Oceans register record heat in May – 07/06/2023 – Environment

The surface of the oceans had the hottest month of May on record, the European service Copernicus said on Wednesday (7).

“Ocean surface temperatures are already reaching record levels, and our data indicate that the average temperature of all ice-free seas in May 2023 was higher than any other May,” said Deputy Director of the Copernicus Service on Climate Change. , Samantha Burgess, in a statement.

This latest bulletin is based on a computer analysis generated from billions of measurements from satellites, but also from ships, planes and weather stations around the world. The data used by Copernicus go back, in some cases, to 1950.

Regarding the temperature of the planet as a whole, the month of May was the second hottest on record.

Average ocean surface temperatures in May “were around 19.7°C, or 0.26°C above the 1991-2020 average,” a Copernicus spokesman told AFP.

The ocean absorbed about 90% of the increase in heat caused by human activity.

“May 2023 was the second warmest globally as we watch the El Niño signal continue to emerge in the equatorial Pacific,” added Burgess.

El Niño is a natural weather phenomenon generally associated with rising temperatures, severe drought in some parts of the planet and heavy rainfall in others.

It last appeared in 2018-2019 and gave rise to a particularly long episode of almost three years of La Niña, which has had the opposite effects, including a drop in temperatures.

In early May, the WMO (World Meteorological Organization) estimated that there was a 60% chance that an El Niño would develop before the end of July and an 80% chance of it happening before the end of September.

Added to the impact of greenhouse gases, this phenomenon could make the period 2023-2027 the warmest on record, the organization said weeks ago.