Earlier this month, the American Meteorological Society published their annual report on the State of the Climate for 2014.  This report provides exceptional detail on climatic conditions across the world, including temperature, precipitation, sea level, storms, and ocean heat content.

You can read about the report and find a link to the full report in this NOAA press release https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/state-of-the-climate-2014.  AgWeb also had a summary article about the report here.

I won’t go over the whole report here, but want to show the global temperature and precipitation images from the report.  The images show that here in the Eastern US, temperatures were below the long-term average.  By comparison, most of the rest of the world was much warmer than average.  The cool conditions in the eastern US are linked to the presence of a strong and resilient ridge of high pressure which parked over the western part of the US and the eastern Pacific Ocean, bringing drought and heat to the western US but putting the eastern US in cool flow from Canada for much of the year.  Meanwhile, Europe set many heat records in 2014.  Precipitation in the US was generally below the long-term average but many other parts of the glob experienced very wet conditions, particularly in tropical regions.  The exception was northeast Brazil, which experienced a severe drought, and some areas of southeast Asia.

State-of-the-Climate-in-2014-Report-Cover  global sfc temps 2014  global precip 2014