Gerald Ford was president and the nation was celebrating its bicentennial the last time the Earth had a cooler-than-average June, and this past June was the Earth’s hottest since weather records began in 1880, a report made public Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found.
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Researchers said that both El Niño and human-created global warming can at least partially explain the increase in temperatures.
NOAA also spoke about what it calls the “monthly temperature departure” or record spikes in heat. In a press conference Tuesday, NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, who directs the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, provided a temperature analysis not just for June of 2016, but for the first six months of this so-far record warm year.
In June, record warmth was felt across parts of the southwestern US, southern Mexico, northeastern Brazil, northeastern and southwestern Africa, the Middle East, northern Australia, and Indonesia. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says globally, June was the 14th straight record hot month, with earth averaging 61.52 degrees (16.4 degrees Celsius). Last year previously held the title as the warmest first six months, but 2016 surpassed it by 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit).
January through June 2016 global land surface temperature was measured at 3.17 degrees above average..
NOAA said the first half of 2016 was 0.36 degrees (0.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than last year’s record. Yet February of 2016, in the same dataset, crushed February of 2015 by 0.33 degrees Celsius. Only central and southern South America experienced cooler-than-average conditions during June 2016.
Meanwhile, July’s temperatures are looking pretty dire.
“It’s fair to say we are dancing with those lower targets”, Schmidt said.
The graphic below illustrates how warm the first half of 2016 has been, compared to the warmest seven years on record.
The area of the Arctic covered by ice was the smallest for June since records began in 1979, NOAA and NASA said.
The calculations also showed that June 2016 is the 40th June during which global ocean temperatures were “at least nominallyabove the 20th century average”. Get this: Not only was March 2016 the hottest March ever recorded, but it broke that record by the greatest margin ever recorded, exceeding the margin set by …
Sea ice is frozen ocean water that melts each summer and refreezes each winter.
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“This was also the 14th consecutive month the monthly global temperature record has been broken – the longest such streak in NOAA’s 137 years of record keeping”.
