Ten Russian cities record warmest temperature ever
The mercury reached an unprecedented high of 5.1 degrees Celsius on January 8
The temperature across ten cities in Russia reached a record high, RIA Novosti reported on Thursday, citing the scientific director of Russia’s Hydrometeorological Center, Roman Vilfand.
In a country where temperatures can fall to minus 60 degrees Celsius in some regions in winter, several cities saw the mercury rising to 5.1 degrees earlier this week, according to the meteorologist.
“The daily temperature record for January 8 was broken in cities such as Ryazan, Orel, Lipetsk, Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Yoshkar-Ola, Cheboksary and Cherkessk,” Vilfand told the news agency.
The latest data released by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service shows that 2024 was the hottest year on record, stretching back to 1890. Each of the past decades was one of the ten warmest years recorded, and the two-year average for 2023-2024 exceeded the 1.5-degree limit that countries agreed to avoid under the Paris climate agreement in 2015, Copernicus said on Friday.
READ MORE: Moscow breaks record for May snowfall (VIDEOS)
Last year the planet’s average temperature was 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than during the pre-industrial period of 1850-1900, before humans began burning CO2-emitting fossil fuels on a large scale, according to the service.
The year 2024 was the warmest year on record in Moscow despite the unprecedented chill recorded in the Russian capital during the first ten days of May. Moscow State University reported on December 31, citing data tracked by its meteorological observatory, that the average annual temperature reached a record high of 8.2 degrees Celsius. The previous record of 8.0 degrees Celsius was recorded in 2020.