New Delhi: Latest data from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) shows that February 2017 was the second warmest February in 137 years of modern record-keeping.

According to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's GISS in New York,

the temperature for February 2017 was 0.20 degrees Celsius – which is 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than the mean February temperature from 1951-1980, but cooler than February 2016 .

February 2016 was the hottest on record, at 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than the February mean temperature from 1951-1980.

NASA's monthly data analysis shows that the top February temperature anomalies have occurred during the past two years.

The monthly analysis by the GISS team is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations.

NASA's monthly analyses are sometimes updated when additional data becomes available, and the results are subject to change.

Furthermore, January 2017 was found to be the third warmest January since record-keeping on global temperature began around 1880.