Warm Month

February 2016 Was the Most Abnormally Warm Month Ever Recorded, Topping January 2016, NASA Says

Published: 

Mar 12 2016 08:15 PM EST

By Jon Erdman

weather.com

For the third month in a row, Earth's global temperatures in February 2016 were the most abnormally warm on record for any month, according to an analysis released by NASA Saturday.

February's global temperature departure of 1.35 degrees Celsius above the 1951-1980 average topped the previous record just set in January (1.13 degrees Celsius above average), according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

February 2016 temperature departures from average, in degrees Celsius, relative to 1951-1980 average. Brown/blue contours correspond to temperatures most above/below February averages. (NASA/GISS)

Monthly mean global temperature anomalies since 1996. The black line denotes meteorological stations while the red line are the land-ocean temperature index, according to Hansen et al. (2010).  (NASA/GISS)

That may not sound impressive, but ingesting temperature data over the entire surface of the Earth, NASA's analysis found this was the largest monthly warm temperature anomaly in their database dating to 1880, topping a record set the previous two months in a row.

A separate analysis from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting also found February 2016 set a new record-warm anomaly for the globe, 0.86 degrees Celsius above the 1981-2010 average. That reanalysis, however, dates only to 1979.

Separate analyses from the Japanese Meteorological Agency and NOAA will be released in the coming week.

The global record was paced again by exceptional warmth in the northern hemisphere higher latitudes. Much of Alaska into western and central Canada, as well as eastern Europe, Scandinavia and much of Russia were at least 4 degrees Celsius (roughly 7 degrees Fahrenheit) above February averages, according to NASA/GISS. 

NASA calculated February temperatures north of 75 degrees north latitude were over 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above average.

Elsewhere, February was also much warmer than average (at least 2 degrees Celsius) over much of the United States, central Europe, parts of southwest Asia and the Middle East, northern and southern Africa, northern and central South America, northern Australia and the equatorial eastern and central Pacific, associated with the strong El Niño. 

There were some colder-than-average spots in February including the north Atlantic, a stretch from far eastern Siberia into the north-central Pacific, the Southern Ocean including Antarctica, and over northern Hudson Bay, Canada, according to NASA.

The five largest monthly global warm anomalies in NASA's database have all occurred within the past five months, topped by February 2016.

Top Five NASA Global Monthly Warm Anomalies (Degrees C) Since 1880

February 2016	+1.35˚
January 2016	+1.13˚
December 2015	+1.11˚
October 2015	+1.06˚
November 2015	+1.02˚

February 2016 continues a string of 372 consecutive months at or warmer than average. The last colder-than-average month in NASA's database was February 1985, and Earth's last colder-than-average January was 40 years ago, in 1976. 

Six of the last nine months have either tied or set new records in NASA's database for that month, helping to set the Earth's warmest year on record in 2015. 

The warm anomaly from December 2015 through February 2016 - northern hemisphere winter - easily outpaced the record warm such period for the globe by 0.38 degrees Celsius, a shellacking in climate statistics, according to NASA. It marked the first time dating to 1880 the December-February period had a warm anomaly greater than 1 degree Celsius.

Climate scientists emphasize that whether a given month is a fraction of a degree warmer or cooler than a previous month isn't as important as the long-term, overall trend. 

And that trend of warm anomalies over the past year or so has become disconcerting, not simply due to the record-tying strong El Niño, but also the degree of higher northern latitude warming.

According to international weather records expert Maximiliano Herrera, new national all-time record highs have been set so far in 2016 in Botswana (43.8 degrees Celsius at Maun), Vanuatu (36.2 degrees Celsius at Lamap Malekula) and the French South Pacific territory of Wallis and Futuna (35.8 degrees Celsius). 

Interestingly, Herrera noted Hong Kong set an all-time record low for the territory, dipping to -5.7 degrees Celsius (just under 22 degrees Fahrenheit) atop Tai Mo Shan, the highest peak overlooking Hong Kong at an elevation of 957 meters (3,140 feet) above sea level.