Monitoring the Global Climate - Monthly Temperature Anomalies, August 2009

The globe continues to exhibit well above normal temperatures despite the recent cool weather in our part of the world.  Don't be mislead by our below normal temperatures, its called "Global Warming", not "Nebraska Warming", and we were just fortunate to be in one of the very small areas that has had below normal temperatures.  Here's hoping for an above normal Winter.

The dot map, below, is a product of a merged land surface and sea surface temperature anomaly analysis. Temperature anomalies with respect to the 1961-1990 mean for land and ocean are analyzed separately and then merged to form the global analysis.  Note that
BLUE is BELOW normal and RED is ABOVE normal, and the size of the dot is proportional to the magnitude of the anomaly.  Temperature anomalies are noted in degrees Centigrade.  The maps and data analysis are from the National Climatic Data Center. This page was produced within the Applied Climate Sciences Group of the School of Natural Resources, UNL.

A Short narrative for this month is found below the map.

LINK to other months

AUGUST 2009:
The combined global land and ocean surface temperatures for August 2009 ranked as the second warmest August on record since records began in 1880. The combined global land and ocean temperature anomaly was 0.62°C (1.12°F), falling only 0.05°C (0.09°F) short of tying the record set in 1998.  During the month of August, warmer-than-average temperatures were present across large portions of the world's land areas with the exception of cooler-than-average conditions across Japan, the central contiguous United States, parts of Canada, western Alaska, and western Russia.   the Southern Hemisphere, both the August 2009 average temperature for land areas, and the Hemisphere as a whole (land and ocean surface combined), represented the warmest August on record.