 counties – residents experienced a top five hottest year when it comes to average temperature. More than half the Commonwealth’s counties had their hottest year ever, which contributed to the state surpassing the previous record heat set more than a century ago in 1921.
The one county that didn’t have a top 5 year was Hancock County, which experienced its seventh hottest year.
State Climatologist Jerry Brotzge largely credits the record-setting temperatures to a very warm winter and warm overnight temperatures in Kentucky.
“During the winter, you can range from 10 degrees to 50 degrees depending on the day, or even 60 or 70 degrees,” he said. “So if you have a year where those winter months are very warm, that's going to have an outsized impact on your annual average.”
Basically, Brotzge explained, higher lows in Kentucky’s coldest months – and hotter nights in the summer – are dragging that average up. But the climatologist also tied some of the elevated temperatures to atmospheric conditions like a strong El Niño in 2024 and the continued impacts of the Tonga volcanic explosion putting increased amounts of water vapor in the stratosphere.
“You've got at least a couple of things going on during 2024 – in addition to the long-term global warming trend from CO2 – that very likely contributed to the unusual warmth that we've seen both in 2023 and 2024,” he said.
Many states that neighbor Kentucky also experienced record average temperatures in 2024, including Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. In all, seventeen states had their hottest year in 2024, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Brotzge said that seven of the 11 hottest years in state history have happened since 2000. Kentucky state climate data also shows that three of the five wettest years on record have occurred over the past decade.
Along with the warming trend in Kentucky’s climate, the Commonwealth also experienced many extreme weather events last year. During 2024, the state was impacted by catastrophic tornadoes and wind storms, the remnants of Hurricane Helene, a drought that saw several Kentucky counties declare a natural disaster, mudslides, a heatwave powered by an atmospheric heat dome and bitter, deadly cold.
Alice Turkington, an associate professor of geography, has been teaching University of Kentucky students for more than two decades about climate change, its impacts and the steps they can take to mitigate it. She said it wasn’t that much of a surprise to hear that 2024 was a historically hot year but that it was still “a gut punch.”
“Globally, we've got to this so-called tipping point where we've gone past the Paris [Agreement] target of 1.5 degrees (Celsius) of warming in total. We're now at 1.6,” Turkington said. “In Kentucky, we finally got to the point where we're breaking records on an average scale – not just for summers or winters. Primarily, [it] just makes me feel very sad, because this has just been a nonstop process of increasing carbon emissions and increasing warming.”
She said she sees the upward trends in temperature and in precipitation, as well an increase in extreme weather events, as being connected to climate change.
“I think that the changes recently have been quite rapid, and the major impacts that we've seen are in extreme events: heat waves, floods, droughts, big storm breakouts,” she said. “Those things have really become much more noticeable.”
Turkington is a member of the Kentucky Climate Consortium, a network of climate researchers and teachers in higher education across the state. She said her position as someone who teaches people about climate change has allowed her to see shifts in attitude over time regarding the topic.
“When I began teaching it, it was really quite a political topic, and people were not convinced that it was an issue at all. Now, I think the students coming into the classroom are firmly in the camp of they believe that something is changing quite rapidly,” she said. “They're concerned to know what to do, why it's changing and how they can act.”
Turkington said she tries to help her students “find ways to be hopeful and talk about solutions, rather than be doom and gloom.” For her, that means finding ways to take action on a “local, personal scale” to reduce carbon emissions and slow climate change.
“If you understand where the carbon emissions are coming from, you can start to think about ways in which you can reduce those emissions personally,” Turkington said. “It's not just about what car you drive. It's also about what you eat, what you wear, how you get places and all of those things have a little bit of an impact … if everyone made the same small changes over such a large place, it would really add up.”
Brotzge said that shifts in Kentucky’s climate have occurred cyclically, with the state warming between the 1890s and 1940, cooling between then and the 1970s and warming consistently since the 1980s.
“When you look at the 130-year record, you see this kind of zigzag pattern of warming and cooling and then warming again. So depending on when you were born, you may have different recollections of winters or summers during your childhood than we have now.”
Moving forward, Brotzge expects Kentucky to continue getting warmer and wetter.
“If you just extrapolated into the future, you would say that Kentucky would still warm gradually, and we would probably continue to see slightly increased rainfall as we move forward,” he said. “When we look at some of our past years – our wettest years, our driest years – we have a lot we can learn from those, and we're going to learn a lot from 2024.”
Copyright 2025 WKMS
