The world went through its second-warmest month in July 2024. It was also the second-warmest July with the temperature 0.68°C above the 1991-2020 average for July, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has said.
The temperature in July was only 0.04°C lower than the previous high set in July 2023, said C3S, implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission with funding from the European Union.
July also marked the end of 13 months when each month was the warmest in its data for the respective month of the year. A similar length streak of monthly global temperature records happened previously in 2015-2016 during the last strong El Niño event. The world went through El Nino from June 2023 to April 2024.
2 hottest days
“Though July 2024 was not quite as warm as July 2023 on average, the Earth experienced its two hottest days. The daily global-average temperature reached 17.16°C and 17.15°C on July 22 and 23. Given the small difference, similar to the level of uncertainty in the data, we cannot say which of the two days was the hottest with complete certainty,” the weather agency said.
According to data, the month was 1.48°C above the estimated July average for 1850-1900, the designated pre-industrial reference period, marking the end of a series of 12 consecutive months at or above 1.5°C.
The global average temperature for the past 12 months (August 2023 – July 2024) is 0.76°C above the 1991-2020 average and 1.64°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, it said.
The year-to-date (January–July) global temperature anomaly for 2024 is 0.70°C above the 1991-2020 average, 0.27°C warmer than the same period in 2023, said C3S. Temperatures were mostly above average over Asia.
La Nina developing
“The average anomaly for the remaining months of this year would need to drop by at least 0.23°C for 2024 not to be warmer than 2023. This rarely happened in the entire dataset, making it increasingly likely that 2024 is going to be the warmest year on record,” it said.
The sea surface temperature (SST) for July 2024 was 20.88°C, the second-highest value on record for the month, and only 0.01°C below July 2023. It ended a 15-month period when the SST was the warmest in the data record for the respective month of the year.
The equatorial Pacific had below-average temperatures, indicating a developing La Niña, but air temperatures over the ocean remained unusually high over many regions.