Global sea surface temperature, sst?
Preliminary data says, Friday was an all-time record high, surpassing even bananas El Nino year 2024.
But we're in a receding La Nina year. So the image below puts 2026 side by side with 2023.
Plus 2016 as the year with the than-highest "normal" sst.
The #Pacific today looks more like an intensified version of the El Nino year 2016 than like 2023. The North #Atlantic too.
The South Atlantic sst anomaly is one huge warm blob this year. I find this is doubly concerning because the air temperature anomaly there is neutral or cooler… https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/daily_maps/?dm_id=world-wt&wm_id=t2anom&year=2026
Terhaar et al 2025 ran two simulation experiments to look whether a jump year-on-year of 0.25C can be repeated by "our" climate models. The experiment with 11,000 model years finds 11 occurrences. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08674-z
So while very rare, and virtually impossible without #ClimateChange , the jump of 0.25C year-on-year is physically plausible for the models.
That's good. They have all the formula magic needed to simulate freak outliers.
In all instances, the bananas sst reverts back to the previous normal by the next September.
In reality, by October 2025, sst did fall back to the previous normal+climatechange of 2016.
So the bananas years were a freak outlier.
However.
2026 is repeating it.
If the super El Nino year 2016 is still our "normal", we're seeing a jump of over 0.3C now.
Terhaar posted a thread about their paper and he covers this eventuality of sst not reverting back to normal with:
"we expect SSTs to return to pre-jump levels by September 2025. If this is not the case, climate sensitivity might be higher than thought." https://skywriter.blue/@polarocean.bsky.social/3lk6xxs5dm22q
#LaNina #ENSO #ElNino
Tom Zijlstra
Ivi Choc
Ivi Choc
Severe Weather Europe
Mimi
kat
anlomedad