Warm!
December in the east, was, to say the least, a bit warm. Now that we have hit the New Year, temperatures have cooled down to normal. But if you think it was warm in the east, why not try the North Pole?
A powerful winter cyclone — the same storm that led to two tornado outbreaks in the United States and disastrous river flooding — has driven the North Pole to the freezing point this week, 50 degrees above average for this time of year.
From Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning, a mind-boggling pressure drop was recorded in Iceland: 54 millibars in just 18 hours. This triples the criteria for “bomb” cyclogenesis, which meteorologists use to describe a rapidly intensifying mid-latitude storm. A “bomb” cyclone is defined as dropping one millibar per hour for 24 hours.
Now, obviously this is not all about climate change. It’s also about El Niño, a freak storm, and luck. But it is partly about climate change in a year that broke yet another global temperature record, with nearly the entire globe having above-average temperatures. Above freezing at the North Pole in late December? What? That’s scary.