North Pole 20 C warmer than normal
Heat a combination of record low sea ice and moist air moving north, worried Arctic specialists say
Political people in the U.S. are watching the chaos in Washington in the moment.
But some people in the science community are watching the chaos somewhere else — the Arctic.
It’s polar night there now — the sun isn’t rising in much of the Arctic. That’s when the Arctic is supposed to get super-cold, when the sea ice that covers the vast Arctic Ocean is supposed to grow and thicken.
But in fall 2016 — which has been a zany year for the region with multiple records set for low levels of monthly sea ice — something is totally off. The Arctic is super-hot, even as a vast area of cold polar air has been displaced over Siberia.
At the same time, one of the key indicators of the state of the Arctic — the extent of sea ice covering the polar ocean — is at a record low. The ice is freezing up again, as it always does this time of year after reaching its September low, but it isn’t doing so as rapidly as usual.
In fact, the ice’s area is even lower than it was during the record-low 2012.
Twitter’s expert Arctic watchers are stunned. Zack Labe, a PhD student at the University of California at Irvine who studies the Arctic, tweeted an image Wednesday from the Danish Meteorological Institute showing Arctic temperatures about 20 C higher than normal above 80 degrees North Latitude.
“Today’s latest #Arctic mean temperature continues to move the wrong direction … up. Quite an anomalous spike!,” Labe wrote.
“Despite onset of #PolarNight, temperatures near #NorthPole increasing. Extraordinary situation right now in #Arctic, w/record low #seaice,” added Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
This is the second year in a row temperatures near the North Pole have risen to freakishly warm levels. During the final days of 2015, the temperature near the Pole spiked to the melting point thanks to a massive storm that pumped warm air into the region. So what’s going on here? “It’s about 20 C (36 F) warmer than normal over most of the Arctic Ocean, along with cold anomalies of about the same magnitude over north-central Asia,” Jennifer Francis, an Arctic specialist at Rutgers University, said by email last week.
“The Arctic warmth is the result of a combination of record-low sea-ice extent for this time of year, probably very thin ice and plenty of warm/ moist air from lower latitudes being driven northward by a very wavy jet stream.”
Francis has published research suggesting the jet stream, which travels from west to east across the Northern Hemisphere in the mid-latitudes, is becoming more wavy and elongated as the Arctic warms faster than the equator does.
“It will be fascinating to see if the stratospheric polar vortex continues to be as weak as it is now, which favours a negative Arctic Oscillation and probably a cold mid/late winter to continue over central and eastern Asia and eastern North America,” Francis added.
“The extreme behaviour of the Arctic in 2016 seems to be in no hurry to quit.”
Francis cited the work of Judah Cohen, a forecaster with Atmospheric and Environmental Research, who has linked odd jet stream behaviour with cold air over Siberia.