Last month was the hottest October in modern history and the first 10 months of the year have also been record warm, U.S. government scientists on Wednesday. The record-shattering month was right in step with most of the preceding months in 2015 – which is positioned to easily rank as the warmest year on record. Given that the El Nino continues to strengthen and how much warmer 2015 is than previous years, Blunden said “it is virtually just impossible that we will not break the record” for the hottest year.
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According to a monthly NOAA report, the October average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 0.98 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average of 14.0 degrees Celsius.
“The year-to-date (January-October) was also record warm”.
“The year-to-year variability is kind of interesting and it makes for good news stories, but what we really like to look at are trends over decades”, he said. Since the year 2000, global monthly heat records have been broken 32 times, yet the last time a monthly cold record was set was in 1916.
Experts are pointing to El Nino as a cause of rising temperatures. The agency hinted that this El Niño may even surpass that year’s. For North America, that’s likely to mean a warmer-than-usual winter for the northern latitudes and more wet weather across the southern United States, from drought-stricken California to the already-sodden Southeast. The average temperatures are higher during the past 35 years and the beginning of the 21th century promise more hot summers in the future. That record was set in 2014.
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So far 2015 has experienced the highest temperatures on average since 1880, according to a report from NOAA. “Argentina, part of northeastern Canada, scattered regions of western and central Russian Federation, and central Japan were cooler or much cooler than average”.
