Last month was the fourth-warmest March since modern historical temperature records began in 1880, according to data provided by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The global mean temperature for March 2014 was about 0.7°C (about 1.26°F) higher than the 1951-1980 average, placing it fourth in line behind 2002, 2010 and 1990 among the hottest Marches on record.
Powering last March's near-record global temperatures was a "sea" of extraordinary warmth (shown in the map above, in dark and bright red colors) that stretched across much of Eastern Europe and Russia all the way to the western United States, noted weather.com meteorologist Jon Erdman.
"March was indeed cold in the eastern United States, much of Canada and parts of southern South America," he said. "However, the broader picture showed a sea of warm anomalies from Europe across Russia to Alaska and the western United States."
Wildfires burned across a large swath of Siberia in early April, Weather Underground's Christopher Burt pointed out, adding that the southern Siberian city of Chemal soared to a high temperature of 83.7°F on April 2, at least 40 degrees above its average high for the day.
As the NASA-GISS graph below shows, the March temperature anomaly last month was starkest at Earth's highest latitudes:
NASA/GISS
The difference between the top six March values are small enough, he pointed out that small differences or new information – such as a different analysis method by NOAA or the U.K.-based Hadley Centre – can change the rankings significantly. That can move a third-place ranking down to a sixth-place ranking or vice-versa, he added.
NOAA, the Hadley Centre and NASA-GISS maintain the world's three most widely-cited historical temperature databases, all of which feature records that date back to the late 1800s.
find this story at: http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/march-2014-was-4th-hottest-record-nasa-data-shows-20140414
No comments:
Post a Comment