A combination of strong >El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean and human-caused warming drove temperatures in February 2016 to levels never before seen since records began in 1880, according to new NASA data.
The data shows that February had a global average surface temperature of 1.35 degrees Celsius above the 1951 to 1980 average.
The 1.35 degree Celsius temperature anomaly in February beat the previous record high departure from average for any month seen in January 2016.
Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) tweeted the temperature analysis.
“Normally I don’t comment on individual months, but last month was special,” Mr. Schmidt tweeted.
According to NASA, the global average surface temperature during January was 1.14 degrees Celsius above average compared to the 1951 to 1980 average.
This means that temperatures in February 2016 had the largest departure from average of any month in NASA’s records since 1880, Mashable reported.
The previous warmest February was in 1998, which was also a year with an extremely strong El Nino, NASA said.
However, in an important indication of how far human-caused global warming has shifted the baseline state of the planet’s climate, February 2016 came out 0.846 degrees Celsius warmer than February 1998, despite the similar intensity of the El Nino events in both years.
