NASA September 2023 Temperature Data Shows Continued Record Warming

Data visualization of a line graph. On the Y axis is the temperature anomaly in degrees Celsius, ranging from below -2 to above 3. The months of the year are on the X axis, starting with January at left and ending with December at right. Temperatures advance from January through December left to right, and also move up during warmer months and down again during cooler months to form a roughly bell shaped curve. The color of each line reflects the year, with colder purples for the 1960s and warmer oranges and yellows for more recent years. As the animation plays, the years count up from 1960 to 2023. The lines get progressively higher, indicating a long-term warming trend. At the end of the animation, the line representing 2023 emerges above all previous years, with September 2023 particularly distant from previous Septembers.
NASA/Peter Jacobs

Continuing the temperature trend from this summer, September 2023 was the hottest September on record, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The month also set the record for the highest temperature anomaly – the largest difference from the long-term average.

This visualization shows global temperature anomalies along with the underlying seasonal cycle. Temperatures advance from January through December left to right, rising during warmer months and falling during cooler months. The color of each line represents the year, with colder purples for the 1960s and warmer oranges and yellows for more recent years. A long-term warming trend can be seen as the height of each month increases over time, the result of human activities releasing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“What’s remarkable is that these record values are happening before the peak of the current El Nino event, whereas in 2016 the previous record values happened in the spring, after the peak,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS. El Nino is the warm phase of a naturally recurring pattern of trade winds and ocean temperatures in the Eastern Tropical Pacific that influences global temperatures and precipitation patterns.

By Katy Mersmann

NASA Goddard

First published at NASA.gov

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