2024 was the warmest year on record worldwide, and that’s no different in Pittsburgh.
Beyond record-high average temperatures, Pittsburgh saw exceptional precipitation and catastrophic flooding early in the year, drought conditions in the latter half and the most tornadoes on record in 2024.
Ray Petelin, a meteorologist with KDKA, said anytime a record is broken, “It’s significant.” He credited part of the significance to the fact that when the previous record was recorded in 1921, the weather station was located in downtown Pittsburgh. Today, the station is in Moon Township.
“Anytime you have a sensor in an urban setting … the temperatures will likely read warmer than if you’re in a more rural setting because you have concrete, you have a bunch of other things that absorb heat and then reradiate that,” Petelin said. “So if you’re beating these old records that were from an urban setting and with a setting that’s more rural, now that’s significant, that’s a sign of something.”
Fred McMullen, a meteorologist with National Weather Service Pittsburgh, described 2024 as “a very busy year” between being the warmest year and experiencing a range of abnormal weather conditions.
McMullen said that by the end of April, rainfall was seven inches above average, and that by May, 2024 was on track to be the wettest year on record. Drought conditions in August, September and October prevented that record from being attained, according to McMullen.
“It was interesting because usually you don’t see the pendulum swing as much as it did,” McMullen said.
Pittsburgh has experienced 18 consecutive months of above-average temperatures through December 2024, according to NWS. McMullen said that January 2025 will likely break this streak.
“This year, we are seeing what a normal Pittsburgh winter is,” McMullen said. “Temperatures are going to be near average. We’re going to see it near average, or slightly below average snowfall for the season.”
The average temperature for the month of December in Pittsburgh is 33.7 degrees Fahrenheit, though the average for 2024 was 36.6 degrees Fahrenheit according to the NWS. Pittsburgh received 5.7 inches of snow in December 2024, which is two inches shy of the average snowfall for December according to the NWS.
Mark Abbott, a professor of geoscience and environmental science at Pitt, said spikes in temperature experienced in 2024 were in part related to El Niño patterns as well as long-term climate change.
“The overall trend over the last century, especially in the last 50 years, is warming, and that is undeniably driven by fossil fuel use,” Abbott said. “What we’re seeing with El Niño is natural up-and-down temperature swings. We happened to land on an El Niño, which is the warm end of that cycle. So it made it especially warm so you have a trend of warming with this variability on top of it.”
Some potential effects of warmer temperatures across the country include changes in precipitation, which in turn affects vegetation and agricultural zones as well as increasing the potential for water or insect-borne diseases in places that experience winter, according to Abbott.
The exact effects of anthropogenic warming temperatures are hard to predict — even when researching far beyond the meteorological record, according to Abbott.
“When [fossil fuel usage is] the key forcing, we haven’t had anything like that in the past,” Abbott said. “It is a difficult subject to make progress on, because we’re experiencing a rate of change that, frankly, we’ve never experienced.”
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