2024 By The Numbers

By Ryan Knapp

Blowing snow highlighted at sunset with some undercast on Feb. 1, 2025.

Having just wrapped up the monthly review for January 2025, it appears that 2025 is off to a cold start. While reviewing last month’s data, it reminded me that I should probably put together a blog post summarizing some of the weather stats that formed 2024. Looking back at weather stats, if I had to choose four words to summarize 2024 weather conditions on the summit, they would be – warm, wet, snowy, and foggy. To find out why these words were chosen, let’s look back at some of the stats from last year:

Our average temperature for 2024 was 31.3°F (-0.4°C), which is 3.3°F above the 1991-2020 30-year normal for our station. This would make the annual average temperature of 2024 the highest average annual temperature in our dataset (1932-present). The previous highest annual average temperature was 30.4F (-0.9°C) which occurred in 2012 and 2023. Our warmest temperature recorded in 2024 was 70°F (21°C), which occurred on June 19th. Our coldest temperature recorded in 2024 was 17°F below (-17°F/-27°C), which occurred on February 4th.

In terms of total liquid precipitation, from January to December of 2024, the summit of Mt Washington received 94.94 inches, which was 3.71 inches above the 1991-2020 30-year normal for our location. The 94.94 inches of precipitation makes it the 12th wettest year (January to December) in our dataset (1932-present). From January to December of 2024, the summit received 332.80 inches of snow, which was 51.0 inches above the 1991-2020 30-year normal for our location.

In terms of winds, for 2024 our average was 33.0 mph, which was 1.9 mph below the 1991-2020 30-year normal average for our location. Our highest gust recorded for 2024 was 147 mph, which occurred on February 29th. From January to December, we had 143 days which had gusts of 73 mph or greater and of those days, 31 days had gusts that were 100 mph or greater.

As for our weather during 2024, we averaged 35% of the possible sunshine. 2024 was a leap year and out of the 366 available days, the summit had 17 days that were noted as clear or mostly clear, and there were 68 partly sunny days, with the remaining 281 days being filed under mostly cloudy, cloudy, or obscured (fog). We had 330 days with at least some amount of fog recorded during a 24-hour period. We had 145 days with rain and 137 days with snow.

If interested in additional weather data, please check out our F-6 page which is updated nightly, our Mount Washington Weather Archives page, our  Current Conditions page, and our 48-Hour and Higher Summits Forecast. If you need data for research purposes, you can submit a request here. If interested in supporting the work we do at our weather station, please consider donating at mountwashington.org/donate.