Extreme warmth at North Pole in wild weather pattern

There are strange things going on up north. %

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For the second year in a row, abnormally warm air is stunting the normal autumn growth of Arctic sea ice and some of the temperatures around the Arctic Circle are more like late summer than the week before Thanksgiving.

As the erudite folks at the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang reported Thursday, the average temperature in the part of the Arctic north of 80 degrees north latitude (let's just call it the "North Pole") is an astounding 36 degrees fahrenheit above normal.

"In reviewing records back to 1958, we could not find a more intense anomaly," they wrote.

This is resulting in the total sea ice in the Arctic running at the lowest level for this time of the season than it was in 2012, a record year. %

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Where is the cold air? 

While it is abnormally warm across much of the total land mass of the Northern Hemisphere with the average temperature 1.62°F warmer than normal (that's significant), the hottest areas compared to "normal" is the Arctic, while Siberia sticks out like a sore thumb, in the opposite.

The intensity of the cold is right now over Siberia, where many locations are dozens of degrees below zero.  It is normally cold in Siberia in winter.  But, this isn't winter yet!  %

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Just let this sink in: it's so cold there, schools have been forced to close... in SIBERIA!

It appears that an early snowfall across those regions caused early and strong formation of Siberian high pressure, which is a pretty common feature in the winter as extremely cold air is very dense and slow to move in that part of the world.

In response, though, to the cold high pressure over Siberia, the jet stream currents that were already pretty weak allowed milder air from the south to flow into the Arctic regions.  This, combined with already warmer-than-normal conditions throughout the recent months, did nothing but exacerbate the problem.

Warm water of the Arctic Sea needs a very cold airmass above to dissipate the heat, allowing sea ice to form and grow.  Mild air being pumped into the Arctic won't fit the bill!

Will this change?

It appears it will in the coming days and the overall temperatures will be decreasing, so the sea ice should fill in for most spots, and Santa, the elves and the reindeer will be just fine. %

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How thick that ice gets this winter, however, could impact next year's summer and beyond.  With ocean temperatures and sea ice, the effects can last a long time!  And given rising global temperatures, we don't want anything that prevents sea ice from forming.

Will this affect our winter?

The present situation won't affect us this winter because we expect this temporary displacement of the cold air to correct itself in the coming days to weeks, or even possible overcorrect -- meaning colder air across northern parts of Canada later in the winter season.

For us to get a really cold winter, we need cold, dry air to invade the prairie provinces of Canada and hang out for a while.  Then, given the right circumstances, that cold air can flood down the Fraser River valley of British Columbia and bring us a good chill.  We (or at least many of us) are still hopeful for this as it will increase our lowland snow chances.

Is this North Pole craziness climate change?

To an extent. But we don't know to what extent.

The simple fact that global temperatures have risen make some effect pretty much undeniable.

However, such an extremely rapid warm-up in many regions over the past few years -- or certainly at the North Pole in recent weeks -- is not something we would expect in such a small period of time simply due to anthropogenic (or "man made") global warming alone.

Too much, too soon.

So, it appears there are plenty of natural processes at work as well causing the gyration of global temperature and wind flow at the jet stream level high aloft.  But rising global temperatures are likely playing a part.

However -- and this is alarming -- current science predicts that human-caused warming is likely to make these sort of extreme weather patterns more likely later in the century because with a warming planet, we expect the jet stream to become more variable.

Cox Media Group