Should we expect each year in the next decade (2019–2028) to be ranked among the top 10 warmest years globally?

Details

• Journal Title:
  Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society,
• Personal Author:
  Arguez, Anthony ; Hurley, Shannan ; Inamdar, Anand ; Mahoney, Laurel ; Sanchez-Lugo, Ahira ; Yang, Lilian
• NOAA Program & Office:
  NESDIS (National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service) ; NCEI (National Centers for Environmental Information) ; CICSP (Cooperative Institute for Climate Science)
• Description:
  Annual rankings of global temperature are widely cited by media and the general public, not only to place the most recent year in a historical perspective, but also as a first-order metric of recent climate change that is easily digestible by the general public. According to observations from NOAA’s Merged Land Ocean Global Surface Temperature Analysis Dataset (NOAAGlobalTemp) 5.0, the year 2018 was the fourth warmest year on record globally since 1880 (see Table 1). The most recent 5 years in the record (2014–18) comprise the 5 warmest years on record, with 2016 currently ranking as the warmest year. Given this streak of record or near-record global warmth in recent years, should we expect each year in the next decade (2019–28) to be ranked among the top 10 warmest years globally? In other words, given historical observations (including the most recent ones), can we assume that near-record annual rankings are already “baked into the cake” for the next several years?.
• Keywords:
  Climatic changes
• Source:
  Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 101(5), E655-E663
• DOI:
  https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0215.1
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Funding:
  Grant no. NA14NES4320003
• Rights Information:
  Other
• Compliance:
  Submitted
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:f491d0c7cac2f41309d42542540c579c385ec8bcb3232184ac86059d9d8cfe5d
• Download URL:
  https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/45182/noaa_45182_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 1.06 MB ]