2024 was a year of weather extremes in western North Carolina: Inescapable summer heat. Extreme rainfall. Landslides. Drought. Freezing cold.
Those are just some of the conditions that were part of a new statewide climate report released this week.
North Carolina climatologists Corey Davis and Kathie Dello confirmed on Wednesday that extremes including Hurricane Helene are part of an increasing climate trend.
Davis, who is North Carolina’s Assistant State Climatologist, said that this was the hottest year on record for not only Asheville, but multiple counties across the state.
“We are consistently seeing these average temperatures that are running 2-3 degrees above that historical average,” Davis said. “We also saw those signs of warmth locally all throughout the year and it was not just with those hot summer days.”
In Western North Carolina, Macon, Jackson, Clay, Madison, Yancey, Mitchell, Ashe, Alleghany, Surry, and Avery counties all saw their hottest years on record. Across the state, 2024 was in the top 10% hottest years on record for every county.
Davis said this has been an ongoing trend – the top six warmest years have been since 2016. This increased heat means that weather events that were once anomalous - seventy degree days in February, summer nights that rarely cool down – have become more commonplace.
This heat and drought, Davis said, can be disastrous for public health.

“When you're talking about people or plants or animals, we all rely on those nighttime temperatures cooling off to give us a chance to rest and recover. And when it never drops below 74 degrees, you're not going to do a whole lot of recovering,” he said.
There have also been increased cycles of drought and extreme rain across the state. Dry weather in 2024 damaged the state’s corn crop, Davis said. In Buncombe County, Asheville saw record lengths of time without snow, as well as its third wettest year on record. These drought cycles, combined with debris piles from Hurricane Helene, could have consequences for years, he added.
“This could be a problem, 10, 15 years down the road,” Davis said. “There's so much debris left behind from that storm in the forest and even in some of the towns that if they were to get into a drought, like we've seen in some recent falls in Western North Carolina. All that's going to be ready to burn.”
The Forest Service does routine timber salvaging and vegetation management after disasters in order to prevent this kind of scenario, but with 822,000 acres of estimated timber damage from Helene, that cleanup could take a long time.
Fossil fuel burning has been connected to climate change and the resulting weather extremes.
N.C. state climatologist Kathie Dello said that she saw an acceleration of hotter temperatures in 2023, with 15 consecutive months breaking heat records. That amount of extremes is starting to change our environment a lot.
“Looking to the future,” Dello said, “you can expect to see habitats that may be altered for seasons at a time because of heavy rainfall and expect to see that fire regime changing and certainly shifting earlier.”
Climate change is not a “stairstep,” Dello said, and not every year or month is warmer than the one before but the increasing trend is clear.
“We are seeing the fingerprints of climate change here in our state,” she said.