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Temperatures spike almost 50 degrees in North Pole
Arctic sea ice reached its fourth-lowest extent on record on Sept. 11, 2015. (Dan Pisut, NSIDC, NOAA Climate.gov)
There has been a heat wave of sorts in the North Pole this week that might even have Santa
trading in his sleigh for swim trunks.
Temperatures were as much as 50 degrees above average on Wednesday– almost reaching 32
degrees Fahrenheit in portions of the Arctic Circle that average 20 below zero at this time of
year.
Meteorologists and experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration blame the
strange weather on winter cyclones over the Atlantic near Iceland that pushed warm air far up
from the south. Another storm in the Arctic north of Greenland - helped by low-pressure system
that also produced blizzards in New Mexico, tornadoes in Texas and flooding in Missouri - was
also to blame.
“A series of cyclones lined up over the Arctic and North Pole to Iceland (where Cyclone Frank
crossed),” Ryan Maue, a meteorologist for WeatherBell a private weather forecasting company
based in NYC, told FoxNews.com by email.
“The combined flow at all levels of atmosphere was directed from the Atlantic over the Arctic
and into Siberia,” he said. “Thus, warmer and moister marine air from Atlantic traveled over the
Pole and raised temps to near or at freezing for a few hours. However, the warm advection event
was short lived and temps are closer to normal well below 0.”
James Overland, an Arctic climate researcher at NOAA’s research lab in Seattle, said it was the
two storms together that really caused the freak weather.
“If you think of those two storm centers as kind of a dumbbell with the winds blowing around
them, it brought all that warm air up from the Atlantic to near the North Pole,” he told
FoxNews.com “One of the buoys shows slightly above freezing on Wednesday.”
Storms like this are typical in the Arctic for this time of year but such temperature swings are
more unusual – about once in five years. Forecasters were careful not to single out any one cause
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for the strange weather such as El Nino or climate change, suggesting it’s a combination of
factors that caused the temperature spike.
“I would say its rare event,” Overland said, adding that “in a lot of these extreme events that we
see recently, there tends to be more than one factor contributing so they make it worse than if it
was just one factor.”
“We tend to see more extreme events in the Arctic,” he said. “The Arctic was the warmest this
last year as it’s ever been. There is so much random chaos in the weather that you can never say
one event was caused by that. But the fact we are seeing more extreme events is a long-term
change.”
The briefly balmy conditions alone are unlikely to cause any lasting damage in the Arctic. But
scientists say it is only exemplifies the challenges facing a region that has been seeing record
losses of ice including in 2015, due to rising temperatures around the globe.
Last month, NOAA reported that November Arctic sea ice was 360,000 square miles or 8.3
percent below the 1981-2010 average. This was the sixth smallest November extent since records
began in 1979, according to analysis by the National Snow and Ice Data Center using data from
NOAA and NASA.
“It is cold and dark in the Arctic so it will revert to its colder temperatures,” Overland said. “But
every warm air moving into the Arctic keeps it from getting really cold like it used to. It has a
minor, long-term effect, thinner ice and warmer temperatures overall.”
Thought Questions:
1. According to “Day After Tomorrow” how could the warming of the North Pole affect the
ecosystems on Earth?
2. According to “Day After Tomorrow” how could this warming eventually cause another
Ice Age?
3. Compare what you know about the current weather events in the United States and the
World to the events that you have seen in the movie “Day After Tomorrow”? What is
similar? What is different?