While people on the east coast of North America would disagree, given the harsh winter weather they experienced, there is the bigger picture that tells a far different story.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said last month’s average worldwide temperature was 56.4 degrees (13.6 degrees Celsius), making it the hottest March on record, averaging 1.5 degrees higher than the average for the 20th century and breaking a record set in 2010.
Looking at the first three months of 2015, all the major temperature-tracking agencies around the world have ranked January, February, and March as the warmest three months on record, breaking the record set in 2002. Global temperatures averaged 55.6 degrees (13.1 degrees Celsius).
This news comes on the heels of increasingly more confident forecasts that show a strengthening El Nino that is expected to impact global weather for the remainder of 2015. NOAA climate scientist Jessica Blunden said 2015 looks like it will break 2014’s hottest year record if conditions persist.
Planet Earth or Planet ocean?
An interesting observation was made by a reporter for ABC10 News. The reporter said we always refer to our world as planet Earth. Yet the Earth is mainly water with a portion of it being land masses. But the effects on the weather are dictated by what is happening in the Earth’s oceans and their interaction with the atmosphere above them.
While there are parts of the ocean with colder-than-normal water, the Pacific Ocean is a troubling entity. For the most part, it is warmer than normal, and with a plume of subsurface water moving to the east, the El nino already present could grow much larger.
But even more troubling is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a recurring pattern of climate variability that governs ocean temperatures and climate. Right now the PDO is in a “warm” or “positive” phase, meaning the western Pacific Ocean becomes cooler and part of the eastern ocean warms up. If the PDO were to be in a “cool” phase, just the opposite, ocean water temperature -wise, would occur.
It will be interesting to see what happens as the year progresses. Will we continue to break temperature records worldwide, or is the first three months of this year an anomaly? I might add, though, that the ocean temperatures off the coast of California in March rivaled summer temperatures.
