NASA's Blue Marble visualisation of Earth (archive composite, not a 2026 temperature map).
NASA's Blue Marble visualisation of Earth (archive composite, not a 2026 temperature map). Illustrative archive image; not a photograph of the reported 2026 event. Image: NASA images by Reto Stöckli, based on data from NASA and NOAA. Instrument: Terra - MODIS / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. Resized and converted to JPEG; thumbnails may be cropped by the page layout.

Earth experienced its hottest August on record in 2026, the World Meteorological Organization reported on 11 September. The agency also described a record-warm northern summer, drawing on assessments from international climate monitoring organisations.

NOAA put the month's global temperature at 1.32 degrees Celsius above its twentieth-century average. Copernicus reported a different figure relative to a pre-industrial baseline; the two reference periods should not be treated as interchangeable. WMO identified the developing El Nino as a contributing influence alongside the broader warming trend. The findings add to evidence of elevated ocean and land temperatures, while reminding readers that a single month's anomaly is different from the long-term average used to assess international climate goals.