Record-setting Arctic temperatures soar 25 C above normal

‘Striking’ warmth another indicator of region’s rapidly transforming landscape

While Eastern North America simmers in some of its warmest February weather ever recorded, the Arctic is also stewing in temperatures more than 25 C above normal.

This latest huge temperature spike in the Arctic is another striking indicator of its rapidly transforming climate. On Monday and Tuesday, the northernmost weather station in the world, Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland, experienced more than 24 hours of temperatures above freezing, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute.

“How weird is that?” tweeted Robert Rohde, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. “Well it’s Arctic winter. The sun set in October and won’t be seen again until March. Perpetual night, but still above freezing.”

This thaw occurred as a pulse of extremely mild air shot through the Greenland Sea.

Warm air is spilling into the Arctic from all sides. On the opposite end of North America, abnormally mild air also poured over northern Alaska on Tuesday, where the temperature in Utqiagvik, previously known as Barrow, soared to a record high of -1 C, 22 C above normal.

The warmth over Alaska occurred as almost one-third of the ice cover- ing the Bering Sea off Alaska’s West Coast vanished in just over a week during the middle of February, InsideClimateNews reported.

Temperatures over the entire Arctic north of 80 degrees latitude have averaged about 6 C above normal since the beginning of the calendar year, sometimes spiking over 14 C above normal (the normal temperature is around -30 C).

These kinds of temperature anomalies in the Arctic have become commonplace in winter in the past few years.

“[T]he *persistence* of the above average temperatures is quite striking,” tweeted Zack Labe, a PhD candidate in climate science at the University of California at Irvine.

Some of the most extreme warmth of the year so far is forecast to flood the Arctic in coming days, with a number of areas seeing temperatures that exceed 25 C above normal and up to 34 C above normal. The mercury at the North Pole could well rise above freezing between Thursday and Sunday.

Similar circumstances occurred in December 2016, when the temperature at the North Pole last flirted with the melting point in the dark, dead of winter. The Washington Post documented similarly large jumps in temperature in November 2016 and December 2015.

An analysis from Climate Central said these extreme winter warming events in the Arctic, once rare, could become commonplace if the planet continues warming. A study in the journal Nature published in 2016 found the decline of sea ice in the Arctic “is making it easier for weather systems to transport this heat polewards.”

Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent on record this past January, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“I have sailed boats through (the Arctic Sea) but never this time of year,” tweeted David Thoreson, an Arctic photographer. “It’s amazing to watch this unfold.”

The record-setting temperatures and lack of ice are exactly what scientists have projected over the Arctic for years and are fundamentally changing the landscape.

“Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades,” NOAA concluded in its Arctic Report Card, published in December.