The number worth knowing from last month is not the hottest afternoon. It is 76 degrees, and it happened in the middle of the night.
On July 14, the National Weather Service office in Negaunee Township recorded a low temperature of 76 degrees. That is the all-time warmest low ever measured at the office. NWS meteorologist Ben Warren, describing what stood out about the month, put it this way: “A notable record that we broke here at our office was the all-time warmest low temperature.”
Then he supplied the detail that makes it land. Seventy-six degrees, Warren noted, “is the normal high temperature for the day.”
The temperature bottomed out, at the coolest point of a July night, exactly where a normal July afternoon is supposed to peak.
Nothing else in 67 years of records at that office comes close. The previous warmest low was 74 degrees, set on July 1, 2002. July 14 beat it by two full degrees, in a station archive holding more than 24,000 daily observations.
The month, in the numbers
July 2026 was the second warmest July on record at the Marquette office, in a record going back to the 1950s. “July in the U.P. was certainly one of the hottest on record,” Warren said.
The month averaged 69.8 degrees. The 1991 to 2020 average for July at that station is 65.4, so the month ran 4.4 degrees above normal. The only warmer July in the station’s history is July 1983, at 70.1 degrees, which means 2026 missed the all-time record by three tenths of a degree.
The chart above shows all 67 of them. It is worth looking at for what it does not show as much as what it does. There is no tidy staircase. The single coldest July in the record, 1992, sits eight years after one of the warmest, and the 1990s as a decade came in cooler than the 1980s. July is noisy at this latitude and one warm month is not a trend.
What the ranking does show is where the warm ones cluster. Seven of the ten warmest Julys at the Marquette office have happened since 2000, in a record that began in 1959.
The afternoons did their part. A couple of places in the Upper Peninsula reached 100 degrees for the first time ever recorded: Amasa, and the MSU Extension farm at Chatham. Paulding and Ironwood both got to 99.
For a peninsula surrounded by the coldest large body of fresh water on the continent, three digits is not a normal summer occurrence, and “first time ever” is doing real work in that sentence.
Why the nights would not cool off
Warren pointed at moisture. Dewpoints reached the upper 70s, which he described as rare for the U.P.
That is the mechanism, and it is worth understanding because it is what made this month different from a run of merely hot days. Dry air sheds heat fast after sunset. Humid air does not. Water vapor holds warmth in, so a muggy night sets a floor under the temperature and the ground never gets rid of what it absorbed. Stack a few of those together and nothing resets.
Heat that breaks at night is uncomfortable. Heat that does not break is the kind that accumulates, in buildings and in people, which is why the overnight number is the one a forecaster reaches for first.
The national picture
The U.P. was not alone. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information reported that July 2026 averaged 76.9 degrees across the contiguous United States, making it the warmest month on record in a series that runs from 1895 to the present. It beat the previous marks, July 1936 and July 2012, by between a tenth and two tenths of a degree.
Every state finished in the warmest third of its own July history, and the Upper Midwest ran much above average.
So the U.P. placing second in its own record, during the month the whole country set a first, is roughly what you would expect. This was not a local weather quirk. The U.P. was in the middle of it.
Sources, credits, and reporting details
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How this story was reported
Editorial methodAnalysis
Last verifiedAug. 15, 2026
Corrections statusNo material correction note is recorded on this article.
Verification note: The featured image is an ORIGINAL CHART built in house from the primary climate archive, not a sourced photograph, so the provenance that matters is the DATA provenance. Every plotted value was pulled live from NOAA ACIS on 2026-08-15 for station USW00094850. Nothing is estimated, smoothed or drawn by eye, and there is deliberately no trend line. Rebuild only by re-running the query, never from the rendered image. STATION TRAP: three different Marquette series exist with different start dates, the WFO office 1959-09-29, the ThreadEx composite 1961-10-01, and the old city station 1860-11-01. Always name the station.
Primary sources
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NOAA Applied Climate Information System, station MARQUETTE WFO (USW00094850) — NOAA Regional Climate Centers
Accessed Aug. 15, 2026.
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July 2026 was warmest month on record for contiguous US — WLUC Upper Michigan’s Source
Published Aug. 11, 2026. Accessed Aug. 15, 2026.
Additional reporting
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National climate report, July 2026 — NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
Accessed Aug. 15, 2026.
Photo and media credits
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July mean temperature departures, MARQUETTE WFO, 1960-2026 (original chart) — Yooper Hub, original graphic; data NOAA ACIS
Featured image record. Accessed Aug. 15, 2026. Original work; underlying US federal observation data not copyrightable.
Original 1600×900 chart produced in house. Diverging bar chart of all 67 July means plotted as departures from the 1991-2020 normal, 2026 and the 1983 record direct-labelled. Colour pair validated for colour-vision deficiency in both light and dark modes. Credit line as printed: Chart: Yooper Hub. Data: NOAA Applied Climate Information System, station MARQUETTE WFO (USW00094850).
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