Global land and sea surface temps tied with 1995 as ninth-warmest
January 2013 marks the 335th month with global temps above average.
By Summit Voice
FRISCO — Southern hemisphere land areas reported their warmest January readings on record, including Australia, where January 2013 was the hottest month ever recorded, according to NOAA climate scientists, who released the global state of the climate report this week. A slide show from the presentation is online here.
The Southern Hemisphere was record warm over land for the second month in a row. Record high monthly temperatures were observed over northeastern Brazil, much of southern Africa, and northern and central Australia. No land areas in the Southern Hemisphere were cooler than average.
While some northern hemisphere land areas reported below-average temperatures for the month, global land and sea surface temperature averaged out to tie with 1995 as the ninth-warmest on record, at .97 degrees above the 20th century average of 53.6 degrees. Even with cooler than average readings in some parts of the northern hemisphere, the average temperature was still 1.48 degrees above average, the 21st-warmest January on record.
Warm conditions prevailed across Alaska, the eastern United States, southern Greenland, Uzbekistan, and Australia. It was cooler than average in northwestern and central Canada, the western United States, and a large swath of northern Eurasia.
The global sea surface average temperature was notably warm, especially in the absence of El Niño. For January the average temperature for the world’s oceans was the eighth-warmest on record, at .74 degrees above average. Almost the entire Atlantic Basin was above average, along with the Indian Ocean, parts of the Southern Ocean and the far western Pacific.
Warm Atlantic ocean conditions were reflected by readings in Iceland, where Reykjavik was 5.9 degrees above average, marking the warmest January since 1987 and the seventh warmest January since local records began in 1870.
The heat was on in Australia, where the average monthly temperature was the highest ever, beating the 1932 record by .20 degrees. The country set a new national record for the hottest day on Jan. 7, with an average maximum temperature of 104.6 degrees. The highest temperature for the month was reported Jan. 12 January at Moomba, South Australia, at 121.33 degrees. Every state and territory reported above average maximum and minimum temperatures for the month.
Data compiled from the NOAA National Climatic Data Center, State of the Climate: Global Analysis for January 2013, published online February 2013, retrieved on February 21, 2013 from http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2013/1.
