Climate Monitor

In the fol­low­ing charts, dai­ly updat­ed tem­per­a­ture anom­alies for dis­tinct Earth enti­ties, name­ly the ‘sea sur­face’ and the ‘2 meter air atmos­phere’ are pre­sent­ed for dif­fer­ent regions, along­side month­ly updat­ed anom­alies in ‘sea ice extent’. Dashed lines cor­re­spond to the least square regres­sion fits and trends, respectively.

The two charts below depict Glob­al and North Atlantic sea sur­face tem­per­a­ture anom­alies on a dai­ly basis over the past 43 years rel­a­tive to the base­line y(x) = 0, rep­re­sent­ing the aver­age for the peri­od from 1982 to 2022. These anom­alies reflect the dif­fer­ences in tem­per­a­ture from the mean. It is impor­tant to note that the analy­sis focus­es sole­ly on sea sur­face tem­per­a­tures, and even extreme changes observed do not nec­es­sar­i­ly indi­cate over­all increas­es or decreas­es in the heat con­tent of the seas. Instead, they are pri­mar­i­ly attrib­uted to changes in strat­i­fi­ca­tion. Nev­er­the­less, these tem­per­a­ture fluc­tu­a­tions pro­vide evi­dence of the vast heat reser­voir inher­ent in the oceans, where­in approx­i­mate­ly 90% of the sur­plus solar radi­a­tion ener­gy is sequestered. Once this ener­gy reach­es the ocean’s sur­face, it exerts sub­stan­tial influ­ences on air tem­per­a­tures, land pre­cip­i­ta­tion, storms, and var­i­ous mete­o­ro­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na. Fur­ther­more, it is essen­tial to acknowl­edge that the base­line already accounts for a sig­nif­i­cant increase in sea sur­face tem­per­a­ture, as it rep­re­sents the aver­age of the past 41 years. Con­se­quent­ly, the actu­al val­ues of the seas are notably high­er than those depict­ed on the y‑axis.

Fig. 1–2: The source data was obtained from Cli­mate Rean­a­lyz­er (https://ClimateReanalyzer.org), which is affil­i­at­ed with the Cli­mate Change Insti­tute at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Maine. The orig­i­nal data was sourced from NOAA Opti­mum Inter­po­la­tion SST (OISST) ver­sion 2.1. The anom­alies were com­put­ed by industryfootprint.org.

The six charts below illus­trate dai­ly air tem­per­a­ture anom­alies at 2 meters above the sur­face over the past 85 years, rel­a­tive to the base­line y(x) = 0, which rep­re­sents the aver­age for the peri­od from 1940 to 2022. The data includes var­i­ous regions: the over­all glob­al aver­age, the Trop­ics, the North­ern and South­ern hemi­spheres, as well as the Arc­tic and Antarc­tic. Notably, the base­line already incor­po­rates a sig­nif­i­cant increase in 2‑meter air tem­per­a­ture, encom­pass­ing the aver­age of the past 83 years. As a result, for instance, the glob­al aver­age tem­per­a­ture anom­aly for the year 2023 shown here is approx­i­mate­ly only 1.0 degrees Cel­sius, where­as it is 1.5 degrees Cel­sius rel­a­tive to the year 1850. Hence, to obtain the com­mon­ly used val­ue for Glob­al Warm­ing, i.e. relat­ed to the pre-indus­tri­al ref­er­ence peri­od, about 0.5 degrees Cel­sius must there­fore be added to the y‑values in first the diagram.

The glob­al air tem­per­a­ture anom­aly aver­aged over the cur­rent year 2024 for the ref­er­ence peri­od 1850–1900 is cal­cu­lat­ed dai­ly and dis­played in red in the left-hand dia­gram. This is also an exclu­sive cal­cu­la­tion from pri­ma­ry data. The cal­cu­la­tion steps essen­tial­ly com­prise: (1) Deter­mi­na­tion of the dif­fer­ence between the aver­age tem­per­a­ture anom­alies of the years 2024 (begin­ning of the year to the cur­rent day) and 2022 and the base­line 1940–2022, (2) addi­tion of the tem­per­a­ture anom­aly of the year 2022 to the ref­er­ence peri­od 1850–1900 (1.16 °C).

Fig. 3–8: The source data comes from the Cli­mate Rean­a­lyz­er (https://ClimateReanalyzer.org), which is affil­i­at­ed with the Insti­tute for Cli­mate Change at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Maine. The orig­i­nal data is from the Coper­ni­cus Cli­mate Change Ser­vice (C3S) (2023), ERA5. The anom­alies were cal­cu­lat­ed by industryfootprint.org.

The two charts show month­ly ice extent anom­alies plot­ted as a time series of per­cent dif­fer­ence between the extent for the month in ques­tion and the mean for that month based on the Jan­u­ary 1981 to Decem­ber 2010 data. The North­ern hemi­sphere ice extent anom­alies demon­strate a per­sis­tent down­ward trend with min­i­mal vari­a­tions. In con­trast, the South­ern hemi­sphere ice extent anom­alies exhib­it fluc­tu­a­tions with­out a dis­cernible trend until a notable and abrupt decrease occurred in the year 2023.

Fig. 9–10: Unlike the oth­er charts, the two charts dis­played are not processed here, but embed­ded direct­ly from the web­site of The Nation­al Snow and Ice Data Cen­ter (NSIDC) at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado Boul­der (https://nsidc.org). The data con­tained with­in is sub­ject to month­ly updates.