Just six months of year 2016 have passed, but the year is already on its way to become the hottest year ever recorded. In an announcement this week, NASA officials said that each of the initial six months -January to June- has set new temperature records.

It is the first year when the US space agency has shared a midyear climate analysis. The agency officials said that the step is taken because temperature averages in 2016 have been a lot in excess of earlier data.

According to NASA's data, this year’s each month was the warmest respective month across the globe in the modern temperature record, dating back to 1880. NASA added that the trend is an indication that 2016 is going to surpass last year as the hottest recorded year.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, said that the present year has indeed blown that out of the water.

Schmidt's calculations suggested that there is a 99% chance that 2016, on average, is going to be hotter than last year.

Till now in 2016, the planet's average temperature was 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in comparison to the late 19th century. International climate negotiators agreed in the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 that warming mustn’t surpass over 2 degrees Celsius in present century. The Accord's temperature threshold was put in place with a hope to avoid climate change’s worst impacts.

A powerful El Niño last year was one of the contributors to these temperatures, but as per Schmidt, the sustaining warming trend is mainly because of the effects of greenhouse gases.

The effects of El Niño will dissipate by next year, leaving temperatures a bit lower than current year, but Schmidt said the coming year is still going to average to 1 degree C above the pre-industrial average.

According to a report in Live Science by Kacey Deamer, "This year may be only half over, but 2016 is already on track to be the hottest year ever on record, with each of the first six months, from January to June, setting new temperature records, NASA officials announced this week."

For the first time, NASA shared a midyear climate analysis, doing so because temperature averages this year have been so in excess of previous data, agency officials said. NASA's data showed that each month in 2016 was the warmest respective month globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880.

So far this year, the planet's average temperature has been 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit (1.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 19th century. In 2009, international climate negotiators agreed in the Copenhagen Accord that warming should not increase more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) this century.

A report published in NY TIMES revealed, "The world is on pace to set another high temperature benchmark, with 2016 becoming the third year in a row of record heat. NASA scientists announced on Tuesday that global temperatures so far this year were much higher than in the first half of 2015."

Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, said that while the first six months of 2015 made it the hottest half-year ever recorded, “2016 really has blown that out of the water.”

He attributed part of the rise in temperatures this year to El Niño, in which warming waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean pump a lot of heat into the atmosphere.