June, July, and August were 0.23°C (0.41°F) warmer than any other summer in NASA’s record. The summer of 2023 was Earth’s hottest since global records began in 1880, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The months of June, July, and August co
, were largely responsible for the summer’s record warmth,” said Josh Willis, climate scientist and oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon characterized by warmer than normal sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.The record-setting summer of 2023 continues a long-term trend of warming. Scientific observations and analyses made over decades by NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , and other international institutions have shown this warming has been driven primarily by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
Willis and other scientists expect to see the biggest impacts of El Niño in February, March, and April 2024. El Niño is associated with the weakening of easterly trade winds and the movement of warm water from the western Pacific toward the western coast of the Americas. The phenomenon can have widespread effects, often bringing cooler, wetter conditions to the U.S. Southwest and drought to countries in the western Pacific, such as Indonesia and Australia.
“Unfortunately, climate change is happening. Things that we said would come to pass are coming to pass,” said Gavin Schmidt, climate scientist and director of GISS. “And it will get worse if we continue to emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere.” NASA’s full temperature data set and the complete methodology used for the temperature calculation and its uncertainties areNASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, based on data from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.