The surface of the oceans registered the warmest month of May ever recorded, which warns of the strong climate change that is being recorded in recent years, said Wednesday the European service copernicus.
“Ocean surface temperatures are already reaching record levels and our data indicates that the average temperature for all ice-free seas in May 2023 was higher than any other May,” Samantha Burgess said in a statement. , deputy director of the European service copernicus about climate change.
The latter is based on 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 They date back in some cases as far as 1950.
Average ocean surface temperatures in May “was around 19.7°C, that is, 0.26°C above the 1991-2020 average,” a spokesperson for AFP told AFP. copernicus. It was added that the ocean absorbed about 90% of the increase in heat caused by human activity.
The temperature of the planet also rises
Refering to temperature of the set of planetthere are also worrying data, since the month of May was the second hottest on record.
“May 2023 was the second hottest globally as we watch the El Niño signal continue to emerge in the equatorial Pacific,” Burgess added.
El Niño is a natural climatic phenomenon generally associated with an increase in temperatures, an accentuated drought in some parts of the planet and heavy rains in others.
It last appeared in 2018-2019 and gave way to a particularly long episode of almost three years of La Niña, which causes the opposite effects, including a drop in temperatures.
In early May, the World Meteorological Organization estimated that there was a 60% chance that El Niño would develop before the end of July and an 80% chance that it would develop before the end of September.
This phenomenon added to the impact of greenhouse gases could make the period 2023-2027 the hottest ever recorded, this organization said weeks ago.
Source: Ambito
