2024 Warmest Year on Record for India: IMD

The previous year was India's warmest on record, with the annual mean air temperature 0.65°C above normal.

- Jasjeev Gandhiok

NEW DELHI: The India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Wednesday—a grim record in lockstep with the world at large, which has been heating relentlessly, fuelled by the climate crisis.

The weather agency also issued its January-March forecast, not ruling out similar weather shocks in 2025 and predicting that temperatures will remain above normal this month, with rainfall expected to be above average across the country.

IMD data showed that 2024 was the hottest, overtaking 2016, when the mean temperature was 0.54°C above normal, on the back of a bruising El Niño that also led to an excess monsoon pattern, which in turn resulted in widespread flooding and crimped food crop output.

"The annual mean air temperature has been showing an increasing trend in recent times due to climate change. This year too, it has been higher than recent years. At 0.65°C above normal, it is the highest ever since records are available from 1901," IMD director general Mrutyunjay Mohapatra said during an online press briefing.

The year was also the hottest ever for the earth as a whole, with the average air temperature between January and November more than 1.5°C above normal, according to at least four global data sets—the first time that the world breached the threshold for warming agreed upon as a ceiling at the Paris climate summit in 2015.

El Nino, a climate pattern characterised by the warming of the waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, was largely responsible for the surging temperatures in 2024, said experts, adding that even as this pattern emerged in July 2023 and withered out by April 2024, it left a lasting impact across the world.