Earth’s Warmest May on Record

 

Above: People crossing a broken flooded road in the Satkhira district of southwest Bangladesh on June 6, 2020, in the aftermath of Cyclone Amphan. Thousands of shrimp enclosures were washed away, while numerous thatched houses, trees, electricity and telephone poles, dykes and croplands were damaged and many villages were submerged by Amphan's storm surge. (Piyas Biswas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

May 2020 was the planet's warmest May since record keeping began in 1880, said NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and NASA on Friday, June 12. NOAA rated May as tied with 2016 for warmest May on record, while NASA put May 2020 ahead of May 2016 by 0.06°C. Minor differences in rankings often occur between NOAA and NASA, due to the different techniques they use to handle data-sparse regions such as the Arctic.

The year-to-date period of January-May ranks as the second warmest such period on record, just 0.06°C behind the record set in 2016. According to NCEI's outlook for annual temperature, the year 2020 has more than a 99.9% chance to rank among the five warmest years on record, and a 49% chance of being the warmest year on record. If so, each of the past seven years (including 2020) will have been among the seven warmest years on record.

NASA classified May 2020 as having the 17th-highest monthly temperature departure from average for any month in the 1,684-month record, dating back to 1880: 1.02°C (1.84°F) above the 20th century average. All five months of 2020 rank in the top 20 for warmest of any month on record.

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