June breaks global heat record for 14th consecutive month: U.S. climate agency

Last month was the hottest June on record and marked the 14th consecutive month to break global heat records, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Tuesday.

"Warmer to much-warmer-than-average conditions dominated across much of the globe's surface, resulting in the highest temperature departure for June since global temperature records began in 1880," the NOAA said in its monthly report.

"This was also the 14th consecutive month the monthly global temperature record has been broken -- the longest such streak in NOAA's 137 years of record keeping."

The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for June was 0.90 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average of 15.5 Celsius, beating the previous record set in 2015 by 0.02 degrees Celsius, said the NOAA.

It also said June 2016 marks the 40th consecutive June and the 378th consecutive month with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th century average.

Record warmth was sporadically across parts of the southwestern contiguous U.S., southern Mexico, northeastern Brazil, northeastern and southwestern Africa, the Middle East, northern Australia, and Indonesia, the report said.

The only land area with cooler-than-average conditions during June was central and southern South America, but no land areas had a record cold temperature for this month.

In a separate report, also released Tuesday, the U.S. space agency NASA confirmed that each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates back to 1880,

Five of the first six months of 2016 also set records for the smallest respective monthly Arctic sea ice extent since consistent satellite records began in 1979, said NASA

The one exception, March, recorded the second smallest extent for that month.

Global temperature and Arctic sea ice, according to NASA, are continuing their decades-long trends of change and both trends are ultimately driven by rising concentrations of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"While the El Nino event in the tropical Pacific this winter gave a boost to global temperatures from October onwards, it is the underlying trend which is producing these record numbers," Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a statement. Enditem