Description:
Executive summary:
"Warming continued in 2016, setting a new
temperature record of approximately 1.1 °C
above the pre-industrial period, and 0.06 °C
above the previous highest value set in 2015.
Carbon dioxide (CO
2
) reached new highs at
400.0 ± 0.1 ppm in the atmosphere at the end of
2015. Global sea-ice extent dropped more than
4 million km
2
below average ? an unprecedented
anomaly ? in November. Global sea levels rose
strongly during the 2015/2016 El Niño, with the
early 2016 values making new records.
The powerful 2015/2016 El Niño event exerted
a strong influence on the climate and societies
against a background of long-term climate
change. Severe droughts affected agriculture
and yield production in many parts of the world,
particularly in southern and eastern Africa
and parts of Central America, where several
million people experienced food insecurity
and hundreds of thousands were displaced
internally, according to reports from the World
Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) and the International Organization for
Migration (IOM).
Hurricane
Matthew
in the North Atlantic led to
the most damaging meteorological disaster,
with Haiti sustaining the heaviest casualties.
There were also major economic losses in the
United States and elsewhere in the region.
Flooding severely affected eastern and southern
Asia with hundreds of lives lost, hundreds of
thousands of people displaced and severe
economic damage. Wet conditions led to good
crop production in many parts of the Sahel,
with record yields reported in Mali, Niger and
Senegal.
1
Detection and attribution studies have demon
-
strated that human influence on the climate
has been a main driver behind the unequivocal
warming of the global climate system observed
since the 1950s, according to the Fifth Assess
-
ment Report of IPCC. Human influence has
also led to significant regional temperature
increases at the continental and subcontinental
levels. Shifts of the temperature distribution to
warmer regimes are expected to bring about
increases in the frequency and intensity of
extremely warm events."
Source/publisher:
World Meteorological Organisation
Date of Publication:
2017-03-21
Date of entry:
2017-03-22
Grouping:
- Individual Documents
Category:
Language:
English
Local URL:
Format:
pdf
Size:
2.76 MB