Fast on the heels of the second hottest June on record, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies reports that July is also the second hottest on record.
NASA just quietly updates its data set (here). NASS GISS is much more low-key than NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which issues a major report on the climate every month (see NCDC: Second hottest June on record – and once El Niño really kicks in, expect global temperatures “to threaten previous record highs”). I’ll wait for that report (out in a few days) for a longer discussion of July.
What I think is interesting about the NASA month-by-month data is that you can compare it to El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) data and see that it typically takes 3 to 6 months before an El Niño seriously starts warming up the whole planet (see page 24 here). So we have a ways to go before we see the full effect of this El Niño.
Still it’s interesting that the NCDC reported that the ocean temperature in June was the warmest on record – a full 0.11°F warmer than the 2005 record. This certainly looks to be the new El Niño on top of the long-term warming trend. If indeed this is a moderate to strong El Niño, then it looks like we will be seeing record global temperatures this year or next, as NASA predicted back in January (see here).
