New data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that January was, for the globe, an extraordinary month.
But the record-breaking heat wasn’t uniformly distributed — it was particularly pronounced at the top of the world, showing temperature anomalies more than 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the 1951 to 1980 average in this region.
Indeed, NASA provides a “zonal mean” temperature map, which shows how the temperature departures from average change based on one’s latitude location on Earth. Things get especially warm, relative to what Earth is accustomed to, as you enter the very high latitudes.
Global warming has long been known to be particularly intense in the Arctic — a phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification” — but even so, lately the phenomenon has been extremely pronounced.
This unusual Arctic heat has been accompanied by a new record-low level for Arctic sea ice extent during the normally ice-packed month of January, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center — more than 400,000 square miles below average for the month. And that is closely tied to warm Arctic air temperatures.
“We’ve looked at the average January temperatures, and we look at what we call the 925 millibar level, about 3,000 feet up in the atmosphere,” says Mark Serreze, the center’s director. “And it was, I would say, absurdly warm across the entire Arctic Ocean.” The center reports temperature anomalies at this altitude of “more than 6 degrees Celsius (13 degrees Fahrenheit) above average” for the month.
The low sea ice situation has now continued into February.
“We’re way down. We’re at a record low for this time of year right now,” says Serreze. When it comes to the rest of 2016 and the coming summer and fall season when ice melts across the Arctic and reaches its lowest extent, he says, “we are starting out in a deep hole.”
So what’s causing it all? It’s a complicated picture, say scientists, but it’s likely much of it has to do with the very strong El Niño event that has carried over from 2015. But that’s not necessarily the only factor.
“We’ve got this huge El Niño out there, we have the warm blob in the northeast Pacific, the cool blob in the Atlantic, and this ridiculously warm Arctic,” says Jennifer Francis, a climate researcher at Rutgers who focuses on the Arctic and has argued that Arctic changes are changing midlatitude weather by causing wobbles in the jet stream. “All these things happening at the same time that have never happened before.”
