'July was the hottest month on record,' says NASA

'July was the hottest month on record,' says NASA. August. 17, 2016 07:14. by 권재현기자, 임현석기자 confetti@donga.com,lhs@donga.com.

July was the hottest month on record globally this year since 1880 when the world started weather observation.

The U.S. space agency NASA said on Monday that last month’s average temperature on earth was 0.18 degrees Celsius higher than July last year when the planet’s average temperature was the highest on record. It was 0.84 degrees Celsius higher than the average temperature for July from 1950 to 1980. It was the 10th month in a row to break the monthly temperature record since October last year. Given this, this year will highly likely break the record of the hottest year following 2014 and 2015.

This year’s record temperature is apparently due to a combination of global warming and El Niño. The El Niño, which had continued for more than 18 months since December 2014, is now dissipated. Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb said that people have to be aware that the earth’s temperature is rising though the El Niño subsided. David Karoly, a climate scientist at Melbourne University, said that the average July temperature was about 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average, and only about 0.2 degrees Celsius of that is due to the El Niño and the rest is due to global warming.

Korea saw the highest temperature in July with four tropical nights on average, an increase of 1.7 days from the average of 2.3 of the previous years. This is the sixth largest number since 1973 when they were officially counted. The average number of days with a heat wave was 5.5 on average in July in Korea, far higher than the annual average of 3.9 days. A heat wave is likely to continue with the highest temperature forecast to be around 27 to 35 degrees Celsius on Wednesday.