April NCEP/NCAR down 0.226°C

Temperatures rose from January to March but dropped right back in April, from March's 0.566°C to 0.34°C. That makes it the coldest month since the 2016 El Nino, behind December's 0.391°C. But even so, it was warmer than the annual averages of both 2014 and 2015, each a record in its time.

The main cool places were Canada, N Europe and Antarctica. China, E Siberia and the Arctic Ocean were warms was even most of the US.

Update - slightly OT, but you may notice that the TempLS report for March has a strange number (0.653°C) for that month. The main table above it has the correct number. The reason seems to be that in GHCN in the last few days, a whole lot of March data has gone missing, as you can see in the station map of the report. I hope they fix it soon. Fortunately, the lack of data prevents it updating the main table.

Update 2 - I wrote to GHCN but no response so far. Meanwhile, the pattern has changed - no longer whole countries missing, but more stations overall, so that now TempLS won't report at all.

Update 3. I got a response from GHCN saying that it was an ingest problem, now fixed. And it does seem OK now.