For the first time in more than 50 years, Honolulu didn’t get any rain in the month of August.
NOAA’s most recent monthly climate report noted that no measurable rainfall was recorded in the Honolulu area in August 2025.
Other parts of Hawaiʻi were also parched. Overall, last month was the driest August for Hawaiʻi since at least 1991.
Climatologist Thomas Giambelluca said that rainfall levels over the past four decades have been trending downwards. Large swaths of the islands are experiencing some level of drought.
That’s cause for worry, Giambelluca said. But he added that more data is needed to determine if this trend will reverse, or if it's indicative of a permanent shift in Hawaiʻi’s climate.
“Whether we should be concerned that this dry period is evidence of a transition to a drier climate, perhaps as a result of global climate change, we don’t know,” he said.
Hawaiʻi sees a lot of variance in rainfall month to month and year to year, which makes the data difficult to parse.
For instance, summer storms sometimes dump huge amounts of rain on the islands. The wettest August on record was in 2018, when Hurricane Lane passed by the state.
But if dry conditions persist, Hawaiʻi may need to figure out some way to make up for the lack of rainfall.
“The dry areas are where we live, where we do a lot of our agriculture and where a lot of our tourism industry is located,” he said. “Those are all activities that require water, and they'll need more water if they're getting less rainfall.”
