WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - On Sunday, Earth experienced its warmest day in recent history.
According to the preliminary data by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, on July 21, the daily global average temperature reached a new record high of 17.09°C. This is slightly above the previous highest of 17.08°C, recorded on 2023 July 6.
While the increase is marginal, what really stands out is the difference between the temperatures since July 2023 and all previous years.
The EU climate monitoring service says it is expecting the daily global average temperature to further increase in the coming days and then go down, but with possible further fluctuations in the coming weeks.
The data can be explored in Climate Pulse, the C3S application that provides historical and near real-time temperature data from the ERA5 reanalysis dataset.
Before July 2023, the previous daily global average temperature record was 16.8°C, recorded on August 13, 2016.
Since July 2023 3, there have been 57 days that have exceeded that previous record, distributed between July and August 2023, and during June and July so far in 2024.
According to C3S Director Carlo Buontempo, what is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records. 'We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years.'
Analysis of the years with the highest annual maximum daily global temperatures shows that both 2023 and 2024 have seen annual highs substantially above those recorded in previous years.
Another sign of the global warming trend is the fact that the ten years with the highest daily average temperatures are the last ten years, from 2015 to 2024.
The C3S analysis suggests that the sudden rise in daily global average temperature is related to much above-average temperatures over large parts of Antarctica. Such large anomalies are not unusual during the Antarctic winter months, and also contributed to the record global temperatures in early July 2023.
Antarctic sea ice extent is almost as low as it was at this time last year, leading to much above-average temperatures over parts of the Southern Ocean.
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