2020 will go down in history as the most active year for tropical weather in the Atlantic Basin with a total of 30 named storms.

It also featured severe weather outbreaks in several states, resulting in billions of dollars in damage.

For North Carolina, it was one of the wettest years on record, and for several cities, it was even a top-five wettest year! 2020 ended appropriately yesterday, wet across most of the Tar Heel state.

Here’s a look at cities across the state and where they landed:

Several cities experienced one of their top-five wettest years on record. Here’s a map of where 2020 stands in the ranking of wettest years on record.

Many cities weren’t able to reach the number one spot because of the extremely rare flooding that occurred with Hurricane Florence in 2018.

To see how the most recent climate normals have changed from the new data over the last decade, check out our blog here!

Besides heavy rainfall, it’s worth mentioning three other notable weather events from 2020 across North Carolina.

According to the National Centers for Environmental Information Storm Events Database, North Carolina had 49 total reports of tornadoes in 2020.

There were also 141 tornado warnings in North Carolina, the fourth-highest amount issued in 30 years for any given year.

The most active day for tornadoes occurred on April 13, when 16 tornadoes formed across the state. That made it the fifth-largest outbreak in state history!

The only deadly tornado occurred within one of five tropical cyclones to impact North Carolina, an EF3 tornado on August 4.

Arthur, Bertha, Fay, Isaias, and Zeta were five of the tropical cyclones to either barely swipe past or make a direct hit on North Carolina this year. Isaias was the strongest of those four, but it was Hurricane Zeta that brought tropical storm warnings to the western part of the state.

The center of Isaias tracked north just inland of the Middle Atlantic Coast from late Monday night, August 3 through Tuesday morning, August 4.

Outer bands north and east of the Tropical Storm produced three tornadoes across portions of northeast North Carolina.

One tornado was an EF3, producing maximum sustained winds of 140-145 mph. This tornado moved into Windsor, NC and caused fourteen injuries and two deaths.

At 8:07 on the morning of August 9, the most powerful earthquake to hit North Carolina since Woodrow Wilson was president shook much of the state.

Items were knocked off of store shelves, and there was minor structural damage in Sparta near the quake’s epicenter, but there were no serious injuries.

Though not specifically a weather event, this phenomenon garnered attention state-wide. There were reports of shaking from the Mountains to the Coast, and Spectrum News in North Carolina covered the quake live on-air that day.

Be sure to follow Spectrum News for all the inclement weather we’ll be sure to track in 2021!