January 2017 third-warmest-January on record, says NASA

Image credit: NASA

New Delhi: NASA scientists have found that January 2017 was the third warmest January in 137 years of modern record-keeping.

According to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, last month's temperature was 0.20 degrees Celsius cooler than the warmest January in 2016. However, it was 0.92 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean January temperature from 1951-1980.

They said two of the three top January temperature anomalies have been during the past two years. “2016 was the hottest on record, at 1.12 degrees Celsius warmer than the January mean temperature, followed by 2007 at 0.96 degrees Celsius warmer. January 2017 placed third,” NASA said.

NASA says the monthly analysis by the scientists is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations.

The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations didn't cover enough of the planet.