New York:
US space agency NASA has said that the month of May, 2017 was the second warmest on record. It said that it was the warmest month in 137 years of modern record-keeping of average global temperatures.
May 2016 was the hottest on record and was at 0.93 degrees Celsius warmer than the May mean temperature. During the past two years, the two top May temperature anomalies have took place.
May 2017 was 0.88 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean May temperature from 1951-1980. However, the temperature was 0.05 degrees Celsius cooler than the previous year. It was only 0.01 degrees Celsius warmer than the third warmest May, which happened in 2014.
Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) did the monthly analysis. They assembled it from the publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations.
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The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations didn’t cover enough of the planet.
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(With inputs from PTI)