The likelihood of 2023 being the hottest year on Earth has doubled.
After a record time around the world this summer, it looks almost certain:2023 will surpass 2016 and become the hottest year ever recorded on Earth.
Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimate there is a 93.42% chance that 2023 will be the hottest year, according to a monthly climate report released Thursday.
Annual global temperature ranking outlookPreview
This outlook product will be updated monthly, providing multiple annual rankings of global temperatures at the end of the year.
The calculation does not use any weather or climate forecasting models.
Instead, we use simulations of possible outcomes based on the extent to which global temperature time series vary from month to month in the historical record. After creating these plausible scenarios, we will have identified 95% of the most likely outcomes.
Outlook for annual global temperature rankings for 2023 Pic
Based on current anomalies and historical records of annual temperatures around the globe, it seems almost certain that 2023 will be in the top 10 years, consistent with a strong trend since 1988 in recent years initially ranked among the top 10 (Sánchez-Lugo et al.., 2018).
Our calculations suggest:
- < 6.9% chance of warmest year
- < 53.3% chance of a top 5 year
- > 99.5% chance of a top 10 year
- 95% confidence interval of 1st to 9th warmest year on record
Methodology
The main calculation factors are 1) the difference or separation between the recent monthly figures and all previous annual averages and 2) the statistical distribution of the monthly fluctuations in the historical record.
We use the working version of
NOAAGlobalTemp global monthly land and ocean time series from January 1975 to present.
We use this period because it provides a benchmark over 40 years to estimate monthly fluctuations that can be representative of real-time fluctuations.
Next, we remove the ordinary least squares trend and simulate plausible results based on an autoregressive model of the residual time series.
Finally, we add an extended trend to account for the simulated months, calculate annual averages, and compare them with all previous annual averages since 1880 to arrive at a ranking of each year.
This process was repeated 10,000 times and we report two-sided 95% confidence intervals.
The method is similar to previous analysis used to determine whether a year will be the hottest on record.
We anticipate that future versions of this product will examine the statistical relationship between El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) indices and global temperatures.
This rate is nearly double the estimate a month earlier (46.82%) and 86 percentage points higher than the forecast at the beginning of the year (6.9%)
The calculation – with four months to go until the end of the year – highlights how observations of air, ocean temperatures and ice extent globally differ from what scientists have observed or expected wait before that.
Signs of unusual warmth began to appear in early spring and the trend has continued since then.
July was the hottest month on record on the planet, perhaps the hottest month in a row in 125,000 years.
The three months from June to August were the world’s hottest in 174 years of records, 0.43 degrees (0.24 degrees Celsius) higher than the previous record and 2.07 degrees (1 .15 degrees Celsius) above the 20th century average for Northern Hemisphere summers, according to NOAA.
National Environmental Information Center.This confirms estimates by European Union scientists published last week, which declared a summer of “largely large” record temperatures.
Deke Arndt, director of the NOAA Center, shared the report on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) with an unusual statement.
“I am rarely surprised by our discoveries,” he wrote.“Yesterday, when the climate monitoring group held a briefing, it took me five minutes to understand the significance.”
A new world temperature record started looking possible when the El Niño climate pattern emerged in June – but scientists think it will happen in 2024.
El Niño is tied to the phenomenon of surface water The surface is warmer than normal in the eastern equatorial Pacific and is known for warming the planet and promoting extreme weather conditions.
Robert Rohde, a senior scientist at Berkeley Earth, said a strong El Niño that formed in 2015 and lasted through 2016 helped the planet reach a record average temperature in 2016.But the warm pattern This year’s rise is different from the heat of 2016.
“Most of the time when you prepare for a new record, the weather is hot right from the start,” Rohde said in an email.
»But this year, extreme temperatures only appeared in June.
“This temperature record is quite unusual,” Rohde said.Rohde and Berkeley Earth estimate there is a more than 99% chance that 2023 will be the warmest year, a jump from earlier in the year when they estimated the probability to be just 14%.
While El Niño may to some extent be responsible for this year’s warming, the oceans are reaching record temperatures far beyond the El Niño epicenter in the Pacific.
Heat in the Atlantic basin has caused catastrophic bleaching of coral reefs in Florida and contributed to the rapid strengthening of hurricanes.
Around Antarctica, during the Southern Hemisphere winter, sea ice coverage reaches a much lower maximum than what scientists have previously observed.
Arndt notes that while some may seek to dismiss the new extremes in the 174-year-old record as “an accident in geological time,” he emphasizes that they are nonetheless very special.special.
“The reality is that this has been the most important and vital 174 years in the history of humanity’s relationship with the Earth system, when almost everything we know about agriculture and infrastructure was discovered or improvement,” he wrote on X.
