The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Union, announces record temperatures for July on a global level.
July is typically the warmest month of the year in the global average. July 2016 was previously the warmest of any month on record in absolute terms. It has now been replaced by July 2019, albeit by a margin that is small compared with the typical differences between datasets for previous Julys.
Compared to the latest standard thirty-year climatological reference period, 1981-2010, July was about 0.56 °C degrees above average. This is close to 1.2°C above the pre-industrial level as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and about 0.04 °C warmer than July 2016, the previous warmest July in this data record.
The C3S data show that the margin between the temperatures for July 2019 and temperatures for July 2016 is very small. Typically, there is a difference between the values provided by the global temperature datasets of various institutions, and the C3S difference between July 2019 and 2016 temperatures is smaller than this margin.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service also revealed that besides seeing an extraordinarily warm July, the year 2019 has been a very warm one so far. C3S data show that all months of 2019 are ranking among the four warmest for the month in question and that June 2019 was the warmest June on record.
Jean-Noël Thépaut, Head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), comments: “While July is usually the warmest month of the year for the globe, according to our data it also was the warmest month recorded globally by a very small margin. With continued greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting impact on global temperatures, records will continue to be broken in the future.”
