Nonstop heat: NOAA predicts 2024 may be hottest year on record

After a 14th-straight month of record-high global temperatures in July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expects this year to end up as the hottest on record or very close. 

The agency said in its monthly climate briefing news conference that there was a 77% chance this year will be the warmest on record. There is a nearly 100% chance this year will land in the top-five hottest years. 

Karin Gleason, a monitoring section chief with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said nearly one-fifth of the world’s landmass saw a record temperature in July. 

“The globe still remains incredibly warm,” Gleason said, though she added that global temperatures last month were very close to July 2023. “Europe, Africa and Asia were each warmest on record for July, with North America second-warmest.”

The Earth saw its two hottest days on record back-to-back in July. During that time, much of the Southwest U.S. sweltered under heat warnings, and the Park Fire took off amid triple-digit heat in central California, becoming the fourth-largest in state history. 

NOAA is expecting above-average temperatures for almost all of the continental U.S. in September, except for parts of the California coast and the Pacific Northwest.

Researchers tracking the extraordinary temperatures have said the burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver, so the trend will continue until humans get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions. During this recent streak, the natural climate pattern El Niño has boosted temperatures, too.

The influence of El Niño has waned and soon may give way to La Niña. Brad Pugh, a meteorologist with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, said there is a two-thirds chance that a La Niña pattern will develop in September, October and November.

This pattern is associated with cooler global temperatures, but it can propel Atlantic hurricanes, a concern during an already active season for tropical storms. La Niña is also associated with wet winters in the Pacific Northwest and with dry conditions in the Southwest, where drought could return, Pugh said. 

European scientists are also monitoring global temperatures through the Copernicus program, which relies on a combination of real-world observations and computer modeling. The Copernicus data for July said it was the second-hottest July on record. 

Gleason said U.S. and European scientists are not out of harmony, and that this July was nearly tied with 2023 when it comes to heat. 

“The primary global data sets are all consistent,” Gleason said. “It just depends on how you combine and compile the data and what data you use in the analysis. And so there are enough differences there between the data types and the methodology that we’re not going to have exactly or precisely the same numbers, but the consistency over time is, I think, the thing to really take home, and that’s that we are at or near record pace.”

The Earth did break one significant hot streak. After 15 months of record-high sea surface temperatures that have puzzled scientists, those levels have eased, according to NOAA. 

Data from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer still shows sea surface temperatures trending about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit above average, which is high but below the records set in 2023.