Now that the Copernicus program has made real-time daily global temperature data available, as well as producing daily graphs I can now also produce monthly, seasonal and annual charts by summing up the daily data. The chart above is of mean February temperatures from 1940 to 2024. The chart below is of February anomalies using the 1851-1900 baseline offset for the pre-industrial era, and shows that as well as being the warmest February on record, it also had a mean anomaly of 1.77°C above that baseline.
The mean global temperature for February 2024 was pipped into second place by February 2016. This brings to an end the incredible eight month consecutive run of record high mean temperatures. The estimates are from my DIY series that I calculate from 6 hourly NCEPNCEPThe United States National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) delivers national and global weather, water, climate and space weather guidance, forecasts, warnings and analyses to its Partners and External User Communities. gridded data. The daily means since the 12th of February took a bit of a nose dive (see image below) and allowed 2016 with a mean of 9.36°C to just nip ahead of 2024 with 9.34°C. I think my maverick calculations are unlikely to be duplicated when Copernicus publish their result in the coming week, but it will be a close run thing.
Now that I finally have some quality real-time global temperature data to work with, courtesy of the ECMWFECMWFThe European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by most of the nations of Europe. It is based at three sites: Shinfield Park, Reading, United Kingdom; Bologna, Italy; and Bonn, Germany. It operates one of the largest supercomputer complexes in Europe and the world's largest archive of numerical weather prediction data., I thought that I would construct a couple of graphs you wouldn’t find in their Climate Pulse web application. The first graph that occurred to me to construct was one that plotted daily anomalies using the 1850-1900 LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. as a baseline for the pre-industrial era, and overlay a 365 day moving average on it. I then overlay a 30 year linear trend over that and extrapolate a linear trend until it meets the y axis at 1.5°C. This gives a date of the 15th April 2031 when 1.5°C is reached. The IPCCIPCCThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations responsible for advancing knowledge on human-induced climate change.
It was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, and later endorsed by United Nations General Assembly. in contrast estimate global temperatures will exceed 1.5°C around 2040. This is what they say In their report:-
Human-induced warming has already reached about 1°C above pre-industrial levels at the time of writing of this Special Report. By the decade 2006–2015, human activity had warmed the world by 0.87°C (±0.12°C) compared to pre-industrial times (1850–1900). If the current warming rate continues, the world would reach human-induced global warming of 1.5°C around 2040.
IPCC Report
To explore the difference I have added another viewer to my application that displays a rolling 10 year mean anomaly, and then do the same as I did in the first graph, that is add a 30 year linear tend and then extrapolate it forward. This gives a date of the 8th February 2040 when 1.5°C is realised and in line with the IPCC estimate.
In light of the significant increases in SSTSSTSea Surface Temperatures in all the world’s oceans in the last year, and the resulting surge in global temperatures it may be that 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels will occur much earlier than the IPCC expected last year. As you can see using the latest global data for the 29th of February 2024 using a linear trend on a 365 day moving average 1.5°C will be reached on the 15th of April 2031, almost seven years earlier than 2040. I think using a 365 day average is much more sensitive and accurate than one based on a longer 10 year rolling average. Thanks to El NinoEl NiñoEl Niño 'The Boy' is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific and the surge in SST over the last 12 months, daily global temperatures have already been above the 1.5°C threshold for much of that time. A La NinaLa NiñaLa Niña is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that is the colder counterpart of El Niño, as part of the broader El Niño–Southern Oscillation climate pattern. The name La Niña originates from Spanish for "the girl", by analogy to El Niño, meaning "the boy". In the past, it was also called an anti-El Niño[1] and El Viejo, meaning "the old man." event is expected later this year, this should help reduce global SST and air temperatures a little you would think, but even if and when this happens global temperatures still won’t be too far off the 1.5°C mark.
