The U.S. and Global Climate Conditions of 2016 in Historical Perspective

In this annual summary of the climate, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information provides an overview of conditions during 2016 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. This presentation typically provides large-scale context for more specific climate monitoring presentations that follow. Our primary focus is to provide a historical perspective for recent climate outcomes, in the context of decades of atmospheric measurements and paleoclimate records that extend to the more distant past. A discussion of century-scale variability and trends in temperature and precipitation is included, as is a discussion of extreme events.