“2015 was remarkable even in the context of the ongoing El Niño,” said NASA GISS Director Gavin Schmidt. In the past, the highest global temperature records were often set in El Niño years, which suggests that 2016-with El Niño going strong as of mid-January-appears likely to be another very warm year. Note that while El Niño conditions dominated the Pacific Ocean for most of 2015, it was not officially an El Niño year in strict climatological terms because ocean conditions did not manifest themselves until April 2015. Neutral years are shown in gray, and the dashed black line shows the overall temperature trend since 1950. Purple bars depict La Niña years, and the purple line shows that trend. Orange bars represent global temperature anomalies in El Niño years, with the orange line showing the trend. The graph below shows temperature trends in relation to El Niño and La Niña events. Phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña, which warm or cool the tropical Pacific Ocean, can contribute to short-term variations in global average temperature. Most of the warming has occurred in the past 35 years, with 15 of the 16 warmest years on record occurring since 2001. The 2015 temperature record continues a long-term warming trend that has largely been driven by increased carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere. For more explanation of how the analysis works, read World of Change: Global Temperatures. This raw data is analyzed using methods that account for the varied spacing of temperature stations around the globe and for urban heating effects that could skew the calculations. The team from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) assembles its temperature analysis from publicly available data acquired by roughly 6,300 meteorological stations around the world by ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature and by Antarctic research stations. It does not show absolute temperatures, but instead shows how much warmer or cooler the Earth was compared to a baseline average from 1951 to 1980. The map above depicts global temperature anomalies in 2015. Globally, new monthly temperature records were set in every month except January and April. It was the warmest year for Asia and South America. According to their analysis, 2015 was the second warmest year on record for the continental United States, Africa, and Europe. Working independently, NOAA researchers found 2015 to be 0.90☌ (1.62☏) above the 1901–2000 average. HOTTEST TEMPERATURES IN RECORDED LAST YEAR FULLFor the planet, 2015 was more than a full degree Celsius (1.8☏) warmer than temperatures in 1880, when consistent record-keeping began. The previous record-set last year-was 0.74☌ (1.34☏) above the norm. The NASA team found that globally averaged temperatures from January through December 2015 were 0.87 degrees Celsius (1.57° Fahrenheit) above the norm (defined as a 1951–1980 base period). On January 20, 2016, scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released their analyses of surface temperatures for the past year. 2015 was the warmest year ever recorded on Earth, and it was not even close.
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