Over 12,000 minutes of ‘summer’ in Seattle this year. It wasn’t a record.
Scott Sistek 2 min read
Space Needle & Sun (Photo courtesy: Sigma Sreedharan Photography)
Seattle is finishing up this past summer with 12,093 minutes of experiencing 80 degrees or warmer temperatures.
How do we know? I counted…
It’s a unique project I started after in 2011 when summer was REALLY late getting started. By mid-July, I went to the UW, which tracks the weather by the minute on top of the atmospheric sciences building, to count up how many minutes it had been over 80 degrees — what I would come to define as a “summer minute”. Turns out it was just 78 minutes. The post went super viral.
Seattle summer minutes at or above 80 for Sept. 17-22: 0
Total for September: 781
FINAL total for 2025: 12063It’s the 9th-most since 2000 but fewest since 2020.
HAPPY AUTUMN ALL! WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT SUMMER!
— Seattle Summer (@SummerMinutes) September 22, 2025
Seattle eventually ended up with over 3,000 minutes but I enjoyed the project and dug through their archives back to 2000 to fill in the “summer minutes” back to then. And in the years since then, I’ve been keeping track on my Summer Minutes Twitter…er…X page..
It’s shown a remarkable increase in the past several years. The tally had crossed 10,000 minutes just twice between 2000 and 2013, but now easily reaches that mark. This marks the 5th consecutive summer we’ve reached at least 12,000 minutes. Overall, It’s the 9th warmest since 2000.
2015 remains the champ at 14,370. The 108-degree heat wave-fueled 2021 ended up setting the June record AND has the distinction of having the only full day where an entire day was at or above 80 degrees — July 28.
You can see the entire chart here, which I update frequently, and track both on BlueSky and X @SummerMinutes.