On the heels of a new record high in the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic this week reached its hottest level, several weeks earlier than its usual annual peak, preliminary data released on Friday by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showed.
The news came after scientists confirmed that this month is on track to be the warmest month in recorded history, as searing heat intensified by global warming affects tens of millions of people.
“Based on our analysis, the record-high average sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic Ocean is 24.9°C,” observed Wednesday, NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information scientist Xungang Yin said.
Photo: AFP
The record is particularly startling as it comes early in the year — usually, the North Atlantic reaches its peak temperature in early September.
The previous record high was recorded in September last year, at 24.89°C, Yin said.
The NOAA, which has been tracking sea temperatures since the early 1980s, would need about two weeks to confirm the preliminary findings.
The Mediterranean Sea reached its highest temperature on record on Monday, Spanish researchers said, amid an exceptional heat wave in Europe.
The record of 28.71°C was announced by the Spanish Institute of Marine Sciences, which analyzed data from satellites used by the EU’s Earth observation program Copernicus.
The experts said they measure the daily median sea surface temperature, rather than the average, because it is less susceptible to extreme spikes in temperature in isolated areas of the sea.
The Mediterranean region, hit by record temperatures this month, has long been classified as a hot spot of climate change.
The sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic is “expected to continue to increase through the month of August,” Yin said, adding that it was “highly likely” the record would again be broken.
The new high of 24.9°C is “more than one degree warmer than a 30-year climatological normal, calculated from 1982 to 2011,” he added.
Since March, when the North Atlantic begins to warm up after winter, temperatures have generally been higher than in previous years, with the difference more pronounced in the past few weeks.
The North Atlantic has become an emblematic observation point for the warming of seawater worldwide due to the effects of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
The Copernicus program, which uses different data than that analyzed by NOAA, on Friday said that it had recorded a temperature of 24.7°C on Wednesday in the North Atlantic.
A Copernicus spokesman said while that remained below the program’s record from September last year, slightly lower than the NOAA level at 24.81°C, that record was sure to be broken “this summer.”
“At this stage, it is just a matter of days,” he said.
“This situation is extreme: we’ve seen maritime heat waves before, but this is very persistent and spread out over a large surface area” in the North Atlantic, Mercator Ocean International oceanographer Karina Von Schuckmann said.
She said that the oceans have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat produced by human activity since the dawn of the industrial age.
“This accumulation of energy doubled over the last two decades,” fueling global warming, she said.
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