The report found that “the July average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.46°F above the 20th century average”.
Advertisement
The US-based body keeps tabs and statistics on the climate and oceans, and their records showed that several regions had record-breaking heatwaves last month.
The latest global temperature data make it likely that 2015 will be the hottest year on record, according to NOAA.
The current El Niño weather system is “exacerbating the underlying effect of global warming that we’ve been experiencing for some time”, Blunden said.
The data from NOAA dates back to 1880, but it is possible that July was the hottest month in at least 4,000 years.
The world broke new heat records in July, becoming the hottest month in history, a US scientific agency revealed on Thursday. So far, 2015 has been on track to be the warmest year ever.
The first seven months of 2015 have already set an all-time temperature record for the period. But, warmer nights brought the overall July temperature to just 7-tenths-of-a-degree below normal. Other months have come close – this January was the second-warmest on record and April was third-warmest.
In recent days there have been reports that this year’s El Nino will be particularly intense. That’s a large margin for weather records, with previous monthly heat records broken by a 20th of a degree or less. It surpassed a previous record set in 1998 by 0.08°C.
Advertisement
NASA also observed the telltale signature of the powerful El Nino event – the much-warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the eastern and central tropical Pacific.
