The monthly climate accounting for July has landed, and it reads like the ones before it — which is exactly the point. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, July 2026 was the joint-second-warmest July on record globally, tied with July 2024. The global average temperature was 16.90°C, about 1.47°C above the pre-industrial (1850–1900) baseline. But the number that stands out this month is not in the air. It is in the water.
The ocean set a July record
The most striking figure in the July data is the sea surface temperature. The global ocean, measured outside the polar regions, was the warmest ever recorded for the month of July — partly reflecting developing El Niño conditions in the equatorial Pacific, but sitting on top of a long, steady rise in ocean heat. This matters more than a single air-temperature rank, because the ocean is the planet's flywheel. It absorbs the overwhelming majority of the excess heat we trap, and a record-warm sea surface feeds back into everything downstream: more intense storms, disrupted marine ecosystems, coral bleaching, and shifting fisheries. It is also the fuel behind the exceptionally hot, dry conditions stoking wildfires across Europe this summer.
A hot ocean is a slow-moving forecast. The heat stored in the sea now shapes the weather for months to come.
Read the trend, not the rank
As always, the useful signal is not whether July took first or second place — that bounces with natural variability like the El Niño now forming. The signal is the company this month keeps. The ten warmest Julys on record have all occurred since 2016, and the four warmest are the last four years, 2023 through 2026. When the top of the leaderboard belongs entirely to the recent past, "joint-second-warmest" stops being a ranking and becomes a description of the new normal. This is the same trend we tracked when June came in as the second-warmest on record.
Western Europe underscored it, recording its warmest June–July period ever measured — the heat that has dried the continent's landscapes to tinder, as we saw in France's worst wildfires since the war and in a summer of stacked extremes at home.
Why we publish this every month
We put these numbers in front of our community month after month for one reason: a single hot summer is easy to dismiss, and a decade-long trend line is not. The record-warm ocean, the cluster of hottest Julys all landing in recent years, the European heat drying forests into fuel — these are not separate stories. They are one measurement, taken at different points on the same planet, and you can watch the pieces accumulate on our data dashboard.
The bottom line
July 2026 tied for second-warmest in the air and set a record in the sea, and the warm-month cluster keeps tightening around the present. None of it is a surprise, and that is the whole point: we have reached the stage where the records are expected. The useful response is steady attention to the line these months form — and local work to blunt the impacts, from heat to fire to flood, that the line keeps delivering.
