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Warm March attracts walkers into the countryside: cherry blossoms in Munich's Olympic Park

Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa

The temperature records are falling in series: For the tenth time in a row, a month was the warmest compared to the respective months of the previous year. According to data from the EU climate change service Copernicus, March was also warmer worldwide than any previous March since records began. The data used by Copernicus goes back to 1950, and some earlier data is also available.

"March 2024 continues the string of climate records broken for both air and sea surface temperatures, with the tenth consecutive record month," said Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess.

The air temperature on the earth's surface averaged 14.14 degrees Celsius in March, the service said on Tuesday. That is 0.73 degrees more than the average for the reference period from 1991 to 2020 and 0.10 degrees more than the warmest March recorded so far in 2016.

Compared to the period 1850 to 1900, the pre-industrial reference period, the month was 1.68 degrees warmer, it said. The global average temperature for the past twelve months (April 2023 to March 2024) is the highest on record and is 1.58 degrees above the pre-industrial average. However, that does not mean that the Paris 1.5 degree target has been missed, as longer-term average values ​​are being looked at.

2023 the warmest year on record

Last year was already an extraordinary year “in which climate records tumbled like dominoes,” Burgess recently wrote in a press release. Every single day was more than one degree Celsius warmer than in pre-industrial times, she continues: "The temperatures in 2023 will probably exceed those of any period in the last 100,000 years."

  • You can read an interview about the increasingly frequent

    weather anomalies

    here: "We're running out of superlatives" 

  • You can find out how

    climate change is affecting the oceans

    here: What's behind the record temperatures in the world's oceans 

The European Union's climate change service Copernicus regularly publishes data on surface temperatures, sea ice cover and precipitation. The findings are based on computer-generated analyzes that incorporate billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.

ok/dpa