THE 5 MOST IMPRESSIVE WEATHER RECORDS
Let's start with the main thing - with the weather records, which surprised the just ended winter of Russians, earthlings and even penguins.
1. In Moscow, the 2019/2020 winter has become the warmest in all 140 years that the weather is being monitored. The scientific director of the Hydrometeorological Center of Russia, Roman Vilfand, called the temperature anomaly of the past winter simply incredible:
- In Moscow, this winter turned out to be super warm. Until now, the record of 59 years ago remained relevant: from December 1, 1960 to February 29, 1961, the average temperature was -2.8 degrees. Now the temperature is above this record by about 2.5 degrees. We can confidently say that such a warm winter will not be for a long time.
Why such a surprise? Wilfand has already recorded so many records at his post that the sports judges never dreamed of. In fact of the matter. Typically, temperature records overlap by tenths of a degree. Now two and a half at once. The average temperature of the three winter months in the capital was for the first time above zero, +0.6 degrees.
At the end of February, the thaw in Moscow exceeded climatic norms by 10 - 12 degrees, the weather was like in April.
Most likely, and throughout Russia, the past winter was the warmest in history. But meteorologists are still calculating the exact degrees.
2. Europe is the same story. Meteorologists in France have declared winter 2019/20 the warmest since 1900. In February, on the Cote d'Azur, locals and tourists enjoyed almost beach weather, +20 degrees. And not a single polar invasion with waves of cold, helpless in MeteoFrance. Usually there are from two to five of them during the winter.
Promotional video:
3. Helsinki and Oslo experienced the first ever winter without snow - for the Nordic countries, Finland and Norway, the fact is almost fantastic. But - a fact!
The Alps ski season was disrupted due to warm weather, even artificial snow did not save.
4. In the extreme south of our planet, there are also anomalies. In Antarctica, the temperature exceeded +20 degrees for the first time! Yes, it's summer in the southern hemisphere, but it's still an ice-covered continent - and suddenly it's twenty degrees.
However, the World Meteorological Organization, which maintains the Archive of Climatic Extremes, has officially counted the not so impressive, but also surprising for Antarctica, temperature of +18.4 degrees. Such warmth was on February 6 at the Argentine polar base Esperanza. And the achievement of +20.75 degrees, recorded on the Antarctic island of Seymour, has yet to be confirmed - whether they measured correctly, whether the thermometers are in order and so on. But this does not change the essence. We have an abnormally warm winter, on the other side of the planet, an unprecedentedly warm summer.
5. Globally, temperature records are also okay. January 2020 became the warmest in average temperature on Earth for 140 years of meteorological observations, reported in the US National Atmosphere and Ocean Administration (NOAA). For 42 months in a row (that is, more than three years), the temperature on the planet has exceeded climatic norms.
EXPERT COMMENTARY
Will it always be this way now?
Is it possible to say goodbye to a real Russian winter? Will there be no more snowdrifts and frosts in Moscow? And who is bored - go for winter holidays to Siberia and the Kola Peninsula? Alexey KOKORIN, Director of the Climate and Energy Program of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF-Russia) shares his forecasts:
- In the future, abnormally warm months will be repeated more often: the same December, as in 2019, thaw and almost snowless January and February, as in 2020. But it is precisely the individual months. And so that all three winter months in a row were record-breaking warm, like now, this is a truly unique case and will not be repeated often. And even more so, one cannot expect all winters to be like this. For climatologists, this is more of a starting point. We now know that it could be so. Indeed, in all models and calculations, meteorologists rely on observations of past years: what floods have already happened, what temperatures … After this anomalous winter, I think, many people stopped considering global warming as someone's invention and horror stories. Obviously, this is reality.
WHO'S GUILTY
Arctic or Atlantic?
Russia, and Europe too, was left without a normal winter by the Atlantic Ocean. More precisely, unusual processes in the atmosphere above it, says Roman Vilfand, scientific director of the Hydrometeorological Center of Russia.
What happened? There is such a thing - the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The greater the difference in atmospheric pressure between the Icelandic minimum (the place where the Atlantic cyclones originate) and the Azores maximum (the high-pressure area in the central Atlantic), the more powerful the NAO. The wobble is surprisingly strong this year. Air masses from the Atlantic (and they carry thaws) flew out as if from a cannon and reached not only the European part of Russia, as usual, but also to Yamal, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Yakutia and even to the Khabarovsk Territory.
“I don’t remember that,” says Vilfand.
Foreign climatologists also have another "suspect" - the Arctic Oscillation. To put it simply, the pressure change over the polar regions is high or low there. When there is an anticyclone above the top of the planet, that is, high pressure, frosty air from the north penetrates to temperate latitudes, providing us with real cold winters. Now the atmospheric pressure in the Arctic was unusually low, and this situation persisted for a very long time.
YULIA SMIRNOVA
