It's no wonder Australia just had one of its top 10 warmest winters on record, with new data showing that our planet just registered its 3rd warmest June-to-August period in 141 years of records.

A report released this week by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that our planet's combined global land and ocean surface temperature between June and August was 0.92ºC above the 20th-century average. This is the third warmest June-to-August period on record in the NOAA global temperature dataset, which dates back to 1880. The only warmer comparative periods were in 2016 and 2019.

Image: Global land and surface temperature percentiles for the period from June 2020 to August 2020. Source: NOAA/NCEI

Amid this global warmth, Australia registered its sixth warmest winter on record based on mean temperature and the third warmest on record based on maximum temperature. These records were against the Bureau's ACORN-SAT version 2 dataset, which dates back to 1910.

According to NOAA scientists, 2020 is likely to rank as one of our planet's five warmest years on record.