Yesterday NOAA released their global statistics for January 2017. They show that the January temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.58°F above the 20th century average of 53.6°F. This was the third highest for January in the 1880–2017 record, behind 2016 (highest) and 2007 (second highest). This is in agreement with the NASA statistics released earlier this week. NASA uses a different set of data to do their calculation, so their actual numbers may vary slightly from NOAA’s values.
In addition to the warm temperatures, it was also a record low amount for both the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice covers. This is in contrast to a few years ago when Antarctic sea ice was at a record high (although the amount there dwarfs the sea ice cover in the Arctic). You can read a commentary about this by Chris Mooney in the Washington Post here.
