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Hot Arctic: NOAA’s 2015 Report Card Shows Signs of Failing Climates
21
December, 2015
In
NOAA’s most recent annual Arctic Report Card,
the records just keep falling as the litany of global warming related
events appearing throughout the far north continued to crop up with
ever-more dizzying frequency…
(NOAA’s
Arctic report is a stark expose of the state of the Arctic climate.
What we view now is a system undergoing a rapid and dynamic
transition from its previously stable state to something that is
entirely new and alien to human civilization. Video source: NOAA.)
The
12 month period of October 2014 to September 2015 was the hottest one
year time-frame since record keeping began for the Arctic back in
1900. As a result of these record warm temperatures, Arctic sea ice
during the Winter hit its lowest maximum extent ever seen. Summer sea
ice extent was likewise greatly reduced hitting its 4th lowest extent
ever recorded. Old, thick sea ice which represented 20 percent of the
ice pack in 1985, has precipitously declined to a mere 3 percent of
the ice pack today. Snow cover also took a hit, declining to its
second lowest extent on record during 2015 and striking a range of 50
percent below the typical average for the month.
Overall
warming of the Arctic is at a much more rapid pace than the rest of
the world.
This accelerated pace of warming is due, in large part, to loss of
snow and sea ice reflectivity during the Spring and Summer months. As
a result, more heat is absorbed into dark land and ocean surfaces —
a heat that is retained throughout the Arctic over longer and longer
periods. And, though NOAA doesn’t report it in the above video,
overall higher concentrations of greenhouse gasses like methane and
CO2 in or near the Arctic region also contribute to a higher rate of
warming (see NOAA’s
ESRL figures).
In a world that is now rapidly proceeding beyond the 400 ppm CO2 and
485 ppm CO2e threshold, this is exactly the kind of Northern
Hemisphere polar amplification we would expect to see.
Warm
Winds, Greenland Ice Sheet Melt, and Mass Migrations
NOAA
notes a marked change in the distribution of life with mass
migrations of all life forms well underway in and around the Arctic.
Transitions and disruptions are most highly visible among marine
mammals like walruses and polar bears — who are increasingly forced
to live on land during the summer months. Meanwhile, an
ever-broadening number of non-native fish are invading the Arctic
from the south.
(South
to north weather patterns, like the one featured above, have
increasingly drawn warm winds up and over Alaska. An anomalous new
weather feature that has merited comment in NOAA’s recent annual
Arctic report card. Image from “Arctic
Heatwave to Rip Polar Vortex in Half”.)
NOAA
also links the warm
wind invasion events reported on widely here to
the second worst wildfire season ever to strike Alaska in 2015. A
dipole feature that displays teleconnections between Arctic snow and
ice loss, the hot blob of water in the Northeastern Pacific, and the
persistent trough that prevailed over the US East Coast during the
Winter of 2014-2015.
Finally,
Greenland Ice Sheet surface melt hit a maximum coverage above 50
percent for the first time since the extreme melt that occurred in
2012. NOAA notes that the amount of ice delivered to the ocean by
glaciers also increased across Greenland even as recent studies
continued to find an increasing prevalence of glacial destabilization
and acceleration among Greenland’s ocean-terminating glaciers.
NOAA
concludes: “Taken together, 2015 shows a continuing set of major
changes in the Arctic.”
Links:
Hat
Tip to Alexandr
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