July was the planet’s hottest month on record — so far

A sizzling month marked by record heat waves, major wildfires, melting sea ice and a burgeoning El Niño will go down in the books as the hottest July on record — at least until next year, federal officials said Monday.

The planet and its oceans roasted last month as global average temperatures soared 2.02 degrees above average, making July 2023 not only the hottest July ever, but very likely Earth’s warmest month in at least 174 years of record keeping.

“Climatologically, July is the warmest month of the year,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a monthly report released Monday. “As the warmest July on record, July 2023, at least nominally, was the warmest month on record for the globe.”

Temperature data through July make it virtually certain that 2023 will rank among the five warmest years on record, with a nearly 50% probability that it will be the single warmest year on record, the agency said.

The announcement came as little surprise to millions of Americans who suffered through extreme heat conditions firsthand.

The stubborn presence of a high-pressure heat dome over the American Southwest pushed temperatures in Phoenix to 110 degrees or hotter for a record 31 days straight. More than 40 deaths were recorded in the county with hundreds more under investigation, and scores of people were hospitalized for heat-related illnesses and pavement burns.

In Greece, Italy, Canada and Algeria, raging wildfires ignited amid broiling temperatures, spewing noxious smoke and sending residents and tourists fleeing for safety. Death Valley soared to 128 degrees, while areas in northwest China climbed as high as 126.

A multitude of factors converged to drive the sweltering conditions, said Karin Gleason, chief of the monitoring section at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

The onset of El Niño, a climate pattern in the tropical Pacific, warmed areas around the equatorial Pacific, pushing land and ocean temperatures to new extremes. Surface temperatures simmered 0.36 degrees warmer than the previous July record, set in 2021.

The month “was the warmest on record for land, warmest on record for oceans, and when you combine the two, it was the warmest on record for the combined land and ocean anomaly values,” Gleason said. “So it set a record in all three categories.”