Despite the launch of the excellent Climate Pulse web application by the ECMWFECMWFThe European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by most of the nations of Europe. It is based at three sites: Shinfield Park, Reading, United Kingdom; Bologna, Italy; and Bonn, Germany. It operates one of the largest supercomputer complexes in Europe and the world's largest archive of numerical weather prediction data., never daunted, I’ve now adjusted my own application global temperature program to download daily global data directly from their site as a CSVCSVA data file using Comma Separated Variable format. file, and you can see the results in the graph above. Although global temps are now lower than they were in early February, they are still well above the +1.5°C IPCCIPCCThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations responsible for advancing knowledge on human-induced climate change.
It was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, and later endorsed by United Nations General Assembly. threshold. In fact they’ve been above +1.5°C for most of the last year, and on a number of days they’ve even exceeded +2°C.
So why do we hear so little news about it in the media?
Climate Pulse is a new interactive website that’s just been released by the ECMWF. It’s a wonderful way to visualise global air and sea temperature data in graphs and in a 3D Globe. I may be wrong but the graphs look like they use the plugin from Highcharts, the globe has limited functionality compared to the graphs but is still pretty good. Web applications as good as this are gradually putting me out of a job, and although they do allow you to download the daily data as a CSVCSVA data file using Comma Separated Variable format. file, I can only match the visualisation you get in a Windows application on a PC which is already out there on the web and available to all, and that can only be a good thing.
Nothing has really changed at the start of 2024, and the acceleration in global warming that we’ve seen since the start of 2023 continues apace in the latest 12 month moving average. The simple linear trend from 2020 to 2023 on the new NOAANOAANOAA is an agency in the Department of Commerce that maps the oceans and conserves their living resources; predicts changes to the earth's environment; provides weather reports and forecasts floods and hurricanes and other natural disasters related to weather. version 6 series now stands at 0.23°C per decade.
Daily global temperatures are still in unchartered territory and still breaking daily records in early February 2024. These two charts are a comparison between my DIYDIYDo It Yourself Global Temperature series on the left, with that from Copernicus and ERA5ERAERA stands for 'ECMWF Re-Analysis' and refers to a series of research projects at ECMWF which produced various datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA-40, etcetera). on the right. My series is based on rather crude NCEPNCEPThe United States National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) delivers national and global weather, water, climate and space weather guidance, forecasts, warnings and analyses to its Partners and External User Communities. reanalysis 2.5×2.5 gridded data, whilst ERA5 is based on reanalysis data over a much finer 0.1×0.1 grid I believe. The biggest difference is the estimates of the global temperature, my DIY series being around 9.4°C, whilst the ERA5 is 13.5°C. But the shape of the daily temperature line series are quite similar if you take a closer look even though the DIY series is based on a much coarser grid.
Another day another application. This time a viewer to display ERA5ERAERA stands for 'ECMWF Re-Analysis' and refers to a series of research projects at ECMWF which produced various datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA-40, etcetera). daily global temperature data from Copernicus. So much talk at the moment about how the daily temperatures have been exceeding the 1.5°C threshold a goal that was set in the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal of keeping warming “well below” 2C and aiming to limit it to 1.5C“. As you can see that hasn’t been happening much in the last year, to say the least. The ERA5 data only extends back to 1940, so finding, or more correctly guessing at what the LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. was for the series between 1850 and 1900 was vital to get an accurate anomaly from the pre-industrial age. Reading between the lines of an article I found on the on the Copernicus website I came up with the figure of 0.9°C. That’s the difference between the 1851-1900 and the 1991-2020 LTA and the offset I’ve applied to the first and the third graph in this article. It’s not specified anywhere that I can find that this is what it is, but it’s my best guess.
As you can see the 365 day (leading) running mean has now also exceeded 1.5°C.
The program can also display daily data from the Arctic and Antarctic, Northern and Southern Hemisphere, and the Tropics. Still some work to do on it and some new ways to display the data but that’ll have to do for now.
Again I would like to thank Professor Eliot Jacobson for giving me the link to the raw data on the Climate Reanalyzer web site, and of course to ECMWFECMWFThe European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by most of the nations of Europe. It is based at three sites: Shinfield Park, Reading, United Kingdom; Bologna, Italy; and Bonn, Germany. It operates one of the largest supercomputer complexes in Europe and the world's largest archive of numerical weather prediction data. and Copernicus for generating these global estimates from their reanalysis data in the first place.
