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Although it is necessary to clarify if this is really a record, such temperatures are up to 18 degrees higher than the average daily average in June. Hot summer weather is not uncommon in the Arctic Circle, but temperatures in recent months have been abnormally high.
The Arctic is believed to heat up twice as fast as the entire earth.
Verkhoyansk, home to more than 1,300 people, is a distant corner of Siberia in the Arctic Circle. Temperature changes in this area are extreme, with temperatures dropping to 42 degrees in January and temperatures rising to 20 degrees in June. But this year, the heat wave in the Arctic is of particular concern to meteorologists. The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) reported that the average temperature in the area in March, April, and May is up to 10 degrees higher than normal.
In early June this year, a temperature of 30 degrees was recorded in Siberia, and in May, a record heat of 25.4 degrees was also observed at Katanga in the Arctic Circle in May.
At the end of April this year, fires in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia were already 10 times higher than at the same time last year.
“Long-term temperature records are being broken around the world, but the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth,” said Dann Mitchel, associate professor of meteorology at the University of Bristol. “We will see more and more of that in the near future.”
While heat waves in the Arctic are not uncommon, the fact that such weather lasts a long time and is frequent is troubling. Most scientists agree that the Arctic’s average temperature has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world in the past three decades.
On average, between 1960 and 2019, global average temperatures increased by approximately one degree Celsius. But closer to the north pole, at 90 degrees latitude, the temperature continues to rise. Here, in the same amount of time, it increased more than anywhere else, by about 4 degrees Celsius.
Why should we care about Arctic warming?
Significant warming in the Arctic is leading to warming of what has hitherto been called permafrost.
This worries scientists as carbon dioxide and methane, stored in frozen ground, will enter the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases will lead to even more heating and defrosting of the freezer, respectively, increased gas release. Higher temperatures will also cause continental ice to melt faster in the Arctic, leading to higher sea levels.
It is worth noting that warming will also be caused by a decrease in the area of white ice reflecting heat. The soil will absorb more heat, which will also contribute to temperature changes.
Last summer, Siberia was hit by huge forest fires. Although forest fires are common in the Arctic, in 2019 extremely high temperatures and strong winds increased the scale of the fires.
Siberian forest fires generally start in early May and peak in July and August, but by the end of April this year, fires in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia were already 10 times higher than at the same time of last year.
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