Hottest month
July is set to be the hottest month in the last 12,000 years.
Scientists from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Commission’s Copernicus Climate Change Service described conditions this month as “rather remarkable and unprecedented”, with July seeing the hottest three-week period on record.
Average July temperature so far has been 16.95° Celsius, 0.2° C warmer than in July 2019 — a record in the 174-year observational data of the European Union.
With ocean temperatures on the rise and the Central Equatorial Pacific Ocean transitioning from La Niña conditions — where average sea surface temperatures are below normal — to El Niño conditions, the opposite, it was widely expected that temperatures would be warmer than that in the last three years (when La Niña prevailed).
However, it is the distribution and impact of the 16.95° C, which includes:
Temperature in northwest China touching 52° C;
Wildfires in Greece and the baking heat in the United States’ Southwest.
The extraordinarily high rains in north and western India, while largely due to prevailing monsoon conditions, were also due to the warm air increasing atmospheric capacity to hold moisture resulting in short torrential bursts, causing floods and devastation.
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