Arctic Report Card: 2023 ranks as region’s sixth warmest year
The Arctic is warming up to four times as fast as the rest of the world, and in 2023, the region experienced its sixth warmest year on record, according to an annual assessment.
The planet saw its warmest summer in 2023, and the northern latitudes were no exception. The Arctic had its warmest summer since 1900 by a large margin, even though that may not have been apparent in the Bering Strait region, which had a relatively cool summer.
“Like a lot of the world, but not like western Alaska, this was the warmest summer on record in the Arctic—and warmest summer by a lot,” said Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center at UAF. “The Arctic is a huge area, of course, so when we set a new record at a seasonal scale, that’s often by a tenth of a degree. And this broke it by four times that—four tenths of a degree. That’s huge, but again, that’s fitting with what happens across much of the Northern Hemisphere.”
This week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA for short, released the 18th installment of its Arctic Report Card. The report checks up on various “vital signs,” such as surface air temperature, snow cover, sea ice extent, tundra greenness. These signs track how the ecosystem is changing in areas between 60 and 90 degrees north in latitude.
Thoman, who was the lead editor of the report, told the Nugget that the interconnections between these vital signs are especially apparent in this year’s edition.
For instance, in spots where land temperatures spiked this summer, rivers were heated to higher-than average temperatures. That resulted in higher sea surface temperatures where these rivers flowed into the Arctic Ocean. These warmer temperatures can impact summer sea ice extent and feed the growth of phytoplankton blooms, another vital sign.
Some of those warmer areas in the ocean this year were in the Barents, Kara, Laptev and Beaufort Seas. The August 2023 mean sea surface temperatures in these areas were 9 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit (5-7 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1991-2020 August mean values. Sea surface temperatures seem to have increased nearly one degree Fahrenheit (.5 Celsius) per decade since 1982 in areas of the Arctic Ocean that are ice free in August, according to the report.
Sea ice extent across the Arctic was the sixth lowest since satellite observations began in 1979.
Climate change is making the Arctic wetter, and precipitation was
added as a vital sign in last year’s report. Thanks to advances in modeling, researchers felt they could finally assess precipitation at a panArctic scale with some authority. This year, precipitation was the sixth highest since 1950. All six of the wettest years have now occurred since 2016, Thoman said.
Of course, there was variation in precipitation levels throughout the Arctic. While parts of Alaska saw a wet winter, a dry spring came to much of western Eurasia and the northern North Atlantic. Much of northern Canada experienced a dry summer, which helped fuel the country’s worst wildfire season on record. With fires raging in the Northwest Territories in August, many communities were evacuated, including Yellowknife, the capital that’s home to more than 20,000 people.
Shrubs, willows and other large plants are expanding across the tundra. The “greening of the Arctic” became apparent to researchers in the 1990s, and the trend continues. This year, tundra greenness in the region was the third highest in the 24-year record established by satellite observations.
Another vital sign researchers look at is the state of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which holds enough ancient ice that it would raise sea levels by about 20 feet if it were to melt. The ice sheet continued to lose mass, even though it saw above average winter snow accumulation. The highest point on the ice sheet, Summit Station, also logged a temperature of 32.7° Fahrenheit (0.4°C) on June 26. This was only the fifth time in 34 years that the station reached above freezing, according to the report.
Living through changes
The report was presented in a press conference in San Francisco on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, one of the biggest gatherings for Earth and space scientists. When NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad took the stage, he said he was just arriving from the COP28 climate talks in Dubai. As of press time on Tuesday, negotiations were still ongoing on a deal for nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the largest contributor to climate change. Spinrad spoke about how the Arctic shows that action on climate change is more urgent than ever.
“If you look at Western Alaska, climate change is not something that’s coming down the pipe somewhere in the future,” said Spinrad. “It is happening now. It’s been happening for decades. And whether you’re talking about fish, or people or birds, there are real impacts that we need to deal with right now. And when you hear about what’s going on at COP 28, there may be reasons to be optimistic. But the reality is we need action on the ground right now, not to necessarily turn around climate change immediately, but to deal with the fact that we’re going to be challenged by it now and for decades to come.”
Also present at the press conference was Roberta Glenn, lead author of a chapter in the report on the importance Indigenous knowledge and observations from coastal communities in Alaska. Glenn grew up in Utqiaġvik and is the project coordinator and community liaison for the Alaska Arctic Observatory and Knowledge Hub, or AAOKH. She asked the audience not to label Indigenous people of the Arctic as “victims” of climate change.
“We don’t subscribe to this idea that we are victims of our environment,” Glenn said. “There’s strength in sharing our voices and sharing our histories, our knowledge, our concerns, and our ideas for how to move forward. And there is strength in being proud that we have survived as a people to make it this far, to be able to continually thrive in our region, living off the land and sea. And we don’t plan on stopping soon.”
Thoman echoed her remarks, saying that people in the Arctic are “living this change every day” and have no choice other than to move forward.
“We need the big picture solutions,” Thoman said. “The people of the Arctic are having to adapt right here right now. And it didn’t start today, it didn’t start yesterday. This has been ongoing for years. Listen to the elders. Those changes have been happening for decades. And Arctic peoples are still here.”
Since 2006, Iñupiaq observers across the Arctic have collected thousands of observations for AAOKH, noting sea ice loss, warming temperatures, changing wind patterns and increased intensity and frequency of coastal storms that contribute to flooding and erosion, Glenn said.
“These environmental changes have real impacts on community infrastructure, traditional activities and access and availability of subsistence resources,” Glenn said. “Our work is increasingly turning to our community partners to make use of these observations to support local priorities.”
Salmon
Amid historic salmon crashes in Alaska, researchers are looking at how climate change affects this important subsistence resource. A special chapter in the report summarized recent salmon numbers in the state. The authors documented how 81 percent fewer king salmon returned than average to the Yukon River in 2022. Though a long-term decline in this species has been seen across Alaska, this was a new record low. They also described the more surprising chum salmon crash. In 2021, the number of
adult chums returning to the Yukon River was 92 percent lower than average.
“We’re seeing more and more surprises and things are getting out of whack,” said Erik Schoen, lead author of the salmon chapter and a fisheries scientist at the UAF International Arctic Research Center. “I think the last few years have kind of shaken everybody’s confidence that we can predict what’s going to happen. The chum collapse, that came out of nowhere.”
Schoen told the Nugget that researchers
are starting to piece together some climate links to these fluctuating numbers. For instance, they are starting to connect the chum salmon collapse to the marine heatwave of the coast of Alaska that ended in 2019. Shoen also said recent research has correlated low king salmon numbers with warmer water temperatures and lower river levels during adult spawner migrations and higher precipitation during juvenile rearing. This suggests this species won’t fare well in the warmer, wetter conditions that climate change is bringing to the Arctic.
Meanwhile, not all the surprises in salmon numbers have been unwelcome. Sockeye salmon numbers in Bristol Bay and the Kuskokwim River were much higher than expected in recent years. This commercial fishery in 2022 produced more fish than any year since the commercial harvest record began more than 150 years ago. Warmer lakes that allow juvenile sockeye to grow faster could be responsible for the boost in numbers.
“We’re seeing things that just haven’t been seen in living memory,” Schoen said. “We need to be ready to adapt and capitalize on new opportunities when they come up. And we need to really help communities that depend on salmon adapt to the downturns. We need to listen to that local knowledge and build that into our science and build it into our management policies.”