January 2024 was the warmest on record globally in my DIYDIYDo It Yourself Global Temperature series. That makes it eight consecutive months of record global temperatures. It wasn’t by such as a wide margin as in some of the other months, the January mean of 9.15°C was just was just 0.03°C higher than that of 2016. The 365 day moving average is still skyrocketing as you can see in the chart below.
In January daily global temperatures have struggled to be the highest on record, vieing at times with January 2016 to be the warmest, no doubt due to the El NinoEl NiñoEl Niño 'The Boy' is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific fading and helping to bring global temperatures back to some kind of normalcy after eight months of craziness.
The cause of the recent surge in global temperatures looks likely to have been the very high SSTSSTSea Surface Temperatures in the world’s oceans, led in no small part by El Nino in the central Pacific as you can see in this graph.
All but the usual UKMOUKMOThe Meteorological Office is the United Kingdom's national weather service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and JMAJMAThe Japan Meteorological Agency (気象庁, Kishō-chō), abbreviated JMA, is an agency of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. Met Services have now published their December 2023 estimates. Despite the missing series, I thought I would generate my 12 month moving mean anomalies for the last 30 years for the leading seven data series anyway. It’s plain to see that in 2023 thay have all shot up, almost exponentially😮. The previous warmest 12 months set in 2016 is now just a distant memory. The 30 year linear trend for the NOAANOAANOAA is an agency in the Department of Commerce that maps the oceans and conserves their living resources; predicts changes to the earth's environment; provides weather reports and forecasts floods and hurricanes and other natural disasters related to weather. series is showing a rise of 0.216°C per decade, the ERAERAERA stands for 'ECMWF Re-Analysis' and refers to a series of research projects at ECMWF which produced various datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA-40, etcetera). series is even higher than that at 0.236°C! All very alarming.
The cold air across Scandinavia still won’t relinquish its hold in early January, and we are left with a topsy-turvy anomaly chart, with a belt of warm anomalous air extending from the Atlantic, northeastward across Iceland and into the Arctic Ocean. Either side of this belt of very mild air, across northern Europe and Greenland, anomalies are as low as -17°C in Finland, and -22°C in western Russia. The paradox is that globally, temperatures are still at record high levels never seen before, well at least since 1850 when records started.
In my DIYDIYDo It Yourself Global Temperature series I can now reveal the worst kept secret of 2023 has finally proven to be correct in that 2023 has finally overtaken 2016 to become the warmest calendar year on record. I make the mean temperature in 2023 to be 10.21°C, which is 0.36°C above the 1991-2020 LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO.. That makes it fractionally warmer than the 10.16°C of 2016, the previous warmest year. The last seven months of 2023 all set new records so the fact that it would be the warmest year was a bit of an inevitability. The latest 30 year annual linear trend shows a warming of 0.15°C/decade.
December 2023 became the seventh consecutive month to set a new highest monthly record. Again it did it by another large margin in my DIYDIYDo It Yourself Global temperature series. The December mean 0f 0.53°C was 0.16°C higher than the previous warmest December in 2015. The question I wonder about is what happens to the meteoric rise when it comes full circle this June? Currently the latest daily global mean I’ve calculated for the 31st of December is still out on it’s own in record breaking territory.
With large parts of the world anomalously warm, the cold belt stretching from Greenland, across Scandinavia and on eastward into Siberia and China persisted. In the UKUKThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. this cold belt to the north enhanced the N-S thermal gradient, thanks in no small part to a warm tongue of positive anomalies extending NW from the Balkans, no doubt the result of the many warm sectors that affected southern areas of the UK during the month. Temperature anomalies of 9°C above the LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. across North America were nothing short of extraordinary.
