GENEVA: The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has confirmed that 2025 was one of the three warmest years on record.

The past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record, WMO said.

The year 2025 started and ended with a cooling La Nina and yet it was still one of the warmest years on record globally because of the accumulation of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. High land and ocean temperatures helped fuel extreme weather – heatwaves, heavy rainfall and intense tropical cyclones, underlining the vital need for early warning systems, †said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.

“WMO’s state of the climate monitoring, based on collaborative and scientifically rigorous global data collection, is more important than ever before because we need to ensure that Earth information is authoritative, accessible and actionable for all, †said Celeste Saulo.

The actual average global temperature in 2025 was estimated to be 15.08 آ°C, however there is a much larger margin of uncertainty on the actual temperature.

Aآ separate study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciencesآ said that ocean temperatures were also among the highest on record in 2025, reflecting the long-term accumulation of heat within the climate system.

The study revealed that regionally, about 33% of the global ocean area ranked among its historical top three warmest conditions, while about 57% fell within the top five, including the tropical and South Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, North Indian Ocean, and Southern Oceans, underscoring the broad ocean warming across basins.

The study found the global annual mean sea surface temperature (SST) in 2025 was 0.49 آ°C above the 1981–2010 baseline and 0.12 آ± 0.03 آ°C lower than in 2024, but still ranking as the third-warmest year on record.

The European Copernicus Climate Observatory and the American Berkeley Earth Institute had previously announced that 2025 was the third hottest year, and they anticipated that 2026 would remain at historically high levels.