Looking Back at the Global Climate in August 2023 – This past August was the Warmest August on Record. But it was More Than That – September 16, 2023

Every month, John Bateman sends me a nice email. Usually, he sends me two: one about the U.S. and one about the world.  I do not recall receiving an email from him on the U.S. but I published my own article on August in the U.S. and you can find it HERE. Yesterday he sent me the email for the world. Since they are emails, I usually can not provide a link to what he sent me. He is a spokesperson (not sure that is the right description of his job) for NOAA both NCEI and other parts of NOAA.  For this monthly article, all of the information in his email comes from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information so the information he includes in his email and much more can be found HERE. I published his article in full but included two additional graphics from NCEI namely the historical year by year record and the map of important events.

Obviously the headline this month is that August has been the warmest August since this data has been collected.  And it was also the fifth consequtive month of record ocean surface temperatures.

 

This is the record of August land and ocean temperature anomalies and this Augugust appears to have set a new record high. It is just speculation on my part but I think it is the stepwise rise in temperature we get with an El Nino. But some believe that other factors were a larger contributor to this in August and also in July than simply the increase in greenhouse gases. They may be correct in that many factors impact temperature and precipitation. In this article, we report what happened rather than try to explain why it happened. “Attribution” is always very complex.

 

 I hope you found this article interesting and useful.

 

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