Temperatures recorded by Arctic monitoring stations rose above freezing on Thursday, triggered by the same El Niño influenced weather events that have been deluging the UK with rain from Storm Frank.
Canadian government meteorologist Nathalie Hasell told AFP that "this deep depression has pushed hot air as far as the North Pole, where temperatures are at least 20 degrees above normal, at around freezing point, between zero and two degrees".
Scientists from the North Pole Environmental Observatory (NPEO) report that a monitoring station 300km from the North Pole, which was recording normal temperatures of -37 degrees Celsius on Monday, by Wednesday was registering temperatures of -8 degrees. At the time of writing, NPEO's weather data indicates that surface temperatures in the region are as high as -1.9 degrees.
While the Arctic has seen some of the most profound effects of long-term global climate change, with air temperature increases of over 2 degrees between 1960 and 2011, and Nasa's maximum Arctic sea ice measurement for 2015 coming in as the lowest on record, the current warm snap has been largely attributed to El Niño
This year, the El Niño effect, caused by warm Pacific sea currents, is thought to be the most powerful in the last century, and is currently causing a range of extreme weather effects around the world, from flooding in Australia and tornados in the southern United States, to huge storms battering the coast of Iceland.
The Met Office also said on Thursday that December 2015 was the wettest December on record in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and in northern England. The mean temperature in the UK across the month was 8 degrees C, 4.1 degrees above the long-term average, and the highest anomaly in any direction for any month since 1910. “Looking at the year as a whole, until last week it seemed it would be unremarkable with a cool spring and cool, damp summer being offset by the mild end to the year. “However, the rainfall this week has changed all that and we have now had enough rainfall to propel the UK value in to the top 10 wettest years in our record since 1910.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
