August 2016 hottest ever recorded

August 2016 was the hottest in 136 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by NASA scientists.

The temperature last month was 0.16 degrees Celsius warmer than the previous warmest August in 2014, NASA said in a statement on Monday.

Although the seasonal temperature cycle typically peaks in July, August 2016 tied with July 2016 for the warmest month ever recorded, it added.

Last month also was 0.98 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean August temperature from 1951-1980.

The record warm August continued a streak of 11 consecutive months dating back to October 2015 that have set new monthly high-temperature records.

"Monthly rankings, which vary by only a few hundredths of a degree, are inherently fragile," said Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

"We stress that the long-term trends are the most important for understanding the ongoing changes that are affecting our planet," Schmidt noted.

The monthly analysis by the GISS team is assembled from 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.

The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations did not cover enough of the planet.

--IANS

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