It just keeps getting warmer. August this year has set a new record as the warmest in 136 years, a NASA report showed.
Global temperature record-keeping started in the 1880s and as per record, the space agency reports that August this year is the warmest August in 136 years. The findings came after NASA named July as the warmest ever July and hottest month ever on record.
"Monthly rankings, which vary by only a few hundredths of a degree, are inherently fragile," said Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Director Gavin Schmidt in a press release.
"We stress that the long-term trends are the most important for understanding the ongoing changes that are affecting our planet," he added.
The report shows that August 2016 was 0.29 degrees Fahrenheit (0.16 degrees Celsius) hotter than the last one in 2014. It was also 01.8 degrees Fahrenheit (0.98 degrees Celsius) hotter than the mean temperature for August between 1951 and 1980.
NASA said that the warmest August is the 11th month that the monthly temperature record has been set since October 2015. However, in the 1880s, previous data didn't cover much of the planet due to lack of instruments and equipment. The monthly analysis by the GISS came from approximately 6,300 meteorological stations across the globe, buoy-based instruments and research stations in the Antarctica.
The streak of record-high summers and months could stop if La Niña, a weather pattern that promotes the cooling of the water in the equatorial Pacific, takes place. Though this weather pattern has been linked to widespread changes in climate like that of El Niño, it is less damaging and extensive.
In a separate data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. had one of its warmest summers since record-keeping began in 1985. In fact, eight states in the country's Northeast had the hottest August ever recorded. Specifically, California, Rhode Island and Connecticut have the hottest summer on record.
