Hottest January On Record
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Hottest January On Record: latest news about updates in Hottest January On Record, hottest January on record, in line with a pattern that has seen the country’s average temperature rise over the past five decades under the impact of global warming.
“Nearly the whole country has been hotter than average for daytime and night-time temperatures in January,” David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said yesterday. “It’s not so much a few places breaking records by large margins. It’s nearly the whole country being one to two degrees warmer than average”.
The average temperature across the country rose 1.3 degrees last month, but large areas, especially in the Pilbara in Western Australia and in Central Australia, recorded temperatures three to four degrees above average.
“We just continue to get a stream of these records being broken,” said Dr Jones, who has analysed Australia’s rising temperature going back almost 60 years.
“The general pattern is one of warming. We have now warmed up by a degree since 1950. The effects of global warming have been felt across Australia as a whole. And the pattern of warming across Australia is very consistent with the pattern we’ve seen across the globe.”
Sydney’s daytime January temperature was right on average at 25.9 degrees thanks to easterly summer winds, but night-time temperatures were almost two degrees up at 20.3 degrees.
The rest of the state was not so fortunate. Temperatures in the south and west climbed two degrees higher than average.
Pooncarie, a town west of Griffith, recorded the state’s highest temperature, 44.5 degrees. The licensee of Pooncarie’s Telegraph Hotel, Sharon Neyland, did not need to be told the news.
“It would not surprise me at all,” she said yesterday. “It’s been terrible. I don’t know whether it’s because I am getting old but it’s been very, very hot.”
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