ClimateRecords: October, year-to-date hottest in human history
October 2015 was the hottest October in modern history, and the first ten months of the year have also set new records for worldwide warmth, U.S. government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said last week. The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for October 2015 was the highest for October in the 136-year period of record, at 0.98°C (1.76°F) above the twentieth century average of 14.0°C (57.1°F). The first ten months of 2015 comprised the warmest such period on record across the world’s land and ocean surfaces, at 0.86°C (1.55°F) above the twentieth century average, surpassing the previous record of 2014 by 0.12°C (0.22°F).
October 2015 was the hottest October in modern history, and the first ten months of the year have also set new records for worldwide warmth, U.S. government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said last week.
October 2015
The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for October 2015 was the highest for October in the 136-year period of record, at 0.98°C (1.76°F) above the twentieth century average of 14.0°C (57.1°F). This marked the sixth consecutive month a monthly global temperature record has been broken and was also the greatest departure from average for any month in the 1,630 months of recordkeeping, surpassing the previous record high departure set just last month by 0.13°F (0.07°C). The October temperature is currently increasing at an average rate of 0.06°C (0.11°F) per decade.
NOAA said that, separately, the October average temperature across global land surfaces was 1.33°C (2.39°F) above the twentieth century average, the highest for October on record. This surpasses the previous record set in October 2011 by 0.17°C (0.31°F). This margin is larger than the uncertainty associated with the dataset. Large regions of Earth’s land surfaces were much warmer than average, according to NOAA’s Land & Ocean Temperature Percentiles map. Record warmth was observed across the entire southern half of Australia, part of southern and southeastern Asia, much of central and southern Africa, most of Central America and northern South America, and parts of western North America. Regionally, Oceania and the African continent were both record warm. Argentina, part of northeastern Canada, scattered regions of western and central Russia, and central Japan were cooler or much cooler than average.
