Reuters
Friday December 10 1:42 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North America experienced warmer-than-normal temperatures in November, but the Earth as a whole continued to cool slightly, mainly as a result of the La Nina cooling event, scientists said on Thursday.
The Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville said a wide swath of land including Canada and the 48 contiguous states in the United States were the hottest spots on the globe last month.
But the rest of the world remained in the grip of La Nina, the Pacific Ocean cooling event which since June 1998 has cooled sea surface temperatures in the Central Pacific between South America and Tahiti.
``Chilled by the La Nina, a vast area of slightly cooler-than-normal air spread across most of the Pacific in November, from the Gulf of Alaska to the Antarctic and from South America to Indonesia and Australia,'' the report said.
For the year, Earth's average temperature through November has been 0.05 degrees Celsius below the 20-year norm, according to Dr. John Christy, a scientist at Alabama-Huntsville.
The temperature readings done by the university are a joint project with the NASA space agency. The data is gathered by microwave sounding units on a government satellite to get accurate temperature readings for almost all regions of Earth.
Measures can be taken for even remote desert regions, oceans and rain forest areas. The satellite-based instruments gauge the temperatures of the atmosphere from the surface up to an altitude of about 4.8 miles above sea level.