Global monthly temperature anomalies have exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels nine times or so in individual months in the HadCRUTv5 series since 2016. I’ve adjusted the baseline of the chart above by the LTALTALong Term Average. This is usually defined as a 30 year period by the WMO. for the 1850-1900 period to calculate the increase in temperature since the start of the pre-industrial age. Some global series don’t extend as far back as 1850, GISTempGISTemp v4The GISS Surface Temperature Analysis version 4 is an estimate of global surface temperature change using data from NOAA GHCN v4 (land stations) and ERSST v5 (ocean areas). 4 for example, so I imagine they can’t use this value and the LTA must be reduced to 20 years. I’ve added a 3 year linear trend (warming at the rate of +1.094°C/decade) to the chart above, and extrapolated it forward to find when 12 month average global anomalies will reach +1.5°C if temperatures remain at their record levels for the next nine months or so. The 12 month moving average could achieves this by November 2024, until six months ago I wouldn’t have believed this were possible, but with six consecutive record warmth months, I now beleive it’s perfectly possible. If you take a more measured approach, and use a linear trend over the last 30 years (warming at the rate of +0.213°C/decade), then the 1.5°C won’t be reached for another 10 years, that’s in January 2034. So when will it be? My money’s on 2024, but I could be wrong. 😉
The scores-are-in, and it’s a ten-from-Len, as the world produces a sixth consecutive record warmest month for November, which is a record in it’s own right. I make the daily mean for November 9.81°C which is 0.22°C higher than the previous warmest in 2015. It’s not quite as impressive as in previous months, but nonetheless it’s still quite remarkable. The Daily values from my DIYDIYDo It Yourself series are no less impressive as you can see in the graph below. This year started setting daily records at the beginning of June and it’s been #1 daily warmest for much of the six months since then. Remember you heard it first here even if it was a racing cert 😉
October 2023 Estimated Global Temperature Anomaly ERA5ERAERA stands for 'ECMWF Re-Analysis' and refers to a series of research projects at ECMWF which produced various datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA-40, etcetera). The fifth consecutive warmest month by another massive margin. I knew it was going to be warmest but the margin with which it did it surprised me again. Almost 0.4°C warmer than 2019.Estimated global temperature anomalies ERA5 Since the start of the latest El NinoEl NiñoEl Niño 'The Boy' is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific event in June global temperatures have been turbo charged.October 2023 Estimated Global Temperature Anomalies 12 Month moving averages. They’re all skyrocketing! The 30 yr linear trend on ERAERAERA stands for 'ECMWF Re-Analysis' and refers to a series of research projects at ECMWF which produced various datasets (ERA-Interim, ERA-40, etcetera). 5 is now +0.24°C/decade and exceeds the previous highest in 2016.
I make October the warmest on record globally making it five record months in a row, remember you read it here first😁 Not as devastatingly warm as it was in previous months, but nonetheless warmer by a fair old margin.
There’s always a steep fall off in global temps at this time of the year. 2023 is still managing to hang in there as warmest, but it’s got stiff opposition in the next few weeks from 2016.
For the fourth month in a row global temperatures have set another new monthly record for warmth. September is perhaps the most remarkable of the four in my DIYDIYDo It Yourself global temperatures series, exceeding the previous highest in 2016 by a massive, in global temperature terms that is, of 0.24°C. The question that immediately springs to mind is when will this run of new extremes come to an end? Maybe when it comes full cycle in June of 2024, or who knows if the El NinoEl NiñoEl Niño 'The Boy' is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific is still running it will just continue.
Currently, on the 30th of September, the daily mean global temperature is in open water on the graph above way higher than in any of the previous daily temperatures since 1948. What’s driving the sharp rise in global temperatures are the higher than average SSTSSTSea Surface Temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean. The La NinaLa NiñaLa Niña is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that is the colder counterpart of El Niño, as part of the broader El Niño–Southern Oscillation climate pattern. The name La Niña originates from Spanish for "the girl", by analogy to El Niño, meaning "the boy". In the past, it was also called an anti-El Niño[1] and El Viejo, meaning "the old man." event which had been keeping a check on global temperatures until earlier this year has gone, replaced by a strengthening El Nino.
A very much warmer September than average across much of central Europe and northeast Russia. A colder than average month yet again across Iceland, Greenland, North Africa and Iran.
