"During the last three months of 2024, the world has experienced the warmest June and August, the warmest day ever and the warmest summer on the Northern Hemisphere on record", says Samantha Burgess, deputy head of Copernicus, in a comment to the climate service's monthly report.
She adds that "this streak of record temperatures" may imply that 2024 will also become the warmest year on record.
The global average temperature in August was 16.8 degrees Celsius, 0.7 degrees above the average for the period 1991-2020 and 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial level.
In Europe, the average temperature in August was almost 1.6 degrees above the average for the same month during the period 1991-2020. However, it was not the warmest August on record – August 2022 was more than 1.7 degrees above the average.
In southern and eastern Europe, temperatures were highest above average, but below average in northwestern Ireland and the UK, Iceland, Portugal's west coast, and southern Norway.
Iceland, northern UK, and Ireland, large parts of the Nordic region, as well as western Russia and Turkey, received significantly more rainfall than average.
