NASA and NOAA scientists say 2014 was the hottest year on record. Image by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center
WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 (UPI) -- The official numbers are in, and they confirm what most already suspected: 2014 was the hottest year on record. Temperature records were shattered in places across the globe, including in much of Europe, parts of South America, as well as in China and portions of Russia and the Far East.
As NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Friday, average global temperatures on land and sea surfaces collected across the planet were 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average.
"When averaged over the globe, 2014 was the warmest year on record," Michael Freilich, director of the Earth Science Division in NASA's Science Mission Directorate, told reporters during a teleconference on Friday.
Only the United States featured a considerable chunk of real estate with land surface temperatures below average, with much of the South and Midwest having endured an especially cold year. Still, much of the West Coast and Alaska featured record highs.
And the United States was an anomaly, globally speaking.
Surface temperatures collected by NASA and NOAA via a wide array of instruments -- temperature gauges on buoys and ships, weather station thermometers and satellite readings -- showed, in separate complimentary analyses, that 2014 was the hottest on record.
"Multiple datasets from across the globe continue to validate each other and highlight these long term trends," NOAA's chief scientist Richard W. Spinrad said of the new records and the reality of manmade climate change.
Though average land temperatures weren't the hottest since accurate record keeping began in 1880, despite every continent seeing some record temperature events, ocean surface temperatures were the warmest on record.
"Every ocean had parts with record temperatures," explained Thomas R. Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. "When you put it all together it comes out to the warmest year on record."
The new data sets show that the globe has been warming an average of 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since 1880.
"If you are younger than 29-years old, you haven't lived in a month that was cooler than the 20th century average," Dr. Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist from the University of Georgia and 2013 President of the American Meteorological Society, said in a statement. "That's a new normal that is a result of human activities on top of the natural varying climate that has global temperature trends moving very quickly towards a 1-2 C increase."
"You will hear some skeptics say that the satellite-based temperature records don't support these findings," Shepherd added, "but we also used ground-based instruments like thermometers and rain gauges to validate these measurements."
Of course, data collection is never as precise as scientists want to be. Both NASA and NOAA are constantly working to improve and expand their collection of data points involving surface temperatures over land and water.
The scientists say efforts continue to recover and digitize data collected by stations, some dating back to the 19th century, to fill in the gaps. But when averaging global temperatures, researchers are still forced to throw out information from some parts of the globe -- including much of Africa -- due to a dearth of reliable information.
Researchers told reporters that the expansion of buoy-based temperature instruments throughout the world's oceans have vastly improved data collection and the accuracy of global temperature averages over the last two decades.
Oceans are slow to warm, and slow to cool. Scientists say ocean temperatures during the last three months of the year best correlate to the following year's temperature patterns. They also say if all greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow -- or even if a massive volcano cooled things down -- ocean temperatures wouldn't drop significantly within the year.
The effects of global ocean temperatures on El Nino weather patterns is still "very much an open question" and a "very large challenge" to predict accurately.
Despite small data gaps, researchers say they are confident in their findings. NOAA estimated 2014 was 2.5 times more likely than 2010, in second place, to be the warmest year on record, while NASA pegged 2014 as 1.5 times more likely than 2010 to be the warmest. Japan's meteorological agency has already confirmed that 2014 is the hottest year on record, and the United Kingdom's weather agency is expected to announce similar findings later today.
