News | May 15, 2017
April 2017 was second-warmest April on record
Global map of the April 2017 LOTI (land-ocean temperature index) anomaly shows that central and northeast Asia continued to be much warmer than the 1951-1980 base period. In the United States, Alaska was much warmer than normal. View larger image.
April 2017 was the second-warmest April in 137 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.
Last month was 0.88 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean April temperature from 1951-1980. The two top April temperature anomalies have occurred during the past two years.
April 2016 was the hottest on record, at 1.06 degrees Celsius warmer than the April mean temperature. April 2017's temperature was 0.18 degrees Celsius cooler than April 2016. This past April was only slightly warmer than the third warmest April, which occurred in 2010 and was 0.87 degrees warmer than the mean.
The monthly analysis by the GISS team is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations.
The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations didn't cover enough of the planet. Monthly analyses are sometimes updated when additional data becomes available, and the results are subject to change.
Related links
For more information on NASA GISS's monthly temperature analysis, visit data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp.
For more information about NASA GISS, visit www.giss.nasa.gov.
Media contacts
Michael Cabbage, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, N.Y., 212-678-5516, mcabbage@nasa.gov
Leslie McCarthy, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, N.Y., 212-678-5507, leslie.m.mccarthy@nasa.gov
