Berlin – The Climate Change Service (C3S) of Copernicus, the climate monitoring component of the European space program, reported Friday that this year’s boreal summer was the hottest on record for the planet since measurements have been available.
The temperature during June, July, and August was 0.69 degrees Celsius above the average for those boreal summer months of the 1990-2020 period, slightly exceeding the 2023 record.
According to Copernicus data, the temperature in the boreal summer of 2023 was 0.66 degrees higher than the average for the 1990-2020 period. This data is based on billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft, and weather stations worldwide since 1940.
In Europe, the surface air temperature in August 2024 was the highest on record globally, with an average temperature of 16.82 degrees, 0.71 degrees above the average for August in the 1991-2020 period.
August 2024 was 1.51 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the thirteenth month in a series of fourteen months in which the surface air temperature was above 1.5 degrees of those pre-industrial temperatures.
“The global average temperature for the past 12 months is the highest on record for any 12-month period, at 0.76 degrees above the 1991-2020 average and 1.64 degrees above the pre-industrial 1850-1900 average,” Copernicus said in a statement, referring to the period from September 2023 to August of this year.
“The global average temperature anomaly so far this year is 0.70 degrees higher than the 1991-2020 average, the highest recorded in this period, and 0.23 degrees warmer than in the same period in 2023,” the statement added.
According to Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, “during the last three months of 2024, the planet has experienced the hottest June and August, the hottest day on record, and the hottest boreal summer on record.”
Regarding mean surface water temperature, August recorded the second highest value for August since records have been kept, at 20.91 degrees, only 0.07 degrees below the August 2023 value.