September 2016 Marked 11 Straight Months Of Record-Breaking Warmth

September 2016 set a new warmest-month record, bringing us to 11 consecutive months of increasing warmth since October 2015. NASA announced the news on Monday, saying last month was the warmest September observed in the last 136 years of record keeping. The month won its designation by what NASA calls a 'razor-thin' edge of only 0.004 degrees Celsius over the then-warmest September back in 2014.

This temperature data comes from the space agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, more commonly called GISS. Per GISS's data, the mean temperature of all Septembers from 1951 to 1980 is cooler by 0.91 degrees Celsius than the temps recorded last month. However, there have been some slight tweaks to the record.

Thanks to new temperature data from Antarctica, GISS now says that June 2016 is no longer the warmest June on record — that honor now goes to June 2015 followed by June 1998. This past June is now the third-hottest of its kind on record. This is because the new data, which isn't unusual and results in record updates as necessary, lowered June 2016's overall anomalous temp by 0.05C.

The temperature data used to determine these hottest-month records is extensive and comes from approximately 6,300 stations across the globe. These meteorological stations are joined by Antarctic research stations, buoy instruments, and ship-based instruments. What researchers refer to as 'modern' record keeping began in the 1800s.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released its own report on the matter, and it largely reflects NASA's. Based on research from the National Centers for Environmental Information, NOAA says this September was 1.60F hotter than the 20th century's temperature average. As well, 2016 has so far been overall hotter than 2015 by 0.23F degrees, with this year having an average global temp of 1.78F.

NOAA's researchers found that this year's global sea surface temperatures are the same as observed in 2014, making it a tie for second-warmest on record (monthly) and warmest on record (for the year). The land surface temp was high overall. As far as land masses go, North America experienced its third warmest September last month; Africa experienced its second warmest; Asia and Europe both experienced their warmest September on record.

Finally, and perhaps most frightening, were decreases in both Antarctic and Arctic sea ice extent, with the Arctic average last month being 27.8-percent lower than the average from 1981 to 2010. The Antarctic was down 2-percent last month compared to the average from the same time span, representing the fifth smallest sea ice extent since modern record keeping started.