NOAA Climate report: ocean heat and global sea level hit record high

Writer: Paul Dolan
Published: Updated:
Hurricane Ian is pictured from the International Space Station

The 33rd annual State of the Climate report for 2022 has been released, and it reveals last year saw global sea level and ocean heat both reach record highs.

Spearheaded by scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the 516-page report was released last week and mentions Hurricane Ian 14 times.

Some of the other notable findings from the report involved record-high greenhouse gas concentrations, the continued trend of warming around the world and heatwave temperature records around the world.

climate report
Graphs of yearly global surface temperature compared to the 1991-2020 average for each year from 1900 to 2022, from 6 data records, overlaid on a GOES-16 satellite image from September 22, 2022. (Image credit: NOAA Climate.gov)

Though tropical cyclone activity was nearly average, the devastation brought on by the storms around the world proved extreme.

According to NOAA’s summary of the report, “Hurricane Ian, a major hurricane, killed more than 100 people and became the third costliest disaster in the U.S., with damage estimated at $113 billion.”

The climate report was made with the cooperation of more than 570 scientists spanning more than 60 countries.

The scientists from NOAA who work on the climate report are part of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).

According to NOAA, the State of the Climate report offers “the most comprehensive update on Earth’s climate indicators, notable weather events and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments located on land, water, ice and in space.”

“It is like an annual physical of the Earth system,” said NCEI Director Derek Arndt of the report, “and it serves present and future generations by documenting and sharing data that indicate increasingly extreme and changing conditions in our warming world.”

Click here to read the full report.

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