A new study, published in Environmental Research: Climate and co-authored by Senior Scientist Dr. Jen Francis at Woodwell Climate Research Center, finds that despite abnormal warmth globally, and especially in the Arctic, severe winter cold-air outbreaks will continue, and perhaps become more frequent across the Northern Hemisphere.
“Even though the globe is warming and cold records are falling less often, we are still seeing surprisingly severe cold spells that sometimes last for many days and invade regions unaccustomed to severe cold,” said Dr. Francis. “It seems really counterintuitive, but there will be plenty of ice, snow, and frigid air in the Arctic winter for decades to come, and that cold can be displaced southward into heavily populated regions by Arctic heat waves.”
“In this comprehensive review of recent literature augmented with new analysis, we find the ongoing warming of the Arctic may provide an explanation,” added study lead-author Dr. Edward Hanna.
The stratospheric polar vortex is a mass of cold whirling air that forms high above the Arctic surface in response to the large north/south temperature difference that develops during winter. During recent warm winters with a relatively warmer Arctic, however, this vortex has tended to weaken, which can disrupt the normal flow of the jet stream below it (a river of wind above northern midlatitudes) and lead to conditions called ‘blocking’, which in turn allow pockets of cold Arctic air to plunge much farther south than normal.
This review provides a new analysis of recent research that offers further clarity around these complicated interactions. According to study co-author Dr. Muyin Wang, “An improved understanding of Arctic-midlatitude climate linkages is likely to benefit seasonal prediction and extreme weather preparedness, as well as the understanding of climate change.”
Researchers also underscore the need for urgent action to address the climate crisis, and mitigate and adapt to the consequences of increasingly extreme weather. “The Arctic may seem irrelevant and far away to most folks, but our findings show that the profound changes there affect billions of people around the Northern Hemisphere,” said Dr. Francis. “To reverse these trends, and better protect our communities and our planet, we must take bold and rapid action now to reduce the burning of fossil fuels and the build-up of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The tools to achieve this exist if we can muster the will.”
The study resulted from an international workshop held in Lincoln, UK, in 2023, and was supported by the International Arctic Science Committee, the World Climate Research Programme’s Climate & Cryosphere project and the University of Lincoln. The full text can be read here.
The state of the Arctic: High temperatures, melting ice, fires and unprecedented emissions
The Arctic tundra has switched from a carbon sink to a source of emissions, according to a NOAA report.
The Arctic just experienced its second-hottest year on record. And concerningly, the region’s tundra has transitioned from being a sink for carbon to a source of emissions as permafrost thaws, releasing carbon dioxide and methane.
That will only amplify the amount of heat-trapping gases that enter the atmosphere, paving the way for further warming.
A chapter of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) 2024 Arctic Report Card, published today, presents a new, comprehensive pan-Arctic carbon assessment that, when accounting for wildfire emissions, finds that the Arctic tundra has shifted from storing carbon to being a source of carbon emissions to the atmosphere.
While the Arctic has been a carbon “sink” for thousands of years—storing more carbon than it releases—the Arctic Report Card chapter, Arctic Terrestrial Carbon Cycling, explores how rapid Arctic warming is prompting a range of ecosystem changes that are leading to increased emissions throughout the region. Among these are thawing permafrost (perennially frozen ground), wildfires, and plant and microbial changes.
In particular, the assessment, led by scientists at Woodwell Climate Research Center, finds that 2024 marked the second-warmest average yearly permafrost temperatures on record for Alaska, and the second-highest year for wildfire emissions north of the Arctic Circle.
“The Arctic is warming up to four times the global rate, and we need accurate, holistic, and comprehensive knowledge of how climate changes will affect the amount of carbon the Arctic is taking up and storing, and how much it’s releasing back into the atmosphere, in order to effectively address this crisis,” said Dr. Sue Natali, Woodwell Climate scientist, chapter lead and lead of Woodwell Climate’s Permafrost Pathways project. “This report represents a critical step toward quantifying these emissions at scale which is critical for understanding their impacts on global climate and informing equitable mitigation and adaptation strategies.”
