AMS State Of The Climate Report: 2023 Crushed Records Across The Boards - Ocean Heat, Loss Of Cloud Cover, Drought

Last year was already one for the climate record books, but a new report from the American Meteorological Society is adding to that already substantial list. In 2023, Earth’s layers of heat-reflecting clouds dwindled to the lowest extent ever measured. About 94 percent of all ocean surfaces experienced a marine heatwave during that year. And, last July, a record-high 7.9 percent of land areas experienced severe drought, the report shows.

The root cause of the feverish symptoms is the continued buildup of heat-trapping pollution from burning fossil fuels, the report states, detailing the record-high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide last year. The State of the Climate in 2023 was published Wednesday as a supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It was compiled by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information with contributions from scientists around the world, and includes extensive analysis of global climate conditions in a record-hot year that drove dangerous extremes around the planet.

Last year’s global ocean temperatures in particular stood out to many researchers because they were so far above previous records. The persistently high surface temperatures may mark a “step-change” of climate conditions, said Boyin Huang, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who worked on the oceans section of the report.

The global average annual sea surface temperature anomaly was 0.13 degrees Celsius above the previous record set in 2016, a very large jump for the oceans, he said, adding that marine heatwaves were exceptionally widespread and persistent in many regions. Ocean heatwave conditions stayed in place for at least 10 months of 2023 across vast reaches of the eastern tropical and North Atlantic Ocean, the Sea of Japan, the Arabian Sea, the Southern Ocean near New Zealand and the eastern tropical Pacific. And the globally averaged number of ocean heatwave days rose to 116 from the previous record of 86 days in 2016. At the other end of the scale, there were only 13 marine cold spell days, far below the previous record low of 37 days, set in 1982.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22082024/2023-extreme-climate-conditions/