Where have weather records been broken so far in the past year?

The year 2021 has been getting progressively warmer than normal, with global temperatures inching higher than the average with each passing month.

Between January and November, the average global land and ocean surface temperature was 0.84C above the 20th-century average of 14.1C, making it the sixth-warmest such period on record, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The distance from the 20th-century average has been increasing since February, when the average year-to-date temperature (for January and February combined) was about 0.7C warmer than the norm for that period last century.

The overall temperature rise since pre-industrial times due to human activity is estimated at 1.1C.

The Financial Times is tracking temperature rises and other extreme and record-breaking weather events around the world, using data from NOAA.

The group publishes a monthly global report on key climate anomalies, such as record temperatures, so that scientists and members of the public can learn more about how the planet is changing.

The FT has compiled a selection of these events in a table that is searchable by month and region.

It highlights weather extremes that broke records or were “top five” events — the “third hottest” or “fifth wettest”, for example — and will be updated each month when the latest data is released.

With the planet set to continue warming even if global emissions are slashed, extreme weather events will become more common and severe, the world’s top climate scientists warned in a report in August.

Their conclusions chimed with what people had witnessed: during the first seven months of the year, a succession of deadly heatwaves, tornadoes, floods and wildfires criss-crossed the globe, causing widespread destruction and suffering.

The landmark report — compiled by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — found that the evidence for human-induced warming was “unequivocal”.

Even with rapid emissions cuts, temperatures would continue to rise until “at least” 2050, prompting extreme weather events, said the report, which was signed off by more than 200 scientists from 60 countries.

In September, a study published in the journal Science estimated that people born in 2020 would experience between a two- and sevenfold increase in extreme weather events during their lifetimes, particularly heatwaves, compared with people born in 1960.

A rising awareness and anxiety about extreme weather events has fuelled the growth of a relatively new field of academic research, known as “attribution science.”

Researchers working in the field, who are increasingly in demand, analyse the causal links between individual weather events and the changing climate.

Proving causation is fiendishly difficult, since many factors can contribute to the occurrence and severity of a natural disaster.

But in July researchers at the World Weather Attribution network came to an unusually strong conclusion: the record-breaking heatwave that hit North America this year would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change”.

More recent deadly tornadoes in early December in the US have not been directly linked to global warming due to the absence of reliable historical trend statistics over more than 30 years.

But the IPCC report released in August said that observations since the 1970s showed that while the mean number of tornadoes had remained relatively constant annually, the variability had increased, particularly since 2000. The tornadoes had occurred on fewer days but with a notable increase in the number of tornadoes on those days.

In particular, observations indicated “increases in outbreaks with 30 or more tornadoes in one day, the density of tornado clusters, and overall tornado power”.

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