Global Surface Air & Sea Temperatures: Current Conditions and Future Prospects

[WYorksWeather]

 Midlands Ice Age Just realised I forgot to reply to this comment.

Full April data will be available later, but in terms of the land vs. ocean issue, we have the following full data for March from Berkeley Earth. March was technically the warmest on record globally, but effectively tied for first.

What's more interesting is the following. Firstly, a map of global temperature rankings. There is nowhere amongst the coldest on record for March, but top 5 warmest areas are also not everywhere of course. But it is notable how much of the warmth is concentrated in the oceans, and also across central Africa and South America.

This is then borne out in the global land and ocean averages. You can see that March was only in 3rd place for the land surface, but a clear first for the ocean surface.

I think the confusion generally comes from the fact that though the oceans have warmed by less than the land surface, they have an outsized impact on the averaging, because of course they make up about 70% of the Earth's surface.

The tropical ocean anomalies are of course typical of El Nino plus background warming, so not anything unusual. What is more unusual is the deviations in the North Atlantic and North Pacific shipping areas, and though this remains an active area of research, the suggestion is that reductions in sulphur emissions have caused at least regional warming in these areas over the past few years. This would also account for faster than expected warming in Europe, for example.

All active areas of research of course, and of course none of this will be settled until we have several more years of data.