2018 was the fourth-hottest year on record

Feb 6, 2019·
Dr. Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini
Dr. Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini
· 1 min read
blog

2018 was the fourth hottest year on record, according to two independent reports released today (Feb. 6) by NASA and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Last year was so hot that global land- and ocean-surface temperatures were 1.42 degrees Fahrenheit (0.79 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average, NOAA reported. Since 1880, when record-keeping began, only three years - 2016 (the highest, in part because of El Niño), 2015 and 2017 — were hotter.

“The key message is that the planet is warming,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, told reporters at a news conference. “And our understanding of why those trends are occurring is also very robust. It’s because of the greenhouse gases that we[’ve] put into the atmosphere over the last 100 years.”

The trend isn’t a new one. Nine of the 10 warmest winters have happened since 2005, and five of the warmest years on record happened within the last five years, or from 2014 to 2018.

For more information please visit:

Alternative display text

My Caption

Dr. Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini
Authors
Associate Professor

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of La Frontera. I hold a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of Trento (Italy) and completed postdoctoral training at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. I have more than 20 years of experience in water resources research and have previously served as an Associate Researcher at the Center for Climate and Resilience Research (CR)2 and as a member of the Earth Sciences Assessment Group of the Chilean National Research and Development Agency (ANID).

My research lies at the interface of hydrology, data science, and environmental sciences, with a particular focus on the use of gridded datasets and open-source tools to investigate droughts, extreme events, and water-related impacts of global change.

I work across spatial and temporal scales to improve the understanding of catchment-scale hydrological processes and to translate this knowledge into operational modelling, forecasting, and early-warning systems that support robust environmental decision-making.

Please reach out to collaborate 😃