Weather Complaints Affirmed: NOAA Says July Was Hottest Month Globally On Record

By Lucy Perkins

Published August 20, 2015 at 4:48 PM EDT

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A man finds a bit of shade on the boardwalk at Brighton Beach in New York City.

Spencer Platt

It wasn't all in your head — last month was hotter than ever before.

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that July had the highest average temperatures in records since 1880.

And it's not just in the U.S. Average July temperatures around the world set heat records too, NPR's Kat Chow reports.

She tells our Newscast unit that:

"This confirms what NASA and a Japanese agency found using separate data.

"Jake Crouch is a climate scientist with NOAA. 'So now that we're fairly certain that 2015 will be the warmest year on record, it's time for us to start looking at, what are the impacts for us, what does that mean for people on the ground' [says Crouch]."

Part of reason for the hotter temperatures is El Nino, Kat says.

Here are a few facts from NOAA:

July was the hottest month on record around the world.

/ NOAA

Year-to-date, the average land surface temperature around the world was up 2.41 degrees Fahrenheit from the 20th century average.

The average size for sea ice in the Arctic in July was 350,000 square miles. That's the eighth-smallest size for the month since ice size records began in 1979, but it's the largest area covered since 2009.

The global average sea surface temperature in July was 1.35 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it ever has been previously.