NOAA and NASA Report 2022 Climate Events and Temperature

On 12 January 2023, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released their annual summary of global climate conditions for 2022. Both American agencies – weather and space, respectively- also record the Earth’s temperatures.

According to NOAA scientists, 2022 is the sixth-warmest year since 1880. In a separate analysis by NASA it ranks 2022 as the fifth-warmest year on record, tying with 2015.   

The European Commission’s Copernicus, another scientific organisation, ranked 2022 as the world’s fifth-warmest year.

As the world continues its warming trend, extreme events happening across the globe are becoming increasingly alarming.

Below is an annotated map from NOAA, showing a summary of 2022’s most significant climate events, including catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, severe heatwaves severe across Asia, America, and Europe, and an extraordinarily high number of storms.

NOAA also revealed other notable climate events in 2022, which includes:

• Polar sea ice ran low: The 2022 annual Antarctic Sea ice extent (coverage) was near-record low at 4.09 million square miles. 
• Global ocean heat content (OHC) hit a record high in 2022. The four highest OHCs occurred in the last four years, between 2019 and 2022.
• December 2022’s global surface temperature was the eighth highest in the 143-year record.

Although 2022 is a La Niña year, a weather phenomenon that typically has a cooling effect on global temperatures, the year has been the hottest on record.

Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA, told CNN that he predicts 2023 will, unfortunately, be warmer than 2022 (Ramirez, 2023).

As the temperature continues to rise, it can worsen African food and water shortages. The increasing number and intensity of extreme weather events could bring more catastrophic losses and damage, particularly in developing countries, as seen in Pakistan and other countries last year.

“The reason for the warming trend is that human activities continue to pump enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the long-term planetary impacts will also continue,” Schmidt says (Aguis, 2023).

According to Schmidt, the world also possesses solutions to mitigate climate change, from slashing fossil fuels to retrofitting buildings to be more climate-efficient. Still, we need to apply these solutions with more urgency.

Schmidt notes that it’s clear that people are taking this more seriously than they were a decade ago,” he said. “But let’s not sugarcoat how big a challenge this is. It’s not a challenge for a week, year, or decade. It will be the century’s challenge (Ramirez, 2023).

Read the report “Assessing the Global Climate 2022” by clicking on the link provided in the “Source” below.