SOURCE: Climate Central
DATE: July 13, 2017
SNIP: The Arctic is a bastion of cold, blustery weather. But in the latest sign of how quickly changes are happening, new research published this week shows that the Arctic has seen more frequent bouts of warm air and longer stretches of mild weather.
The new findings show that while warm snaps have occurred even as far as back as the 1890s, a massive shift is afoot in the region, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.
[Researchers] defined a “warm” event as any time when the temperature rose above 14°F (minus-10°C). That’s chilly by winter standards for most regions of the globe, but is significantly warmer than the minus-22°F (minus-30°C) temperatures that are the norm for the Arctic in winter. They also looked at other extremes up to 32°F (0°C).
“In recent years, the frequency of these events and their duration have increased, together with the peak temperature recorded during these events,” said Robert Graham, a researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute who led the study.