The North has never been hotter. Here are the latest stats from the National Climate Data Center.
Driven by the warmth over the land masses of the Northern Hemisphere, the home planet just steamed through the eighth warmest August on record and the fourth warmest January-to-August period, according a new climate report posted on Sept. 12.
The driver of this statistical simmer appears to be record average temperatures in Asia, Europe and North America. During the past seven months, northern land masses averaged 2.29 °F above normal, beating the previous record of 2.07 °F above normal set in 2002.
Rising .2 °F might seem like a miniscule change while sitting in a garden chair with your toes in the grass, but it’s a stunning shift for steppe, desert, taiga, plains and forest. The result?
During the past seven months, the Northern Hemisphere has averaged 1.35 °F above the long-term average — the warmest January-to-August period ever recorded.
The weather wizards at NCDC had this to say:
Anomalously warm temperatures have covered much of the globe throughout the year.
The January-August 2007 map of temperature anomalies shows the presence of warmer-than-average temperatures across all land areas, with the exception of the southern countries located in South America and the south central states in the contiguous U.S.
Warmer-than-average Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) occurred in the Atlantic, Indian, and the Northwest Pacific oceans.
Cooler-than-average conditions were observed in the Nino 1+2 and 3 regions, the northeastern Pacific and some areas in the southern oceans.
During the boreal summer, there were above average temperatures across northwestern Africa, southern Australia, eastern Brazil, and most of Europe, Asia, and the U.S., including Alaska.
Meanwhile, cooler-than-average conditions occurred in northern Australia, the southern parts of South America, and parts of the south central U.S.
Of course, the truly stunning climate development this summer is the Perfect Melt occuring over the Arctic, with the extent of ice cover shrinking more than 20 percent below its previous all-time record minimum.
The latest NCDC report had this to say on the Arctic developments reported by the National Snow and Ice Data Center:
This was the least sea ice extent in August since records began in 1979. Sea ice extent for August has decreased at a rate of 8.4 percent per decade (since satellite records began in 1979) as temperatures in the high latitude Northern Hemisphere have risen at a rate of approximately 0.37 °C per decade over the same period.