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It Hit 80 Degrees In The
Arctic This Week
23 May, 2020
This story will provide important context for the headline, and I encourage you to read it—but really, the headline tells you what you need to know: It was 80 degrees Fahrenheit above the Arctic Circle this week.
A little farther south, in Siberia—you know, the region of world we reference when we want to connote something cold—it was 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Arctic sea ice in the neighbouring Kara Sea took the deepest May nose dive ever recorded. Oh, and random swaths of the region are on fire. Things are extremely wrong.
Let’s start with the heat above Arctic Circle. Mika Rantanen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, flagged a map showing blistering heat across western Siberia. The region has been the epicentre of an explosive heat wave that has rippled across the Arctic this week. Models forecast temperatures there will be as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit above normal for this time of year. The heat could break a bit by the middle of next week, but widespread warmth will continue to grip the region.
On land, it means wildfires continue to spread. Pierre Markuse, a satellite monitoring expert, has kept an eye on the series of increasingly odd fires above the Arctic Circle, a place known more for ice than fire. Most of the blazes he’s documented are in the eastern portion of Siberia, which also dealt with its fair share of heat all year in addition to low snowpack. Seeing fires burn next to braided rivers and large patches of unmelted snow is truly a mood for our current era of climate destabilization.
Then there are the ocean impacts, because climate change doesn’t just stop at the water’s edge. Warmth has washed over the seas that border Siberia, and the Kara Sea north of the western part of the region has seen the most precipitous decline in sea ice. After a slow decline in the first part of May, warm air has fuelled a stark decline in sea ice. As of earlier this week, ice extent was the lowest level that’s ever been record in May. It stands as a stark outlier, especially when looking at how ice behaved in the 1980s. I’m old enough to remember when the ice in the Kara Sea used to decline in July.
Numerous other seas that ring the Arctic have also been losing ice. And while they’re not at record-setting levels like the Kara Sea, the Bering and Barents Seas are both at some of their lowest levels on record for this time of year.
These impacts are the latest in a litany of climate horrors for the Arctic as a whole. Last summer, it reached nearly 95 degrees Fahrenheit above the Arctic Circle in Sweden. The same summer, the mercury hit 70 degrees Fahrenheit at the northernmost settlement on the planet. Greenland also melted and burned. That’s just some of what happened last year. I could list the same for 2018. And 2017. And you get the point.
I have to be honest. I’m getting sick of writing these stories. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe, and what’s happening there is unprecedented. But how many ways can you talk about the fact that the Arctic is just extremely, massively fucked by climate change when the impacts are relentless? After a while, the degrees above normal start to feel normal, and the records are ephemeral, set to broken again the next year.
But here we are with just another absolutely outlandish occurrence. I’ll keep writing about them, because even if the records start to blend together, that in itself is a sign we really need to get our shit together and cut emissions now
Parts of Siberia are hotter
than Washington, with
temperatures nearly 40
degrees above average
Snow cover is disappearing, sea ice is melting and fires, including possible ‘zombie’ blazes, are raging.
Siberia is in the throes of a heat wave that would be considered warm even by the standards of those living outside the Arctic Circle.
In Washington, for example, the temperature has been stuck in the 60s all week, reaching a maximum of 73 degrees Thursday. Yet several stations in North Central Siberia, including areas near or above the Arctic Circle, are seeing temperatures climb well into the 80s.
On Friday, the town of Khatanga, Siberia, located well north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 78 degrees, some 46 degrees above normal. The typical maximum temperature for the day at that location is 32 degrees. The town obliterated its previous record high for the date of 54 by some 24 degrees and its monthly record of 68 by about 10 degrees.
The Siberian warmth in May is not a fluke event, either; instead, it’s been a consistent feature since the winter. Temperature departures from average in Europe and Asia have helped push global average surface temperatures to record highs this year, and on global temperature maps, these regions stand out as splotches of crimson red.
This turns highly reflective ice cover into snow and ice that has a lower reflectivity, known as its albedo, which means that it absorbs more incoming solar radiation.
“This may make the sea ice more vulnerable to melting later in the summer, if weather conditions permit,” Labe said. “Overall, the weather patterns in June through August will dictate the extent of melting closer to the September minimum.”
This year, Siberian fires have gotten off to a fast, and unusually expansive, start. Russian officials have stated they expect the summer will potentially be the hottest the region has seen, with an unusually destructive fire season. Fires in the vast forests of Siberia burned 7 million acres last year, an area larger than the state of Maryland, and sent smoke drifting around the world.
This year, 1.5 million acres have burned. Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in Reading, England, said via email that fire-related emissions around the Arctic Circle and Siberia’s Sakha Republic have not exceeded average data from 2003 through 2019.
However, Labe said there have been trends of fires showing up shortly after snow cover melts, which is a topic of discussion in the fire science community. Some scientists are noting how quickly the hot spots are showing up on satellite imagery and questioning whether these are actually “zombie fires” from last summer that survived the winter by burning in layers of vegetation under the snow.
The temperature departures from average in Siberia this year are some of the highest of any area on Earth. Since January, the region has been running at least 5.4 degrees (3 Celsius) above the long-term average, according to a recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
According to Robert Rhode of Berkeley Earth, which monitors global temperature trends, Russia averaged a temperature anomaly of nearly 11 degrees (6 Celsius) above average for the January to April time period.
“That’s not only a new record anomaly for Russia,” Rhode wrote via Twitter. “That’s the largest January to April anomaly ever seen in any country’s national average.”
The polar vortex is helping lead to record warmth
Several factors conspired to produce such a mild winter in Siberia, and are still working to bring freak warmth now. Among them? The polar vortex spent much of the winter near or at record strength.
When the polar vortex is strong, it forms a frigid upper-air doughnut of winds that doesn’t permit much Arctic chill to slip south to the mid-latitudes. When that happens, areas along the vortex’s periphery that would usually experience frigid weather remain just outside its frosty sphere of influence.
In recent weeks, the vortex has undergone its annual spring collapse, making it easier for intense ridges of warm high pressure to build in.
Most recently, a prominent bubble of high pressure, referred to as a heat dome, slipped even farther northward, spanning from northern Siberia into the Central Arctic ocean — smack dab over much of the sea ice pack.
In fact, the high-altitude “heat dome” is more intense than any other on the planet, and likely anything forecast to develop globally in the coming weeks. The dome of heat has also helped to deflect inclement weather and storm systems away from Siberia, with sinking air eroding cloud cover and precipitation.
The alignment of weather systems is just one side of the coin in a world facing the growing impacts and severity of human-induced climate change.
This period of unusually mild Arctic weather is only the latest of many such episodes in recent years as the region rapidly warms in response to increasing amounts of greenhouse gases inthe atmosphere. The Arctic as a whole is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the world, owing to feedbacks in the climate system, and this is leading to sweeping changes in the way of life for the area’s 4 million residents, as well as a cascade of knock-on effects to ecosystems.
“This heat wave occurs mostly at the area which has been anomalously warm during the whole 2020,” said Mika Rantanen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, via email. “It could be that lack of snow/dry soils can play a role, so they now favor high temperatures as the[solar] energy [is] not consumed [by] melting of snow.”
“One thing which I found noteworthy is that Russia just experienced a record-warm winter.
And [it] looks like the warmth or heat still continues.”