After the triple dip in the 12 month moving average of global temperature anomalies since their peak in 2016, global temperatures are now back on the march upwards once again. Looking back at the last 20 years a simple linear trend on the monthly anomalies reveals that anomalies are rising at the astounding rate close to 0.25°C per decade or 2.5°C per century. You’ll notice that the two charts from the ECMWFECMWFThe European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is an independent intergovernmental organisation supported by most of the nations of Europe. It is based at three sites: Shinfield Park, Reading, United Kingdom; Bologna, Italy; and Bonn, Germany. It operates one of the largest supercomputer complexes in Europe and the world's largest archive of numerical weather prediction data. in Europe and NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. & GISSGISSThe Goddard Institute for Space Studies is a laboratory in the Earth Sciences Division of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center affiliated with the Columbia University Earth Institute. in America show similar results. Again, I’ve spent some time smartening up this monthly view of anomalies that include the usual linear trend and a 12 month moving average overlay.
August DIYDIYDo It Yourself Global temperature series 1948-2023
Not content with having the warmest July on record, 2023 has now produced the warmest August on record too. Although it’s not quite as warm a month as July was, it easily beat the August of 2016 into second place. The years 2016 and 2023 are neck and neck at the moment for the warmest year on record, but I think there can be little doubt that 2023 could end up being the warmest year even though there are still four months to go.😮 Of course global temperatures could slump in the next four month. At the moment in my DIY series, the global mean daily temperature for the 1st of September 2016 has just overtaken that of the 1st of September 2023 (see graph below) so it’s still going to be a close run thing.
DIY daily global temperature series
I’ve based this story on reanalysis data that I use in my DIY Global temperature series. It tracks the other series quite faithfully and I have no doubt that in the coming week Copernicus will confirm what I’m guessing at. Well it’s all a bit of a guess anyway.
It’s official – July 2023 was not only the warmest July on record, but it was also the warmest month on record too, and it did it by a massive margin of 0.16°C (in global temperature terms) from the July of 2016😮. That’s according to mean temperature estimates from my DIYDIYDo It Yourself global temperature series that extend back to 1948, and which I derive from reanalysis data I download from NOAANOAANOAA is an agency in the Department of Commerce that maps the oceans and conserves their living resources; predicts changes to the earth's environment; provides weather reports and forecasts floods and hurricanes and other natural disasters related to weather.. Despite this I notice that the linear trend for July mean temperatures is still only 0.91°C per decade🤔. The daily global mean temperature has been at unprecedented levels too for much of the summer and still is, but has now started to cool off as the globe cools down as we head to the boreal Autumn.
One of the main reasons why this summer 2023 is so warm is the sudden increase in temperatures across the tropics, no doubt brought about from the switch from La NinaLa NiñaLa Niña is an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that is the colder counterpart of El Niño, as part of the broader El Niño–Southern Oscillation climate pattern. The name La Niña originates from Spanish for "the girl", by analogy to El Niño, meaning "the boy". In the past, it was also called an anti-El Niño[1] and El Viejo, meaning "the old man." to El NinoEl NiñoEl Niño 'The Boy' is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific conditions this spring. This graph shows the sharp rise quite dramatically.
I’ve spent much of the day adding a viewer to my DIYDIYDo It Yourself Global temperature application. The new viewer layers a line series of daily temperatures for each year from 1948 to 2023. The lines series are coloured grey apart from, 2023 in red, and 2016 in blue. I picked 2016 because that’s the warmest year in the series. I’ve also added a yellow band for the daily standard deviation and a black line for the long-term average. For much of this year 2023 has been trailing 2016, but in the first four days of July 2023 there’s been a very sharp spike in daily global temperatures, such that, and quite remarkably, the latest available global mean on the 4th of July was the highest in the entire 75 year series at 11.42°C. Not a lot of people know that.
I think it’s a great application, and the results from it are fascinating to see and I’m quite proud to have developed it. It’s a simple concept and can work on any Windows PC using NCEPNCEPThe United States National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) delivers national and global weather, water, climate and space weather guidance, forecasts, warnings and analyses to its Partners and External User Communities. reanalysis data.
