THE RECORD BOOK
Every all-time record, named to the one gauge that holds it.
California holds the highest reliably measured air temperature on Earth, the deepest snow ever measured in the United States, the country's longest run of rainless days, and a certified 199 mph wind gust — all inside one state, and none of it by accident. The same terrain that gives this site its organising argument, a 14,000-foot wall standing between the ocean and a below-sea-level basin, is what makes the extremes possible.
A record is a property of one instrument on one day, which is why every entry below names its gauge, its date and the body that certified it. Six come from NOAA's State Climate Extremes Committee, the official arbiter of state records; three are long-standing marks the SCEC table does not carry a California row for, cited to the Western Regional Climate Center and labelled as such.
These are historical facts, not measurements made here — the same rule that keeps hand-typed temperatures out of every other table on this site.
Map of California locating the nine record sites.
The register
NINE RECORDSNINE GAUGES134°FWORLD RECORD
The highest reliably measured air temperature on Earth. A closed basin 282 feet below sea level, ringed by ranges that reheat every parcel of descending air — the terrain is the record.
CERTIFIED: NCEI SCEC−45°F
Cold-air pooling in a high Sierra valley: on a calm, clear night after a snowfall, the coldest air drains to the basin floor and radiates away what warmth is left. The same mechanism gives Truckee its frosts.
CERTIFIED: NCEI SCEC25.83″
A Pacific storm pinned against the Transverse Ranges, whose east–west wall stands square across the moist southerly flow. More rain in one day than Los Angeles, ten miles downslope, averages in a year and a half.
CERTIFIED: NCEI SCEC67″
Five and a half feet in a day, at a pass on US-50. The date is widely misquoted as 1989; the certified record is January 5, 1982. Why a pass, and not a peak? See the Sierra ramp.
CERTIFIED: NCEI SCEC451″U.S. RECORD
Thirty-seven and a half feet of standing snow — the deepest ever measured in the United States, at 8,000 feet on the wettest stretch of the Sierra ramp.
CERTIFIED: NCEI SCEC199mph
An anemometer on an exposed Sierra crest ridge during an atmospheric-river storm. Crest gusts are a different regime from anything a valley airport measures — see the Sierra Wave.
CERTIFIED: NCEI SCEC390″U.S. RECORD
Thirty-two and a half feet in a single month — still the national record — in the same winter that set the U.S. snow-depth mark two months later, at the same gauge.
PUBLISHED: WRCCThe everyday extremes
THE 1991–2020 NORMALS' OWN RECORD HOLDERSAn all-time record is one afternoon at one gauge. A normal is thirty years of afternoons averaged — and the two answer different questions. The register above says what California has done once; the cards below say what the extremes of its ordinary year look like, computed live from the same NOAA normals every place page on this site uses.
Computing from the normals table…
What a record is, and is not
One gauge, one day
"California's hottest day" means: the hottest reading any accepted instrument in the state has produced. It says nothing about the state as a whole that afternoon. That is not a weakness — it is the definition, and it is why the gauge is named on every entry above.
Certified vs. published
The State Climate Extremes Committee investigates and formally accepts state records; that is the strongest claim a number can carry. The monthly-snowfall, dry-spell and driest-year marks predate the SCEC process and rest on the Western Regional Climate Center's published climatology — excellent provenance, but a different kind, and the register labels the difference.
The pending heat readings
Furnace Creek logged 130.0°F in August 2020 and 129.4°F in July 2021. Both are under formal evaluation and neither has displaced 1913 in the official table — and the 1913 figure itself has vocal critics in the literature. This page reports the certified record and will change when the certifiers do.
Why records cluster in terrain
Seven of the nine entries sit on the Sierra crest, the San Gabriel wall or the Mojave floor. Flat places do not set records; places where terrain concentrates an airstream do. The whole site is an explanation of that sentence — start with the ranges and passes.
Looking for what changed, rather than what peaked?
Records are single days. For the 131-year measured trend — warming rates, the wettest and driest years, the drought ledger — our companion site Golden State Climate carries the full NOAA divisional record, 1895 to now. For verifying or proposing a state record, the authority is the State Climate Extremes Committee.