Wwe Raw July 22 2002
Hayley Sweigard
Temperature anomalies and percentiles are shown on the gridded maps below. The anomaly map on the left is a product of a merged land surface temperature (Global Historical Climatology Network, GHCN) and sea surface temperature (ERSST version 5) anomaly analysis. Temperature anomalies for land and ocean are analyzed separately and then merged to form the global analysis. For more information, please visit NCEI's Global Surface Temperature Anomalies page. The percentile map on the right provides additional information by placing the temperature anomaly observed for a specific place and time period into historical perspective, showing how the most current month, season or year compares with the past.
Australia's July 2021 mean temperature was 1.77C (3.19F) above average, which is the fourth warmest July in the nation's 112-year record. Regionally, South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory had a top three warm July on record. Queensland had it seventh warmest July on record.
Significantly below-average precipitation occurred across northwestern contiguous U.S. to the Canadian Prairies, much of Argentina, northeastern and southern Europe, and parts of Australia and eastern and southern Asia. Significantly above-normal precipitation occurred in southern and northeastern parts of the United States, northern parts of South America, and parts of Europe, eastern Asia, and southern Australia.
Several locations across southern Europe had drier-than-average conditions during the month. The dry conditions combined with very warm temperatures helped with the development and spread of dangerous wildfires in the region by the end of the month. According to media reports, destructive wildfires affected parts of southern and southwestern Turkey, forcing residents to evacuate. Devastating wildfires also affected parts of northeastern Spain. For the month as a whole, Spain had below-average July precipitation, receiving only 57% of normal July precipitation.
The following analysis is based upon the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) Interim Climate Data Record. It is provided courtesy of the GPCP Principal Investigator team at the University of Maryland.
The global precipitation map for July 2021 (Fig. 1, top panel) shows the large area of intense rainfall associated with the Asian monsoon stretching across the Indian sub-continent, the Himalayas, China and Japan, and the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans. It is certainly the dominant feature of this month. The other tropical rain features, including the ITCZs in the Pacific and Atlantic and Africa and South America have also moved near their northernmost positions. The dry zones in the sub-tropics have also shifted in the same direction. This seasonal shift brings the dry season to much of the land areas south of the Equator.
The anomaly maps (magnitude and percentage in the middle and bottom panels of Fig. 1) also have some strong features associated with the Asian monsoon, with positive anomalies dominating over India and China and surrounding waters, indicating a strong start to this year's monsoon in this region. The strongest and largest positive anomaly in this area is in the western Pacific and extending into eastern China. This feature on the monthly scale is the result of a number of rain systems, some frontal related in the early part of the month and a series of mostly weak tropical cyclones over the water. However, slow-moving Typhoon In-fa late in the month organized east of Taiwan and moved slowly onto the China coast and progressed inland with copious rainfall. This event was just the latest heavy rainfall event in eastern China for the month that resulted in very serious flooding in various locations there.
In addition to the flooding in China, floods and landslides resulted in significant loss of life across the globe this month with over 900 deaths in over 100 flood events across 20 countries (FloodList: -floods-july-2021). The worst loss of life occurred in western Germany and Belgium with over 100 dead, with the associated monthly rainfall evident in the anomaly maps, although much weaker and with a smaller scale than the features in China. Heavy rain also contributed to floods in India (especially just east of the Ghats Mountains in central India), in the foothills of Nepal and in Sudan and Ethiopia and also a devastating landslide in Japan associated with 250 mm of rain. Some of these events, e.g., the rain feature associated with the Japan landslide, are of such small scale that they are not obvious in the anomaly maps at coarse scale (monthly, 2.5 latitude/longitude of the analysis).
Most of Canada was drier than normal and over northern Eurasia there was an alternating pattern of positive and negative anomalies and where there was a relative lack of precipitation, wildfires were evident, for example in Siberia. Drought and continued lack of rain in southeast Brazil. Even Hawaii is suffering from drought and its negative anomaly for July has not helped the situation. Connected somewhat to the current situation in Hawaii, but also to longer-time-scale changes, i.e., global warming, the ITCZ in the eastern half of the Pacific and the surrounding subtropics to the north and south show, for this July, a dominating pattern of the core of the ITCZ having a positive anomaly and areas to the north and south having negative anomalies. This is a good example of wet areas getting wetter and dry areas getting drier, showing up here in one month, but also showing up in trends over decades. Although disconnected from more complicated land areas this area may point to this trend toward extremes and indicates the importance of monitoring ocean areas and globe as a whole.
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