The climate of 2010 in historical perspective

In this annual summary of the climate, the NOAA National Climatic Data Center provides an overview of conditions during 2010 throughout the United States and around the planet. As the scientific community works to better understand our changing climate, continual monitoring provides vital information about climate variability and trends. Climate monitoring also helps assess the incidence, impacts and behavior of extreme short-term and weather-scale events, such as droughts, tornadoes and tropical storms. The increase in global temperatures recorded over the past 100+ years has occurred in all seasons and in most regions of the world. Our primary focus is to give the recent climate record a historical perspective based on more than 125 years of atmospheric measurements as well as paleoclimate records that extend understanding of the Earth's climate to the more distant past. A discussion of century-scale variability and trends in temperature and precipitation is included, as is discussion of extreme events.