Record Sea Surface Temperatures

This tweet made me want to look at the latest sea surface temperatures at the U of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, and they're something else:

Extra atmospheric water vapor in the stratosphere from volcano Tongo?

In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer. 

The study says it could be there for awhile:

It may take several years for the H2O plume to dissipate. This eruption could impact climate not through surface cooling due to sulfate aerosols, but rather through surface warming due to the radiative forcing from the excess stratospheric H2O.

For the North Atlantic Brian McNoldy wrote the other day that the latest SST for the North Atlantic was a record high anomaly, 3.87 standard deviations above the mean (a 1-in-18,650 occurrence)