https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/02/07/antarctica-just-hit-65-degrees-its-warmest-temperature-ever-recorded/
[images and links in online article]
Antarctica just hit 65 degrees, its warmest temperature ever recorded
It comes days after Earth’s warmest January on record
By Matthew Cappucci
February 7 at 10:56 AM
Just days after the Earth saw its warmest January on record, Antarctica
has broken its warmest temperature ever recorded. A reading of 65
degrees was taken Thursday at Esperanza Base along Antarctica’s Trinity
Peninsula, making it the ordinarily frigid continent’s highest measured
temperature in history.
The Argentine research base is on the northern tip of the Antarctic
Peninsula. Randy Cerveny, who tracks extremes for the World
Meteorological Organization, called Thursday’s reading a “likely
record,” although the mark will still have to be officially reviewed and
certified.
The balmy reading beats out the previous record of 63.5 degrees, which
occurred March 24, 2015.
The Antarctic Peninsula, on which Thursday’s anomaly was recorded, is
one of the fastest-warming regions in the world. In just the past 50
years, temperatures have surged a staggering 5 degrees in response to
Earth’s swiftly warming climate. Around 87 percent of glaciers along the
peninsula’s west coast have retreated in that time, the majority doing
so at an accelerated pace since 2008.
The WMO notes that cracks in the Pine Island Glacier “have been growing
rapidly” in the past several days, according to satellite imagery.
The recent spate of warmth owes to a ridge of high pressure that has
lingered over the region for several days. High-pressure systems feature
sinking air, which favors milder temperatures.
This effect was amplified on a local level because of a “foehn” wind,
characterized by air sweeping down a mountain that begins compressing as
air pressures rise near the Earth’s surface. That causes additional warming.
Moreover, a look at simulated atmospheric profiles around the time it
hit the record indicated warmer air aloft than at the surface — meaning
any air that mixed down to ground level could have had an additional leg
up in warming.
It’s been a monumental year for climate extremes, and we’re only on Day
38 of 2020. January was the warmest on record globally, according to
atmospheric monitoring group Copernicus, with records shattered in
Europe and Asia. A number of locales in Eastern Europe and particularly
Russia wound up more than 12 to 13 degrees above average.
“[This record] doesn’t come as any surprise,” wrote Eric Steig, a
glaciologist studying climate change at the University of Washington.
“Although there is decade-to-decade variability, the underlying trend
across most of the continent is warming."
He says this record will probably be broken again in the not-so-distant
future.
“That warming has been particularly fast on the Antarctic Peninsula —
where Esperanza is — in summer (the season [they’re] now in)," Steig
wrote. “So we can expect these sorts of records to be set again and
again, even if they aren’t set every single year.”
David Bromwich, a climate researcher at Ohio State University, noted,
however, that while the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed strongly since
the late 1940s, temperature trends in summer have been variable in
recent decades, including a brief cooling spell since 1998. “So overall,
this record looks to be a one time extreme event that doesn’t tell us
anything about Antarctic climate change,” he wrote in an email.
Additional extreme warmth is likely in the Antarctic Peninsula in the
coming days. Temperatures some 40 to 50 degrees above normal are
predicted by some models.
Jason Samenow contributed to this report.
=====================================
To subscribe, unsubscribe, turn vacation mode on or off,
or carry out other user-actions for this list, visit
https://www.freelists.org/list/keiths-list
Note: new climate change website is now in pre-launch
Visit https://www.10n10.ca/e/index.shtml