After the Mediterranean Sea, the North Atlantic Ocean also breaks its heat record

A few days after the Mediterranean Sea, the North Atlantic Ocean also broke a daily temperature record this week, several weeks ahead of its usual heat peak, according to emblematic preliminary data from the marine heat waves currently hitting the coast. planet.

North Atlantic waters reached an average temperature never before measured on Wednesday, July 26, according to the US Oceanic and Atmospheric Observation Agency (NOAA), whose records began in the early 1980s.

“According to our analysis, the record average surface water temperature in the North Atlantic is 24.9°C, and was observed on July 26,” Xungang Yin told Agence France-Presse, scientist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

This data, still considered provisional, will take about two weeks to verify, he said.

An early record

This record is particularly striking because it comes early in the year, with the North Atlantic typically reaching its peak heat in early September. The previous record was set last year, in early September 2022, with a temperature of 24.89 degrees Celsius, very slightly lower than this week, Xungang Yin said.

The waters of the Mediterranean Sea also broke their heat record on Monday, with a median temperature of 28.71 ° C, announced the main Spanish maritime research center, whose records also began in the early 1980s.

These scientists favor the median temperature rather than the average (28.40 ° C on Monday) because it is less disturbed by extreme temperature readings in isolated points of the Mediterranean, they explained.

The surface temperature of the North Atlantic “must continue to increase during the month of August”, warned Xungang Yin, and it is therefore expected that the record will be broken again. The temperature of 24.9°C is “more than a degree warmer” than normal, an average calculated over 30 years (between 1982 and 2011), he pointed out.

Since March, which is the month in which the North Atlantic begins to warm after winter, the temperature curve has been moving well above that of previous years, with a gap having widened further in recent weeks.

“Extreme Situation”

The North Atlantic has thus become an emblematic observation point for the overheating of the planet’s oceans, under the effect of global warming caused by greenhouse gases. The European observatory Copernicus, which uses a different database from that of NOAA, told AFP on Friday that it recorded a temperature of 24.70 ° C for July 26.

“This situation is extreme: we have already experienced marine heat waves before, but here it is very persistent and distributed over a large area” of the North Atlantic, told AFP Karina Von Schuckmann, from the center of European research Mercator Ocean International (MOi).

This oceanographer recalls that the oceans absorbed 90% of the excess heat of the Earth system caused by human activity during the industrial era. And “this energy buildup has doubled over the past two decades,” fueling global ocean warming.

At the global level, the average temperature of the oceans has been breaking seasonal records constantly since the beginning of April. More anecdotally, but strikingly, the water temperature off the coast of Florida reached 38.3°C on Monday night, according to a weather buoy reading.

This temperature, normally more associated with that of a bath, potentially constitutes a world absolute record in terms of point measurement, if its accuracy is confirmed.