AUSTIN, Texas – Although astronomical fall doesn’t end until December 21st, we have now officially closed the door on meteorological fall, which includes the three-month period of September, October and November. It should come as no surprise that this fall has been extremely warm and very dry, but how does it stack up in the record books?

Now it’s official: The meteorological fall of 2024 will be the warmest ever recorded in Austin, with records dating back to 1897. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, he wasn’t even particularly close.

The average temperature in the fall of 2024 in Austin was 75.7 degrees. Remember, average temperature simply takes the average of every morning low and afternoon high for every single day through fall and averages all of those numbers together.

Austin’s second warmest fall on record occurred in 1931, when the season’s average temperature was 75.1 degrees. This means we have surpassed second place by more than half a degree this year. That’s a significant margin if you look at a three-month average.

As you can see below in the list of the five warmest falls of all time, three of the five largest falls occurred in the last 20 years.

Not only was it very warm, but also incredibly dry. The meteorological fall brought only 2.64 inches of rain for the entire season. A normal fall would bring 10.28 inches of rain.

Interestingly, the vast majority of the rain we saw this fall (1.94 inches) came from a single storm system. Without this one system, we would be in even worse shape given the drought and lake levels.

Speaking of drought, conditions deteriorated rapidly throughout much of this fall, and portions of the Austin metro and Interstate 35 corridor are now in “extreme” drought.

We’re now keeping our fingers crossed for some beneficial rain as winter begins, but we’re not holding our breath given the current outlook for the winter, which favors drier than normal weather.