Oklahoma’s 2022 Weather Extremes – It Was A Wildly Hot Year

As we turn over every new year, it's always interesting to look back on the previous year of weather in Oklahoma.

You're guaranteed to be amazed by tales of extreme hot and cold temperatures, astounding rainfall, freakishly high winds, and a few oddball records... 2022 was no different.

The Oklahoma Mesonet is a taxpayer-funded network of weather monitoring stations throughout the state. With at least one monitoring station in each county, it takes and relays weather measurements every five minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Here's what it recorded last year.

Temperatures.

I think everyone can agree that 2022 was a brutally hot year. The data backs up that belief.

The hottest temperature in the state last year was recorded in Mangum on July 18th - 114.8. That's the same day every county and monitoring station in the state hit at least 103.

The hottest heat index was recorded in Webber Falls a month earlier, 120.2.

The heat also lingered on for months. Altus recorded 66 days above 100 degrees.

While the heat remains fresh in the memory, we also had a crazy cold winter in 2022.

There are a couple of towns out in the panhandle that saw the coldest temperature and windchill for the year.

Kenton recorded the lowest air temp at -12.4 degrees last February and the biggest temperature drop, 59.9 to 2.9 degrees in just 24 hours.

The town of Hooker recorded the lowest wind chill, a crazy -31.2 degrees during the Christmas arctic blast.

Blackwell recorded the biggest temperature rise immediately after the last winter storm in April, from 24.6 degrees to 69.5 degrees overnight.

Wind and Rain

Amazingly, as dry as it was last summer, most of the state still came in really close to average in regards to annual rainfall. We received too much in spring, then not enough in summer. It practically balanced out for most places.

The highest rainfall total fell in Haskell, 7.36" in just 24 hours.

The hardest rainfall total fell in Hinton, 3.78" in just one hour.

The smallest rainfall total fell in Goodwell. Only 6.48" total for the year, the lowest recorded rainfall amount in state history.

When the wind comes sweeping down the plain, it sure doesn't mind blowing through anything standing in its way. The town of Idabel, way down in Southeast OK recorded the record gust for the year, 108.4 miles per hour during the tornado outbreak of November 4th.

Since the predicting the weather is akin to predicting the future, nobody is absolutely sure what 2023 will hold for the Sooner State... but Mesonet will be recording the data, and we'll get a peek at it this time next year.