News brief: Antarctic 70 and Arctic 50 degrees above normal

 FILE - A drop of water falls off an iceberg melting in the Nuup Kangerlua Fjord near Nuuk in southwestern Greenland, Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017. Earth’s poles are undergoing simultaneous freakish extreme heat with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees (40 degrees Celsius) warmer than average and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) warmer than average. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

News Brief, Daily Courier, March 20, 2022

 “Antarctic 70 and Arctic 50 degrees above normal”

 “Earth’s poles are undergoing freakish extreme heat, with parts of Antarctica more than 70 degrees warmer than average, and areas of the Arctic more than 50 degrees above average.  Weather stations in Antarctica shattered records Friday as the region neared autumn.  The two-mile high Concordia station was at 10 degrees, which is about 70 degrees warmer than average, while the even higher Vostok station hit a shade above 0 degrees, beating the all-time record by 27 degrees, according to a tweet from extreme weather tracker Maximiliano Herrara.  It caught officials at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, by surprise said Center ice scientist Walt Meier.  ‘They are opposite seasons.  You don’t see the north and south poles both melting at the same time.  It’s definitely an unusual occurrence.’”

 “What the heck!” I said to my daughters.  I assumed the temperatures were Fahrenheit, since they didn’t say otherwise and this is the US. “Both temperatures are below freezing.  Nothing is melting!”  I looked up the stations to see which is Arctic and which is Antarctic.  They were both Antarctic.  We ended up deciding that they must be using Celsius.  But that would make a 70 degree difference a lot more intense: 158 degrees F, which it could not be. 

 Nowhere was any particular place in the Arctic mentioned.  I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska in the early ‘70s when we had a 73-degree rise in 24 hours, from -40 degrees F to 33 above.  Icicles were melting, and people were running around in boots and shorts.  I also saw a fall and winter, 1976-77, there when we had rain on Halloween and Thanksgiving, and we didn’t get snow that stuck until March.  (Interestingly, -40 is the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius.)

 I looked up the headline of this brief and found many copies of the full article by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press.  Almost all included both Fahrenheit and Celsius, though Fahrenheit was not labeled, until I came to the LA Times, which only gave Fahrenheit and yet did not label it.  Otherwise, the article was the same as the other Borenstein articles.  It appears to be the source for the Courier’s brief, which was edited a tad too brief to be accurate.   https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-03-19/antarctica-and-arctic-70-and-50-degrees-above-normal  

 This article from U.S News is representative of most of the articles I perused: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-03-18/hot-poles-antarctica-arctic-70-and-50-degrees-above-normal. These show that temperatures in the Courier brief are indeed Fahrenheit.  All but the Courier’s brief included the single Antarctic station, Terra Nova, that is on the coast and was 14 degrees above freezing.  It is located on an inlet near the Ross Ice Shelf (a fact that I had to look up) which has been slowly melting and breaking up for decades.

 None of them included any particular place or temperature in the Arctic in the article itself, except to mention Greenland at the end, only half of which is within the Arctic Circle and which is brushed by the Gulf Stream, which Borenstein mentioned did not name.  Most of them also include a photo of dripping ice, from an iceberg in a Nuup Kangerlua Fjord near Nuuk, well outside of the Arctic Circle, about the same latitude as Iceland.

 I object strongly to statements by two weather scientists.  National Snow and Ice Data Center ice scientist Walt Meier said, “They are opposite seasons.  You don’t see the north and south poles both melting at the same time.  It’s definitely an unusual occurrence.” 

Spring and fall are not opposite except in time.  They begin 6 months apart, but their weather is much the same, though reversed in time.  Winter and summer have opposite temperatures, outside equatorial zones.  Both places where melting was reported in March were on coasts, one just inside and one outside the Arctic Circle.   

 University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara said, regarding East Antarctica’s Dome C-ii, that logged 14 degrees (-10 degrees Celsius) Friday, where the normal is -45 degrees (-43 degrees Celsius): “That’s a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That’s dramatic.”

 January below the tropics is early summer and is cooler than March, late summer, after heating up for two months, just like July is cooler than September above the tropics.  Interestingly, March is also warmer than January in winter in Northern temperate zones.  If there is any month that places near the Arctic and Antarctic Circles latitudes would have melting at the same time, it’s March.  There probably is also a temperature inversion in high Antarctic mountains that makes it warmer above the inversion than below in the interior in winter, created by ice fog that settles in the valleys, as it did in Fairbanks when I lived there, which explains the record highs, though no melting, in the high mountains of Antarctica.