July Was World's Hottest Month On Record, NOAA Says. Others Say It Was Close

Seeing red again. Most of the world was warmer than normal
in July, 2019, says NOAA. The agency says the
month was the world's hottest on record.

Much of the world endured some pretty big heat waves during July and now the official word is in from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information: July was the world's hottest month on record.

In keeping with climate change, this is part of a trend. All of the hottest Julys on record happened in the past five years, and nine out of the 10 hottest happened since 2005, says NOAA. This July was 1.71 degrees warmer than the 20th century average.

July is normally the warmest month of the year for Earth, despite it being winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Given that this July was so warm globally, that made the seventh month of 2019 the hottest.

The places that seemed to be the hottest this July were Alaska, central Europe, sections of southern Asia and southern Africa and parts of eastern North America. (Here in Vermont, in eastern North America, Burlington had its third hottest July on record. A couple New England cities had their hottest July.)

The only cool spots, at least relative to average were in parts of northeastern Europe, a bit of northeastern Siberia and central Canada.

NOAA says so far in 2019, we're tied with 2017 as the second hottest year on record out of the past 140.

Global July temperatures since around 1880. Notice a trend?

Oh, and by the way, sea ice extent in the Arctic was at a record low level in July, 2019, as NOAA continued to share this bad climate news.

Different climatalogical and meteorological organizations measure global temperatures slightly differently.

The Category 6 blog notes:

"The Japan Meteorological Agency rated July 2019 in a tie with July, 2016 for warmest month on record and NASA found that July 2019 was in a virtual tie with August, 2016.

"Minor differences in rankings between NASA, NOAA and JMA can arise because of how they handle data-sparse regions such as the Arctic, where few surface weather stations exist."

El Nino patterns tend to make the world a bit warmer, on top of the underlying global warming. In July a weak El Nino was fading into oblivion. I'm not sure if the dead/dying El Nino will have a noticeable effect on global temperatures for the remainder of the year.

Most Of World Has Been Warm Lately, But Great Falls, Montana Is New Global Ice Box

The departure from normal of temperatures across the globe Tuesday.
Blues and purples are below normal, oranges and reds are
above normal. Almost everywhere except the United States was warm.

It's been pretty damn cold over the past month in much of the United States and parts of southern Canada.

That's especially true in the northern Rockies and northern Plains of the United States and adjacent areas of southern Canada. Those areas have been consistently the coldest place on Earth, relative to average.

Of course, this area isn't THE coldest spot on Earth, but just the furthest below normal, just to be clear.

Montana seems to be the epicenter of this extreme and long cold wave.

In the opening days of March, some areas in this region had their coldest temperatures on record for the month. Elk Park, Montana was 46 below this week. If verified, that would be the coldest temperature on record for the entire state for March.

Cities in Montana that set their all-time March low temperatures this week include Eureka at -23, Miles City at -31 and Livingston at -27.

Elsewhere, North Platte, Nebraska reached 25 below early this week, setting a March record there.

To give you an idea of how miserable it's been in Montana, let's dig deep into the city of Great Falls. On Sunday, the city had a high of -8 and a low of -32, which is incredible 50 degrees below normal. I don't remember the last time I've seen a departure from normal that big anywhere.

For comparison, if it were 50 degrees below normal here in Burlington, Vermont yesterday, the high and low temperature would have been -14 and -32, and that would have established a record for the coldest day of any day in any month on record. Thank goodness that didn't happen and it was only 11 degrees colder than average Wednesday!

Back in Great Falls, each of the past 31 days have been at least 15 degrees colder than normal and 20 of them were 30 or more degrees chillier than average. You think it wouldn't snow much at such low temperatures, but Great Falls had 32.3 inches of snow in February. It's certainly been a winter to remember in Montana.

It'll sort of warm up in Great Falls and the rest of Montana later this week, but it will still be a good 10 to 15 degrees colder than normal. The number of consecutive days below freezing there is now 32 days, which is a new record, and that streak will grow this week.

I'm sure Great Falls is lovely, but I'm glad I'm not there.

As the Weather Channel points out, the United States is sticking out like a sore thumb in global temperature maps this week, as you can see in the illustration in this post. Cold air which is normally up in the Arctic has been displaced southward by a ridge of high pressure over and near Alaska.

That high pressure has brought record warmth to the northern tip of Alaska. Most of the Bering Straight off the west coast of Alaska between the Pacific and Arctic oceans is ice-free, the first time anybody has seen such conditions in that part of the world this time of year.

Despite the cold in central North America, preliminary data indicates that February, 2019 will likely come in as the world's third warmest on record. Part of the counterbalance came from Alaska, much of Siberia, parts of western Europe and Australia, which have reported record warmth over the past month or so.

Awfully Cold Here, But Warm In Much Of The Rest Of The World

Lots of steam billows from the McNeil Woodfired Electric generating plant
in Burlington, Vermont as temperatures sank to record lows this morning.

Boy, this Thanksgiving cold wave really is one for the record books here in New England.

I have to go back to, I think, to late November and early December 1989 to find a cold snap of this early season intensity.

