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Climate Indicators - Surface Air Temperatures

Arctic Oscillation | Surface Temperatures | Stratospheric Temperatures | Clouds | Ocean

Seven locations

The figure below tracks temperature changes since 1950 at seven Arctic city weather stations for winter (December-January) and spring (April). The time axis for the plots runs from left to right and the temperature anomalies (difference from 1960-1990 mean) are shown as colors, with the values given by the color bar below the plot. Locations of the seven cities are shown on the map to the right and represent the major climate sub-regions of the Arctic.

Notice the warm temperatures (orange colors) in the two plots below. Northern European winters (Tromso) were warm in the 1990's, with some cooler temperature in the last two years. The most dramatic winter changes are the warm temperatures (orange colors) after 2000 from eastern Siberia (Shmidta) eastward to west Greenland (Egedesminde). Siberia (Dikson and Verjojansk) had warm temperature in the 1980s, Dickson in the early 1980s and Verjojansk in the late 1980s. North American stations (Barrow, Resolute and Egedesminde) were also warm around the beginning of the 1980s.

Western Arctic springtime was generally warm (orange colors) after 1987, with west Greenland (Egedesminde) joining the warming after 1993 and Tromso after 2001. There are some earlier events that are as warm as the 1990s, but these events are more localized in location and duration.

Winter surface air temperatures
Spring surface air temperatures
Color bar
Surface air temperatures at seven northern cities.
Data from Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). Updates made using the World Monthly Surface Climatology dataset (ds570.0) and from the NCDC Summary of the Day (click to accept terms to find data).

 

Find more information (references and websites):

  • Bengtsson et al.(2004), The Early Twentieth-Century Warming in the Arctic - A Possible Mechanism, Journal of Climate 17, 4045-4057
  • Overland, et al., (2004), Seasonal and regional variation of pan-Arctic surface air temperature over the instrumental record. J. Climate, 17, 3263-3282. [Click this link to see the Spring temperature record back to 1880 (Fig 2)]
  • Hinkel, KM; Nelson, FE; Klene, AE; Bell, JH (2003) The urban heat island in winter at Barrow, Alaska: International Journal of Climatology [Int. J. Climatol.]. Vol. 23, no. 15, pp. 1889-1905.
  • Thompson, D. W. J., and J. M. Wallace, 2001: Regional Climate Impacts of the Northern Hemisphere Annular Mode. Science, 293, 85-89.
  • Johannessen, O.M., L. Bengtsson, M.W. Miles, S.I. Kuzmina, V.A. Semenov, G.V. Alekseev, A.P. Nagurnyi, V.F. Zakharov, L.P. Bobylev, L.H. Pettersson, K. Hasselmann and H.P. Cattle (2004) Arctic climate change: observed and modelled temperature and sea ice variability, Tellus, 56A(4), pp. 328-341