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WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 (Xinhua) -- September was warm but not warm enough to continue the unprecedented 16-month streak of record warmth, the U.S. government climate agency said Tuesday.
Even so, last month still ranked as the second warmest September since temperature record-keeping began in 1880, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in its monthly report.
"A few months after the end of one of the strongest El Ninos in at least the past half century, this month effectively snapped the 16-month streak of record warm monthly global temperatures," the report said.
September was 0.89 degrees Celsius above the 20th-century average, missing last year's record for the month by just 0.04 degrees Celsius, according to the report.
Despite the streak coming to an end, 2016 is still on track to be the warmest year on record.
According to the report, the first nine months of 2016, characterized by much-warmer-than-average conditions across most of the globe's surface, was 0.99 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average of 14.1 degrees Celsius.
"This was the highest for January-September in the 1880-2016 record, surpassing the previous record set in 2015 by 0.13 degrees Celsius," it added.
U.S. space agency NASA, which analyzes global temperatures in a different way, however, said Monday that September 2016 was the warmest September on record, beating the previous record set in 2014 by a razor-thin 0.004 degrees Celsius.
But Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, agreed in a tweet that the annual heat record "seems locked in" this year.
