Alaskan city undergoes significant warmup

Last week, scientists were pulling together the latest data for NOAA's monthly report on the climate when they noticed something strange: One of their key climate monitoring stations had fallen off the map. All of the data for Barrow, Alaska — the northernmost city in the United States — was missing.

No, Barrow hadn't literally been vanquished by the pounding waves of the Arctic Sea (although it does sit precipitously close). The missing station was just the result of rapid, man-made climate change with a runaway effect on the Arctic.

The temperature in Barrow had been warming so fast this year, the data was automatically flagged as unreal and removed from the climate database. It was done by algorithms that were put in place to ensure that only the best data gets included in NOAA's reports. They're handy to keep the data sets clean, but this kind of quality-control algorithm is only good in "average" situations with no outliers. The current situation in Barrow, however, is anything but average.

If climate change is a fiery coal mine disaster, then Barrow is our canary. The Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth, and Barrow is in the thick of it. With less and less sea ice to reflect sunlight, the temperature around the North Pole is speeding upward.

The missing data obviously confused meteorologists and researchers, since it's a record they've been watching closely, according to Deke Arndt, the chief of NOAA's Climate Monitoring Branch. He described it as "an ironic exclamation point to swift regional climate change in and near the Arctic."

Just this week, scientists reported that the Arctic had its second-warmest year — behind 2016 — with the lowest sea ice ever recorded. The announcement came at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.