Alaskan town shows Arctic’s warming
Last week, scientists were pulling together the latest data for the federal goverment’s monthly report on the climate when they noticed something strange: One of their key climate monitoring stations had fallen off the map. All the data for Barrow, Alaska — the northernmost city in the United States — was missing.
The missing station was the result of rapid, man-made climate change with a runaway effect on the Arctic.
Barrow has been warming so fast this year that the data were automatically flagged as unreal and removed from the climate database. That was done by algorithms that were put in place to ensure that only the best data get included in reports by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The algorithms are handy to keep the data sets clean, but this kind of quality-control algorithm is good only 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 because they are 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, but the trend of rising temperatures is roughly double that of the rest of the planet — and the lowest level of sea ice ever recorded. The announcement came at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, and the report is topped with an alarming headline: “Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades.”
The 2017 Arctic Report Card, an annual NOAA report, documents the changing conditions for floating sea ice and more. Vast expanses of former permafrost have been reduced to mud. Nonnative species of plants — types that only grow in warmer climates — are spreading into what used to be the tundra. Nowhere is this greening of the Arctic happening faster than the North Slope of Alaska, observable with highresolution clarity on NOAA satellite imagery.
Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA’s Arctic Research Program, was introduced by retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, President Donald Trump’s appointee as acting administrator of NOAA, who said the report was important for two reasons that “directly relate to the priorities of this administration” — its implications for national and economic security. Gallaudet cited example of naval submarines in the Arctic, saying that operators had told him the environment in the Arctic is “the most hazardous [that] they’ve ever reported” because of the increased mobility of ice floes.
The new document is peerreviewed and was produced by 85 scientists. It is released annually, but it is the first time it has been released during Donald Trump’s presidency (the last release was in December 2016, post-election but pre-inauguration).
“The current observed rate of sea-ice decline and warming temperatures are higher than at any other time in the last 1,500 years, and likely longer than that,” the NOAA report says.
At no place is this more blatantly obvious than Barrow. In the 17 years since 2000, the average October temperature in Barrow has climbed 7.8 degrees. The November temperature is up 6.9 degrees. The December average has warmed 4.7 degrees.
The Barrow temperatures are now safely back in the climate-monitoring data sets. Statisticians will have to come up with a new algorithm to prevent legitimate temperatures from being removed.