February singes record as a sizzler, relatively speaking
Earth’s temperature soared to a record high last month, a whopping 1.5 degrees above average as measured by weather satellites.
That’s a huge amount in climate science, where records are often broken by hundredths or tenths of degrees. The level makes February the most unusually warm month ever recorded, scientists from the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) said.
Scientists blamed the warmth on a combination of man-made global warming and the near-record El Niño climate pattern.
“The record might have as much to do with an extraordinarily warm month in the Arctic as it does with warming caused by the El Niño,” said John Christy, who runs UAH’s Earth System Science Center.
Some areas in the Arctic experienced temperatures as much as 29 degrees warmer than average last month. The data from the UAH team comes from satellites, which measure and calculate the temperature of the atmosphere about 5 miles above the Earth’s surface. Satellites have been taking the readings for 40 years.
Satellite temperature data include remote desert, ocean and rainforest areas where reliable surface data are not otherwise available, according to UAH.
Monthly temperature data measured at the Earth’s surface is released mid-month by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. NOAA said January was the warmest January since records began in 1880.