Oklahoma, Summer | featured news

Christopher Carlson sprang into action when smoke and embers ushered a fire that threatened to envelop his Noble, Oklahoma, home. After taking his 12-year-old stepson to safety, Carlson raced against time to assist neighbors and try to save his trailer from one of more than a dozen wildfires that, as of Saturday, had destroyed more than 120 structures.

After recalculating data from last year, the nation's climatologists are declaring that Oklahoma suffered through the hottest summer ever recorded in the U.S. last year - not Texas as initially announced last fall.

Texas just finished the hottest June through August on record for any state in the U.S., weather officials said Thursday. National Weather Service meteorologist Victor Murphy told The Associated Press that Texas' 86.8 degree Fahrenheit average beat out Oklahoma's 85.2 degrees in 1934.

Sweltering may have reached a new record last month, as Oklahoma racked up the country's highest monthly average temperature ever.