US: The U.S. government’s official global temperature report hasn’t been published yet, but the recently gathered data from NOAA and NASA satellites indicate March as the warmest month in 37 years. The conclusion is drawn from a combined study of land-sea temperature, which records March 1.31 degrees Fahrenheit above than the 30-year average.
That also was the third-highest anomaly among all the months in the satellite record, according to the University of Alabama’s John Christy, keeper of the data. Christy said while El Nino – anomalously warm surface waters in the tropical Pacific – continues to fade – its residual heat continues to help bump up global temperatures.
On Monday, the government’s Climate Prediction Center said that sea-surface temperatures out that way still were running just over 2.5 degrees above normal, but that the upper ocean has cooled considerably. We should note that NCEI and satellite measurements are quite different.
NCEI computes an average global temperature from thousands of surface stations. The satellites use microwave-sounding devices to measure temperatures in the bottom 6 miles of the atmosphere. The NCEI records are back-dated to 1880, and the monthly numbers are expressed in terms of how they compare with 20th Century averages.
Both databases, however, concurred that before last month, the February 2016 temperatures were the highest relative to averages. NCEI had it 2.1 degrees about the 20th Century average, and the satellites, 1.49 above the 30-year figure. Christy said the February temperatures got a kick from general warmth in the Northern Hemisphere, while the March warmth was focused on the tropics. February and March warmth aside, around here December is about to invade April.
Source: Philly.com
