rationalskepticism.org

Santa may need water skis instead of a sleigh this year.

A weather buoy about 145 kilometres south of the North Pole registered a temperature at the melting point of 0 C early Thursday, as a giant storm east of Greenland drew abnormally warm air northward.

Weather models had predicted temperatures could get this warm and this buoy, part of the North Pole Environmental Observatory, provides validation.

“It seems likely areas very close to or at the North Pole were at the freezing point today (Thursday),” said Zachary Labe, a doctoral student research Arctic climate and weather at the University of California-Irvine.

Data from the buoy show that air temperatures have risen more than 22 degrees in the last two days when they hovered near -24 C which, even then, was above average.



The entire Arctic north of 80 degrees, roughly the size of Canada, has witnessed a sharp temperature spike of nearly 17 degrees.

Consider the average temperature in this large region is around -29 C at this time of year, but had shot up to -14 C on Wednesday and will likely peak at higher number by late Thursday.

Labe said the huge flux of warmth into the region may have contributed to the loss of sea ice at a time when the region is usually gaining ice.

Near the Franz Joseph Islands east of Svalbard, satellite imagery shows a large mass of ice vanishing over the last day. “This is pretty dramatic,” he tweeted.

Data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center indicate the Arctic lost about 148,000 square kilometres of ice in the past day, which is roughly the size of Southern Ontario. Labe cautioned, however, the ice loss data are preliminary and require quality control.


In Longyearbyen, Norway which is on the island of Svalbard in the Nordic Seas, the high reached 2 C Thursday, according to Weather Underground, beating the old daily record of 1 C.

While it is common for large storms to transport large quantities of heat into the high Arctic inducing large temperature swings, the intensity of warmth — more than 22 degrees above normal — has caught the attention of scientists.

This is the second time in the last six weeks such a steep rise in temperatures has occurred. In mid-November, temperatures averaged over the high Arctic were about 17-19 degrees above normal.

An analysis from Climate Central, a non-profit science organization, found that a warm event of comparable intensity to what occurred in November “would have been extremely unlikely in a climate of a century ago” before heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere had grown to current levels.

“If nothing is done to slow climate change, by the time global warming reaches 2 degrees Celsius, events like this winter would become common at the North Pole, happening every few years,” Climate Central concluded.

A similar spike to the present also occurred last year, when a buoy near the North Pole also showed temperatures at the melting point. This sharp rise motivated a study in the journal Nature which concluded the loss of sea ice in the Arctic over time “is making it easier for weather systems to transport this heat polewards.”

While the Arctic witnesses freak temperature rises, the cold air normally positioned there has sloshed southward into Siberia.

Temperatures there have crashed to about 33 degrees below normal, with air temperatures flirting with -50 C.