2019 remained second hottest year on record: Study

Media reports for Moscow tell of record-breaking mild temperatures and absence of natural snow.

Northern Finland also experienced unusually mild temperatures, read the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) website.

Statistics for Sodankylä show an anomaly relative to 1981-2010 of 6.2ºC for December 2019. Since 1961, December anomalies have ranged from -9.5ºC to 8.5ºC at this observatory.

Temperatures over Australia stand out as very much above average. Following many dry months, unusually hot and windy summer weather, including its hottest day on record nationally, provided the conditions for development of intense and widespread bushfires.

Elsewhere, the region of much-above average temperatures that includes Europe extended eastward to central Asia.

Temperatures were also substantially above average over and near regions of the Arctic where sea-ice cover was much lower than the 1981-2010 average, including the Bering Strait, parts of Baffin Bay and Hudson Bay, and the northern Barents Sea.

It was also warmer than usual over much of western Canada and the USA, North Africa and the Middle East, relatively small regions of Brazil and southern Africa, and much of Antarctica.

Temperatures were substantially below average over large parts of Alaska, the Northwest Territories of Canada, Greenland and eastern Siberia.

It was also much colder than average in a region covering much of Tibet, Pakistan and northern India, where Delhi experienced its coldest day in a temperature record dating back to 1901.

Temperatures were below average to a lesser degree over several other regions.

Although there were several quite large regions of below-average temperature in the southern hemisphere, air temperatures over sea were predominantly higher than average.

Global temperatures were substantially above average in December 2019. The month was:

0.74°C warmer than the average December from 1981-2010;
on a par with December 2015, making these two months jointly the warmest Decembers in this data record;
0.17°C warmer than December 2017, the third warmest December;
Only February and March 2016 were warmer relative to monthly climatological averages, with anomalies of 0.88ºC and 0.82ºC respectively.

European-average temperature anomalies are generally larger and more variable than global anomalies, especially in winter, when they can change by several degrees from one month to the next. The European-average temperature for December 2019 was remarkably high. The month was:

3.2°C warmer than the average December from 1981-2010;
warmer than any previous December in this data record, though by less than 0.1ºC in the case of December 2015, now the second warmest December.

Temperatures averaged over the calendar year 2019 were:

much above the 1981-2010 average over most of the Arctic, peaking over and near Alaska, over the far northeast of Canada, and over central parts of northern Siberia;
above average over almost all of Europe;
above average over most other areas of land and ocean, especially so over the Middle East, southern Africa, Australia and some parts of the Antarctic;
below average over some land and oceanic areas, most notably over central and south-eastern Canada.