Lots of record lows were set. Particularly record low daily "high" temperatures for the date.  Burlington, Vermont only reached a so-called high temperature of 14 degrees on Thanksgiving. The previous record low high for the date was 22 degrees, so we shattered that record.

Other record low "highs" were 14 in Plattsburgh and an astonishingly chilly 8 degrees in Montpelier. Back in Burlington, it was the coldest Thanksgiving Day on record, too. The previous record was 19 on November 24, 1938.

Morning record lows on Thanksgiving in southern New England included 7 in Worcester, Massachusetts, 9 in Hartford, Connecticut and Providence was 15 degrees.

Worcester, with a maximum reading Thursday of 16 degrees and Hartford, at 21 degrees, set all time records for the coldest maximum temperature of any November day on record.  Portland, Maine also had it's coldest November high temperature on record.

More record lows are being set this morning. Overnight it was 19 below in Saranac Lake, New York. Burlington, Vermont has so far gotten to 1 above, exceeding the record low for the date, which had been 2 above. 

Also this morning, Albany, New York had a new record low of 4 above, Glens Falls had a record low of 3 and Poughkeepsie had a record low of 6.

It will warm up to seasonable levels over the weekend. Today will still be super cold, but not as bad as yesterday.

We do have to be careful with this warmup later Saturday and Saturday night. Rain is expected to move in to northern New England, but the ground got so cold during this bitter snap that rain might freeze to pavement and other surfaces even if the air temperature is a bit above freezing.  I suspect the National Weather Service might issue winter weather advisories for parts of the region Saturday night.

We will get our thaw, amid periodic rain Sunday and Monday, so some or even much of the snow in the valleys will melt.

But it's back to "Snovember" Tuesday and Wednesday as snow and snow showers move in. At least during next week, it won't be nearly as cold as it's been in the past couple days.

WARM ELSEWHERE

Yearly temperature departure from normal of Octobers on
Planet Earth since 1880. Blue is cooler than normal, red is
warmer than normal. Notice a trend?

New England yesterday was the coldest place on the planet, if you are looking at how far everyone's temperature was below or above normal. In fact, most of the world was warmer than normal yesterday.

New England has been pretty much trapped in generally cooler than normal conditions since the second half of October, but that certainly hasn't been the case for most of Planet Earth.

October overall was the second warmest on record for the world, according to NOAA's Centers for Environmental Information.   Only 2015 was warmer. The only places that were chilly were central and eastern Canada, parts of the northern United States, and to a lesser extent, China.

The hottest places in October, relative to average, were Siberia and Alaska. Go figure.

So far, January through October, 2018 is the fourth hottest year on record. The previous three years, 2015-2017 were the only years that were toastier for the Earth as a whole.

Greenland Heats Up Again, So Do Global Temperatures

Areas in red show where ice was
melting in Greenland on June 10.
That's an unusually big area
of Greenland to see ice melt,
especially so early in the summer.  

Seems like every time I turn around, there's more heat news to report from the Arctic.

This time, it's Greenland again. The community of Nuuk, on Greenland's southwest coast, reached 76 degrees last Friday, the hottest temperature on record for Greenland in June. That broke the previous record high of 75 set just the day before. 

True, the southwest coast of Greenland is normally the warmest part of the mostly ice-capped large island, but still, this was something.

Warmth extended well inland, so, ominously, the seasonal melting of the Greenland ice cap, which already got off to an early start, is more intense than usual, at least for now.

Greenland melting is worse than the ice melting in the Arctic ocean. Greenland's ice is on a land surface, so if more than the usual amount melts in the summer, that contributes to sea level rises.

If the ice is already floating in the ocean, by contrast, sea levels wouldn't really rise if that ice melts.

Still, melting sea ice is bad because it increases the amount of solar heat that goes into the Arctic Ocean, which in turn could help make Greenland warmer and encourage even more melting.

The increasing amounts of ice loss in the Arctic Ocean could also be influencing the arrangement of the jet stream, causing something known as the Arctic amplification.

This would also increase temperatures in Greenland, causing more melting, notes the Christian Science Monitor.

Says the Monitor:

"If loss of sea ice is driving changes in the jet stream, the jet stream is changing Greenland, and this, in turn, has an inpact on the Arctic systm as well as the climate. It's a system. It is strongly interconnected and we have to approach it as such," Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory professor and lead study author Marco Todesco said in a Columbia University release."

Meanwhile, yesterday, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, their monthly global analysis, said May, 2016 was Earth's hottest May on record.

If that statement sounds like a broken record, it should. Incredibly, each of the past 13 months have now been record hottest.

The effects of the world-warming El Nino are fading, now that the periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean is kaput.

May wasn't as far above normal temperature wise around the world as recent months, which might reflect a bit of a "cooling" trend because of El Nino's waning influence.

Still, 2016 looks to be a shoo-in for the hottest year on record for Earth, which would beat the previous record set in 2015. But 2017 will probably be a bit cooler, because El Nino is gone.

We shouldn't take much comfort in that. El Nino explains only part of the wildly warm 13 months we just had. Global warming explains the rest. And that's not going away. It will keep intensifying.

So 2017 will surely be warmer for the Earth than it has in the past, and it will probably be only a few years before the record for hottest year will be eclipsed yet again.