The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a US government agency whose mission is to ‘understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts, to share that knowledge and information with others, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources’. NOAA coordinates research programmes and collects a wide range of environmental data. You can find out more here: www.tinyurl.com/2d224zev.
A key responsibility of NOAA is climate monitoring and climate data analysis from local to global scale. Each year NOAA publishes data on climate anomalies from the previous year. Its State of the Climate report for 2020 was published in August 2021. A climate anomaly is defined here as a period of unusual climate that differs from average conditions measured over a period of several decades or longer. A climate anomaly could be air temperature or aridity for a particular month, season or year being markedly out of line when compared with average climate. Some notable climate anomalies for 2020 are shown in Figure 1. This geography of climate anomalies shows how the climate system is responding to greenhouse warming in different ways in different parts of the world, from the poles to the tropics. Note that some records of climate phenomena are only a few decades long (such as satellite monitoring of cyclones), while air temperature records in parts of Europe go back several centuries.
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