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For the second year in a row, record-high global surface temperatures were set in 2024, according to all six global temperature datasets assessed in this report (Berkeley Earth, GISTEMP, HadCRUT5, the NOAA Merged Land Ocean Global Surface Temperature Analysis [NOAAGlobalTemp], ERA5, and the Japanese Reanalysis for Three Quarters of a Century [JRA-3Q]). The last time consecutive years set records was in 2015 and 2016 when a strong El Niño similarly boosted global temperatures. The last 10 years (2015–24) are now the warmest 10 in the instrumental record—warmer than the 2011–20 average—and hence “more likely than not warmer than any multi-century period after the last interglacial period, roughly 125,000 years ago” (Gulev et al. 2021). The increased energy within the climate system is detectable at the top of the atmosphere, with the outgoing longwave radiation anomaly continuing to be above the range of natural variability.

During 2024, El Niño conditions that had been present since the middle of 2023 faded to neutral by the end of the year. The warm conditions observed around the globe over the last two years had impacts across the climate system, as demonstrated by many of the metrics presented in this chapter. Other temperature metrics also reached record levels over the instrumental periods assessed in this chapter: over the oceans at night, on the surfaces of lakes, and in the lower troposphere as well as measures of equivalent temperature (which considers the moisture contribution to heat), and high and low temperature extremes.

The frozen parts of Earth responded with permafrost temperatures continuing to reach record-high levels in many locations, and the active-layer thickness (the portion that melts and refreezes annually) also increasing at most sites. Repeated high temperatures over the European Alps during recent summers has led to large increases in rock glacier velocities in that region. The Great Lakes had much-below-average ice cover over the 2023/24 winter, and there was below-average snow cover extent in the Northern Hemisphere. All 58 reference glaciers across five continents lost ice during 2024, resulting in the greatest average ice loss in the record, which began in 1970. One more glacier was also declared extinct during 2024.

Higher global temperatures impacted the water cycle. Although lower than 2023 values, water evaporation from land in the Northern Hemisphere reached one of the highest annual values on record, in line with the long-term increasing trend. Specific humidity reached record levels over land and ocean, and relative humidity over both domains was higher than 2023. There was little relief from high humid-heat conditions, with the frequency of high humid-heat days at a record level and intensity at the second-highest level in the record—only a fraction of a degree cooler than that of 2023. The global atmosphere contained the greatest amount of water vapor in the record, and over one-fifth of the globe recorded their highest values. This far exceeded 2023, where only one-tenth of the globe experienced record-high total column water vapor. Rainfall was globally high; 2024 was the third-wettest year since records began in 1983. However, rainfall over land was close to average, while over the ocean it was the fourth-wettest year on record (following 2015, 2016, and 1998). Extreme rainfall, as characterized by the annual maximum daily rainfall over land, was the wettest on record. Averaged globally (4190 lakes), lakes had a small increase in water storage, and regionally, over 40% of monitored lakes showed significant changes in storage and level.

The effects of ongoing droughts in southern Africa and in North and South America can be seen in the soil moisture and water storage patterns. They are also apparent in the river discharge and runoff levels, which are topics that will be covered in the chapter after a few years of absence. Globally, however, drought severity and extent decreased from the record set in 2023.

Atmospheric concentrations of the three main greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide [CO2], methane [CH4], nitrous oxide [N2O]) again all reached record levels, with a record-equal annual increase in the annual change of CO2 concentrations. However, concentrations of ozone-depleting substances continued to decline, corroborated by stratospheric ozone columns well above the 1998–2008 average, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. In contrast, stratospheric aerosols remained high because of the Ruang eruption in April 2024, affecting the atmospheric transmission of solar radiation over Hawaii later in the year, and the ongoing effects from the Hunga eruption in 2022. The latter eruption also caused the ongoing elevated stratospheric water vapor concentrations.

Our planet’s surface albedo continued to darken with increased plant growth and decreased snow and ice cover. Plants responded to the warmer temperatures with some of the earliest starts to spring in the record over Europe—one to two weeks earlier than the 2000–20 baseline—and a warm autumn resulted in a much longer leaf-on season. Severe wildfire seasons occurred in South America (the worst since 2010), Canada (for the second consecutive year), and the Arctic, contributing to the second-highest atmospheric carbon monoxide concentrations since 2003 and the highest tropospheric aerosol optical depth since 2019, at 550 nm.

This year’s iteration of the Global Climate chapter features two Sidebars, both of which present new topics that have not yet been explored in the report. The first covers the ability of satellite products to monitor changes in land surface temperature extremes and identify hotspots where regions of Earth are becoming uninhabitable. This Sidebar also discusses the importance of dataset stability for climate studies, as well as the correlation of land surface temperature and air temperature anomalies. The second Sidebar complements the section on greenhouse gas concentrations by examining short-lived climate forcers—compounds that have lifetimes ranging from a few hours to a few decades.

As usual in the Global Climate chapter, Plate 2.1 shows maps of global annual anomalies for many of the variables and metrics presented herein. Many of these variables are also presented as time series in Plate 1.1. Most sections now use the 1991–2020 climatological reference period, in line with the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) recommendations, although this reference period is not possible for all datasets due to their length or legacy processing methods.