August 2016 temps

This chart shows monthly temperatures going back to 1880. It was provided by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

If you didn't like July's record heat, you probably didn't like August much, either.

Last month was globally the warmest August in 136 years of modern records, NASA says. August also tied with July for the warmest month ever recorded worldwide, breaking a normal seasonal pattern of July having the year's hottest temperatures.

The actual temperature increases released by NASA Monday were very small - a few hundredths of a degree - and NASA says "monthly rankings ... are inherently fragile."

"We stress that the long-term trends are the most important for understanding the ongoing changes that are affecting our planet," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

According to Schmidt, the record warm August continued a trend of 11 consecutive months that have set new monthly high-temperature records.

Here are the numbers:

August 2016 temperature was 0.016 degrees Celsius or 0.288 degrees warmer than the previous record high for August set in 2014.

NASA bases its monthly analysis on public data from about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature and Antarctic research stations. The modern record begins around 1880 because earlier observations weren't planet-wide.