The North Pole just surged above freezing in the dead of winter, stunning scientists
An extraordinary heat wave pushed temperatures at the northernmost tip of Greenland was as high as 6.1 C this weekend. And the sun won’t rise for weeks.

By JASON SAMENOWThe Washington Post
Mon., Feb. 26, 2018

The sun won’t rise at the North Pole until March 20, and it’s close to the coldest time of year, but an extraordinary and possibly historic thaw swelled over the tip of the planet this weekend. Analyses show that the temperature warmed to the melting point as an enormous storm pumped an intense pulse of heat through the Greenland Sea.

Temperatures may have soared as high as 2 C at the pole, according to the U.S. Global Forecast System model. While there are no direct measurements of temperature there, Zack Labe, a climate scientist working on his PhD at the University of California at Irvine, confirmed that several independent analyses showed “it was very close to freezing,” which is more than 30 C above normal.

The warm intrusion penetrated right through the heart of the Central Arctic, Labe said. The temperature averaged for the entire region north of 80 degrees latitude spiked to its highest level ever recorded in February. The average temperature was more than 20 C above normal. “No other warm intrusions were very close to this,” Labe said in an interview, describing a data set maintained by the Danish Meteorological Institute that dates back to 1958. “I was taken by surprise how expansive this warm intrusion was.”

The extreme event continues to unfold in the high #Arctic today in response to a surge of moisture and "warmth"

2018 is well exceeding previous years (thin lines) for the month of February. 2018 is the red line. Average temperature is in white (http://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/arctic-temperatures/ …)

Such extreme warm intrusions in the Arctic, once rare, are becoming more routine, research has shown. A study published last July found that since 1980, these events are becoming more frequent, longer-lasting and more intense.

“Previously this was not common,” said lead author of the study Robert Graham, from the Norwegian Polar Institute, in an email. “It happened in four years between 1980-2010, but has now occurred in four out of the last five winters.”

Graham explained that these warming events are related to the decline of winter sea ice in the Arctic, noting that January’s ice extent was the lowest on record. “As the sea ice is melting and thinning, it is becoming more vulnerable to these winter storms,” he explained. “The thinner ice drifts more quickly and can break up into smaller pieces. The strong winds from the south can push the ice further north into the Central Arctic, exposing the open water and releasing heat to the atmosphere from the ocean.”

Scientists were shocked in recent days to discover open water north of Greenland, an area normally covered by old, very thick ice. “This has me more worried than the warm temps in the Arctic right now,” tweeted Mike MacFerrin, an ice sheet specialist at the University of Colorado.

Such warm water is appearing to have an effect on air temperatures. At the north tip of Greenland, about 650 kilometres to the south of the North Pole, the weather station Cape Morris Jesup has logged a record-crushing 61 hours above freezing so far this calendar year. The previous record, dating to 1980, was 16 hours through the end of April in 2011, according to Robert Rohde, a physicist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit that conducts temperature analysis. At one point, the temperature was as high as 6.1 C.

This is the second time in two years that Arctic temperature has been above freezing in the dead of Winter.

How much can a polar bear?

Weather

This is a map of temperature anomaly. It shows that the North Pole is WELL ABOVE AVERAGE for winter

The_Barnacle wrote on Mar 4^th, 2018 at 10:36am:



How come your map is completely different to the ones in the video?

The_Barnacle wrote on Mar 4^th, 2018 at 10:36am:


You might find that Arctica is at least 30 degrees above average for the time of the year. But parts of Europe and North America are 10 to 20 degrees below average for this time of year. I am sure the equilibrium would sort itself out within the week.