2018 Was the Fourth Warmest Year, Continuing Long Warming Trend

Earth’s global surface temperatures in 2018 were the fourth warmest since 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Global temperatures in 2018 were 0.83 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The 2018 global temperature average ranks behind 2016, 2017, and 2015. The past five years have been the warmest years in the modern record, and 18 of the 19 warmest years have occurred since 2000.

“2018 is yet again an extremely warm year on top of a long-term global warming trend,” said GISS Director Gavin Schmidt. Since the 1880s, the average global surface temperature has risen about 1°Celsius (2°F). According to Schmidt and colleagues, this warming has been driven in large part by increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through human activities.

The map above depicts global temperature anomalies in 2018. It does not show absolute temperatures; instead, it shows how much warmer or cooler each region of Earth was compared to a baseline average from 1951 to 1980.

This animation shows the seasonal cycle in global temperature anomalies for every month since 1880. Each line shows how much the global monthly temperature was above or below the global mean from 1980–2015. The column on the right lists each year when a new global temperature record was set. These seasonal anomalies are drawn from the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, version 2 (MERRA-2), a model run by NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office.Weather dynamics often affect regional temperatures, so not every part of Earth experiences similar amounts of warming every year. For instance, NOAA found the 2018 annual mean temperature for the contiguous 48 United States was the 14th warmest on record.

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