June Was World's Second Warmest As EL Nino Continues To Build

The world had its second warmest June on record this
year. With an El Nino looming, things could get
even hotter later this year. 

Continuing a trend started earlier this year, June ended up as the second warmest on record for the world, according to NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. 

The world is just entering a strong El Nino, which is expected to supercharge climate warming. That could start another spate of record hottest months. 

April was the world's fourth warmest. March and May were second warmest. Now, June came in at second warmest. Will coming months be the warmest on record? There's a good chance that will happen.  

In any event, we don't need El Nino to bake the planet. It's been super toasty for the past decade, thanks to climate change. 

The ten warmest Junes have all hit since 2015. If you are under the age of 50, you've never seen a June in which the world's June temperatures were below the 20th century average. 

This June, as you'd expect, there were plenty of spots in the world that were especially warm. Those included northern Canada, western Europe, eastern Australia, much of Siberia, south central Asia. The eastern and central tropical Pacific Ocean is especially hot, showing how El Nino has already strongly taken over. 

In western Europe, eight nations had their hottest temperatures on record. Not the June records. The all-time records. 

There's always a couple of pockets of cool weather, despite the overall global warmth.  For some reason, most of Antarctica was on the chilly side. We also saw a small pocket of cold air in north central Asia. It was also sort of nippy in northwest Alaska and in Montana, kind of. It was the 41st coldest June there, so not exactly frigid. 

Also, the cold blob that's been hanging around for years in the Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland and Iceland was still there. That's actually another sign of how climate change is messing with the world's weather and ocean systems. 

That Atlantic cold blob stems from extra fresh water entering the ocean from the melting Greenland ice cap. That's slowing the ocean currents that bring warmth to western Europe. 

The end of June brought us to the halfway point of the year. So far, this year is the third hottest out of the past 177 years of record. Only the first halves of 2024 and 2025 were hotter.  

NCEI says that there's a 95 percent chance that 2026 will rank among there four warmest years on record. But as Jeff Masters wrote in Yale Climate Connections, NCEI's data is designed to explicitly exclude El Nino or La Nina from that prediction. 

With El Nino now well into the picture, those almost solid 95 percent odds are even higher. 

UNITED STATES

For the continental United States, June was the 18th warmest on record. That's out of the past 133 years. 

The warmest areas, relative to average were in the Southwest and right along the Northeast coast.As noted above, Montana was the coolest, relative to average, as it was the 41st coolest out of the last 133 years in Big Sky country. 

A broad area from the northern and central Plains, the Ohio Valley and parts of the southeast were somewhere in the middle, not much above or below the long term average.

Here in Vermont, we had our 16th warmest June, according to NCEI

June was the 33rd wettest out of the past 133 years in the Lower 48. The wettest areas were in parts of the Midwest. Illinois had its sixth wettest June. Kansas saw their ninth wettest June. Other relatively wet areas were in the central and western Gulf Coast states and in northern New England. 

Vermont had its 22nd wettest June on record.