If this summer has felt like a never-ending sweltering heat wave, you’re not alone. In its statement, NASA announced that the summer of 2023 will be the hottest summer on record. Experts from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said the temperature is due to human-caused climate change combined with a natural climate pattern called El Niño.
Global records date back to 1880. According to NASA data, the months of June, July and August were 0.23 degrees Celsius warmer than all summers on record. Compared to the average summer from 1951 to 1980, the summer of 2023 was 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer. NASA considers June to August as meteorological summer in the Northern Hemisphere.
“The record-breaking temperatures of summer 2023 are not just a set of numbers; they have dire real-world consequences,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. Nelson called climate change “a threat to our planet and future generations.”
The global temperature anomaly map for the summer months of 2023 shows how much hotter or colder different regions are compared to the baseline average from 1951 to 1980.NASA specifically cited human-caused greenhouse gas emissions as the driving force behind climate change and the global warming trend that has led to such a scorching summer. According to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, most of these greenhouse gas emissions come from China, the United States and European Union countries. Greenhouse gas emissions per capita are highest in the USA and Russia.
NASA collects surface air temperature data from thousands of weather stations around the world, including those located at sea. The agency doesn’t just look at raw heat figures, but instead calculates temperature anomalies, meaning how different temperatures are from previous averages.
What happens to temperatures at sea is as important as what people experience on land. “Exceptionally high sea surface temperatures, fueled in part by the return of El Niño, were largely responsible for the summer’s record warmth,” said NASA JPL climate scientist Josh Willis.
El Niño is a natural weather pattern in which higher-than-normal surface temperatures occur repeatedly in parts of the Pacific Ocean. El Niño worsened conditions throughout the summer, setting the stage for record high temperatures. Summer may be history for the Northern Hemisphere in 2023, but concerns for the future remain. As the world continues to warm, more records may be broken.
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