NOAA released their monthly climate report for the globe for April 2016 today. You can read the summary at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/201604 and follow their links to a full report. Many parts of the globe were at record-setting warm levels, although a few cold pools were still present, including east of Hudson Bay and near Iceland in the North Atlantic. The global average temperature for April was almost 2 degrees above the 20th century average and broke the old record high temperature (set last year) by half a degree. The year to date average temperature also broke the previous all-time record by a half degree. The Northern Hemisphere snow cover for April was also the lowest in the 50 years of record.
One of the results of this string of broken records is that 2016 is virtually guaranteed to break the all-time warmest year on record. The “racetrack” graph below shows that 2016 is far above the pace of the previous warmest year, 2015. Even with El Niño rapidly fading, it is unlikely that the global temperatures will cool enough to bring the year to date totals below last year’s values. You can read more about this from Forbes.com here.
