Extreme Temperature Diary- Monday January 1st, 2024/ Main Topic: Will 2024 Top 2023, Which Was the Warmest Year in Human History?

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The main purpose of this ongoing blog is to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day and are archived on each prior post. I’ll refer to extreme or temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉

Main Topic: Will 2024 Top 2023, Which Was the Warmest Year in Human History?

Dear Diary. Happy New Year everyone! Or will it be happy considering how hot the globe is getting for many with all of the severe weather effects stemming from a planet with a high fever? Certainly, the climate crisis deepened in 2023 as some people experienced ramifications from the hottest year in recorded human history. We will soon get a confirmation on how anomalously hot 2023 was in a few days. I’ll add some hard numbers to this post concerning 2023 when I see them.

Due to warm waters from a strong El Niño getting put into global temperature averages, most climate experts think that 2024 will be even hotter than 2023 plus El Nino’s do add extra heat into the global atmosphere aiding to spike averages.

If our current El Niño wanes faster than expected, 2024 may not be the hottest on record, however. We will be reaping the whirlwind, so to speak, from effects of this El Niño for most of the year, though. What’s worse if El Nino fades by early fall, upper-level atmospheric wind shear over the Atlantic Basin will ebb, so we could be looking at a ferocious hurricane season.

Here is a nice summary by Ian Livingston writing for the Washington Post on how record temperature statistics stacked up across the United States, taking a page from my playbook (For some of his chats that I am not reposting, please hit the following link.):

Extreme heat far outpaced cold in U.S. during record-warm 2023 – The Washington Post

Extreme heat far outpaced cold in U.S. during record-warm 2023

Warm weather records outnumbered cold ones by a factor of 3

Analysis by Ian Livingston Reporter

December 29, 2023 at 12:53 p.m. EST

People gather on July 25 to watch the sunset from South Mountain Park amid Phoenix’s worst heat wave on record. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

The year 2023 — which is set to become the Earth’s hottest on record — featured a disproportionate amount of extremely warm weather in the United States.

Record-warm calendar days outnumbered record-cold ones by a factor of three. The persistent hot weather led to heat-related illnesses and deaths, while intensifying extreme rainstorms in some areas and droughts and fires in others.

The disproportionate number of warm weather records in 2023 fits into a long-term increase driven by human-caused climate change. The strong El Niño event that developed this year also contributed to the warm weather extremes.

In the United States, there have been 41,703 calendar day temperature records and, of those, 31,230 were on the warm side compared to just 10,043 on the cool end (through Dec. 28). August alone had 5,701 warm records. And during this abnormally mild December, there have been only 53 cold weather records compared to a whopping 2,826 warm ones.

Warm weather records were also especially numerous during the hot summer months. Between July and September, warm weather records outnumbered cool ones by a factor of six.

How the year evolved

The year 2023 got off to a hot start with 165 warm weather records on Jan. 3 from the central states to the East Coast.

Jan. 3 became the first of 35 days in 2023 with 100 or more high temperature records; by comparison, there were just five days with 100 or more record low temperatures.

Spikes of abnormally warm temperatures continued in the late winter and spring. There were nearly 500 record highs set Feb. 22 and 23, while April 13 had just shy of 250.

June was the only month to feature more cool records than warm ones. But the peak summer months of July and August produced a torrent of heat records focused across the southern tier, expanding from the Desert Southwest to the Gulf Coast states.

The results by season

If the climate wasn’t changing, warm and cold records would tend to balance each other out over time. But since the 1970s, the balance has tilted heavily toward warm records, and 2023 fits into this trend, as shown in the month-by-month breakdown below:

January was one of the year’s most extreme months, with record highs outnumbering record lows by a factor of 6.5. Heat records outpaced cold ones during the spring, but by a factor of less than 2.

Then, summer heat sprang to life. From July to September, there were 11,557 warm records compared to just 1,834 cool ones.

Monthly temperatures compared to average. (weatherbell.com)

During October, there were more than three times as many warm records as cool ones, but that ratio dropped to about 1.5 in November. The fall lull in extensive record heat was somewhat similar to what was observed in spring.

December has proven to be exceptionally warm, with about 53 warm records for every cold one. It’s poised to become the warmest December on record across a large swath of the northern tier, including in Fargo, N.D., Minneapolis and Milwaukee.

Some of the most memorable numbers

Although there were bouts of record-setting warmth throughout the year, the intensity of the heat was most extreme in July and August.

Following its coolest June since 2009, temperatures rose to unprecedented levels in Phoenix. With an average temperature of 102.7 degrees during July, the highest on record by nearly 4 degrees, Phoenix became the first major city in the United States to average 100 degrees or higher for a month. It also posted its second-hottest August and hottest summer overall, which included a record-setting 31-day stretch reaching at least 110 degrees.

During July and August, the core of the heat shifted east. El Paso sweltered through 70 days reaching at least 100 degrees, surpassing the old record of 62 days in 1994.

High temperatures on August 27 per PRISM Climate Group reanalysis. Dashed contour zones are 100 degrees or greater. (Ian Livingston/The Washington Post)

On Aug. 27, with a temperature of 105 degrees, New Orleans joined many others along the Gulf Coast in setting all-time record highs, including Baton Rouge (106 degrees), Houston (109), Mobile, Ala. (106) and Shreveport, La. (110).

The heat across the southern states helped push the Gulf of Mexico to record highs, while the water temperature surged to 101.1 degrees at a buoy just off the Florida coast.

By Ian Livingston Ian Livingston is a forecaster/photographer and information lead for the Capital Weather Gang. By day, Ian is a defense and national security researcher at a D.C. think tank. Twitter

More on today’s main subject:

Here are more “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:

Here is some brand-new December and 2023 climatology:

Here is More Climate and News from Monday:

(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)

Today’s News on Sustainable Energy, Traditional Polluting Energy from Fossil Fuel, and the Green Revolution:

More from the Weather Department:

More on the Environment and Nature:

More on Other Science and the Beauty of Earth and this Universe:

If you like these posts and my work on record temperature ratios, please contribute via my PayPal widget on this site. Thanks in advance for any support. 

Guy Walton… “The Climate Guy”

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