2024 CONUS Temperatures

NOAA has released their December 2024 results for both nClimDiv and USCRN US temperatures, and 2024 turned out to be the warmest year for CONUS on record (records beginning in 1895). NOAA's website reports CONUS for 2024 as 55.51°F. Below I show several graphs for nClimDiv, with monthly temperatures, a 12-month running mean, and a 10-year running mean.

ERA5 for CONUS is also out, and to make apples to apples comparisons, I changed nClimDiv to Celsius and set it to a 1951-2000 baseline.
USCRN began recording CONUS temperatures in 2005, so the end of 2024 marks the 20th year for that dataset. Below I show graphs comparing USCRN to both nClimDiv and UAH-TLT for CONUS.

Here's how USCRN compares to ERA5, with the scale switched to Celsius to match ERA5.
Since USCRN only goes back to 2005, I can't give you 30-year trends, but CONUS is warming so rapidly, that the last 20 years is already statistically significant. From Jan 2005 to Dec 2024, CONUS trends were:
  • USCRN: 0.451 ± 0.241°C/decade (2σ)
  • nClimDiv: 0.385 ± 0.242°C/decade (2σ)
  • ERA5: 0.418 ± 0.176°C/decade (2σ)
These are statistically indistinguishable, with USCRN showing marginally more warming than nClimDiv and ERA5 splitting the difference between the other two. If I didn't tell you which was which, you wouldn't be able to tell.
Update: June 2025. Above I show a plot of the trends and uncertainties for four CONS datasets, updated through May 2025.
CO2 Forcings Do Correlate with CONUS temperatures


And while proper comparisons between temperature and CO2 should use GMST (the US is only 2% of the globe), I see many contrarians plotting CONUS temperatures and CO2 with scales specifically chosen to create the impression that the US is not warming in a manner consistent with the increase in CO2 concentrations. So I thought it might be useful to show the correlation between CONUS temperatures and CO2 forcings. There is more scatter in the data due to the fact that US is a small fraction of the surface area of the globe, but the correlation is still clear. The US is warming at a rate of 0.73°C/W/m^2.

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