For almost a year, global heat records have been breaking one after another.
April was no exception. It was the warmest April ever recorded in the world, according to the EU's climate service Copernicus.
The month began with an extreme heatwave that hit countries in the Sahel and West Africa hard, with reports of unusually full morgues in Mali. But as April drew to a close, parts of Southeast and South Asia were experiencing record temperatures.
April was the warmest April ever recorded on Earth, with an average temperature of 15.03 degrees Celsius, according to the EU's Copernicus climate service. That was 0.67 degrees Celsius warmer than the average for the month from 1991 to 2000 and 0.14 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous record month of April 2016.
For Europe, April was the second warmest April on record, with the highest temperatures on average in the eastern parts of the continent. However, temperatures were below average in Iceland and Fennoscandia, which includes Sweden.
The global average temperature over the past twelve months is the highest ever measured – 1.61 degrees higher than the estimated pre-industrial average.
The world's oceans also continue to be at record highs. The average surface water temperature was 21.04 degrees Celsius, the highest value ever recorded for an April and marginally lower than the 21.07 degrees Celsius recorded for March 2024.
The heat is driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, but has also been helped by the recurring El Niño phenomenon, which affects both the weather in certain places and the global temperature.
But El Niño has started to weaken.
”El Niño peaked at the beginning of the year and sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific are now moving back towards neutral conditions,” said Carlo Buontempo, Head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, in a comment, continuing:
”But while temperature variations associated with natural cycles like El Niño come and go, the extra energy trapped in the ocean and atmosphere due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases will continue to push global temperatures toward new records.”
Source: TT-DI.SE
