While Cumberland County is off to a cold start to 2025, if past climate trends continue, the region is likely to heat up sooner rather than later.
Fayetteville experienced its third-warmest year on record in 2024, according to data from the National Centers for Environmental Information, which was presented by the North Carolina State Climate Office at a webinar on state climate trends for 2024 on Tuesday. The State Climate Office is a public service center affiliated with UNC System that disseminates climate information throughout the state.
North Carolina also experienced its second-warmest year since record-keeping began in 1895, behind 2019. Some cities experienced their warmest years on record, including Asheville, Hickory and Raleigh. State climate scientists emphasized cases of this record-setting warmth across the state, pointing to an example in Fayetteville last April, when the city saw a daily record-high low temperature of 66 degrees on April 2. This means that the lowest temperature recorded that day was 66 degrees.
“So your morning low is as warm as it’s ever been for that day, 66 degrees,” Assistant State Climatologist Corey Davis said. “That’s pretty close to what their average high is for that day of the year. Just to give you a sense of how out of place that warmth was.”
The warm temperatures in North Carolina recorded in 2024 illustrate the impacts of climate change as the globe heats up, state climatologists said. The last 10 years have also been the warmest on record in the state, director and state climatologist Kathie Dello said.
“We know that the planet’s heating up and we’re seeing some of the impacts here in North Carolina,” Dello said. “That’s not to say that winter doesn’t happen — we’re certainly feeling that right now. We see these cold snaps, we got some snow back, but overwhelmingly we are seeing the fingerprints of climate change here in our state.”
In addition to facing down warm temperatures throughout the year, Fayetteville experienced fluctuating periods of drought and heavy precipitation, an unpredictable pattern that state climatologists said was reflected throughout the state. Notably, Cumberland County experienced its third-driest June on record in 2024. The “summer flash drought” saw 19 consecutive days without rainfall in Cumberland County at the height of the growing season for corn, leading to a devastating impact on local farmers. The State Climate Office estimated that North Carolina farmers had a 60% production loss in corn crop yields, resulting in a $302 million loss across the state.
“Unfortunately, it was really bad timing for the corn crop,” Davis said. “The month of June is usually when the corn is going through its silking phase. That’s when it needs a lot of moisture so those silks can be pollinated. And if they don’t get that moisture, and if it’s hot at the same time, then it can really just fry up those corn crops on the stalks and they may never recover. And that’s what we saw last year.”
However, strong storms in the summer and fall, including Tropical Storm Debby, made up for the heavy dry spell, the state climatologists said, and Fayetteville ended the year as the 59th driest on record with an estimated 2.65 inches below average rainfall. The impacts of Debby in Fayetteville were among the worst in the state, with widespread flash flooding and the Rayconda Dam breach, according to the state climate scientists.
The climatologists expressed concern over the alternating and rapid shifts between exceptionally dry and wet months, amounting to a sort of “weather whiplash” that makes it challenging to plan ahead for extreme weather events.
“I think one of the most concerning parts is that folks can’t look three months down the line and say, we might have a hot, dry summer, because you may have a hot, dry part of summer followed by a really wet flooding part of summer,” Davis said. “And again, I think that just speaks to the nature of these events. They are hitting us hard and fast, unpredictably. And we’ve seen in the last year what the impacts can be from both the dry and the wet side of that.”
In the Sandhills region — a distinct area of the state with sandy soils and longleaf pine forests that includes Cumberland County — impacts can be felt on “both sides of the precipitation spectrum,” with droughts and extreme precipitation bringing hazards, Davis said. He said that extreme precipitation, such as what happened with Hurricane Florence, can cause harm to the local wildlife and disrupt the ecosystems because water gets trapped in the small, isolated wetlands here.
Drought, on the other hand, can quickly bring about wildfires in the Sandhills. With the changing climate, fires might start as early as January in the future and last throughout the year, Davis said.
“This is a part of the state where anytime it seems like in the spring or summer or fall where we start to get into a few dry weeks, that’s one of the first hot spots where we start to see some of that fire activity pick up,” Davis said. “Those wiregrass ecosystems, they do not hold onto much moisture and they can dry out pretty quickly. So, looking to the future . . . 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.”
Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608. This story was made possible by donations from readers like you to CityView News Fund, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.
