514 km north of the Arctic Circle, a weather station in America's northernmost city of Utkwiyagvik (formerly Barrow) in Alaska has been quietly collecting temperature data since the 1920s.
Earlier this month, while preparing for the US climate report, NSCI experts noticed something odd: They were missing data from Utkwiyagvik for all of 2017 and part of 2016.
It turned out that the temperature recorded during this period was higher than ever before. So much higher that an automated computer system installed to manage the data and remove inconsistencies flagged the temperature data as unrealistic and removed it from the report.
This is how Dick Arndt, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Monitoring Service, explained the event: “This is a sign of rapid climate change in and around the Arctic, the average temperature in Utkwiyagvik has changed so rapidly that an algorithm developed to detect artificial changes in instrumentation or plant environment. Thus, the information was excluded from the temperature analysis of Alaska, and the upstate was reported to be a little colder than it actually was.
In the subsequent detailed analysis of how this could have happened, Arndt explained that the exact location of the weather station, temperature recording equipment, and basic procedures sometimes changed, leading to variations in the data. Scientists have also developed an algorithm that filters noise and notifies scientists if something - such as a broken sensor - needs to be checked.
Since 1979, when the first year sea ice began to be monitored by a satellite, the average temperature in Utkwiyagvik has increased by 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit from January to September. This is 2 times higher than the lower 48 states.
In October, November and December, temperatures rose sharply by a difference of 7.8, 6.9 and 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively, Arndt said.
The high temperatures mean that the volume of Arctic ice in the region has decreased significantly, leading to even greater warming. And since this vicious circle - from high temperature to a decrease in ice volume and again to a rise in temperature and even more loss of ice - repeated itself, the weather station in Utkwiyagvik did just that. what I had to do: decided that something broke.
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But it turned out that it was not the station that was out of order, but the climate.
The Utkwiyagvik case is a terrifying look into the future of the rest of the world. In a 2010 description of a distant village and its environment, the Smithsonian concluded that the locality is a "zero point for climate change."