“In recent years, we’ve seen how increasing fire activity from climate change threatens both communities and the carbon stored in permafrost, but now we’re beginning to be able to measure the cumulative impact to the atmosphere, and it’s significant,” said Dr. Brendan Rogers, Woodwell Climate scientist, chapter co-author, and co-lead of Woodwell Climate’s Permafrost Pathways project.
“This year’s report demonstrates the urgent need for adaptation as climate conditions quickly change,” said Twila Moon, lead editor of the 2024 Arctic Report Card and deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “Indigenous Knowledge and community-led research programs can inform successful responses to rapid Arctic changes.”
Contributions to the chapter were also made by Woodwell Climate scientists, Dr. Kyle Arndt, Dr. Jacqueline Hung, Greg Fiske, Stefano Potter, and Dr. Anna Virkkala, as well as collaborators at University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Northern Arizona University, and Université de Montréal.
The Arctic Report Card combines the best available research from over 97 scientists from 11 countries, including seven from Woodwell Climate. Its chapters reveal record-setting observations of a rapidly warming Arctic, including rising air temperatures, declines of large inland caribou herds, and increasing precipitation. These climate impacts and others threaten the health, subsistence, and homes of many Indigenous communities living in the Arctic.
The full Arctic Report Card can be read here.
Second-warmest November on record means that 2024 is likely to be Earth’s hottest year, report says
Earth just experienced its second-warmest November on record — second only to 2023 — making it all but certain that 2024 will end as the hottest year ever measured, according to a report Monday by European climate service Copernicus.
Last year was the hottest on record due to human-caused climate change coupled with the effects of an El Nino. But after this summer registered as the hottest on record — Phoenix sweltered through 113 consecutive days with a high temperature of at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 Celsius) — scientists were anticipating that 2024 would set a new annual record as well.
Continue reading on AP News.
Some of the world’s biggest cities are so polluted they’re warming slower
But this surprising effect of pollution should hardly be taken as a good sign.
The question of whether global warming is accelerating is hotly contested among climate scientists. While some have argued that the current rate of warming — which hit an all-time high last year — is strictly correlated with increased fossil fuel emissions and therefore aligned with current climate models, others have cautioned that the Earth is far more sensitive to fossil fuels than previously thought and that humanity is hurtling toward tipping points from which there can be no return.
“What if you’re not on the map?”
Dr. Kelsey Leonard of the Shinnecock Indian Nation addressed this question to a room of Geographic Information System (GIS) professionals at Esri’s global mapping conference in 2023. Leonard, who uses maps to advance Indigenous water justice, asks this question to raise awareness about the absence of Indigenous land and languages in GIS tools. The removal of traditional place names in physical spaces, cartographic maps, and geospatial software often contributes to the erasure of Indigenous culture and history.
The Permafrost Pathways project, like Leonard, is working to change that.
Read more on Permafrost Pathways
Under the thick forest of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the ancient ruins of a Maya City have been uncovered with the use of remote sensing.
Of course, that wasn’t the outcome that Woodwell Climate’s Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Wayne Walker, anticipated when he and his team collected and processed the remote sensing dataset for an unrelated project nearly a decade ago.
Walker’s team was mapping the region as part of the Mexico REDD+ project, a collaborative, international effort to explore strategies for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation in the country. Using a remote sensing technology called LiDAR, which scans terrain from a low-flying plane using pulses of laser light, Walker and project collaborators created a comprehensive map of forests—and the carbon they contain—across Mexico.
Walker and team coordinated the flights and processed the raw data for use in the project, uploading it afterwards to a website for public use. But, once the project ended, he all but forgot about the effort, apart from responding occasionally to researchers interested in downloading the dataset for their own work.
One of those researchers was Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD candidate at Tulane University researching the Classic Maya civilization, which thrived in the Yucatan until the 9th century when much of the region was abandoned, though their culture and languages persist to this day. Because of its unique ability to provide a detailed three-dimensional picture of whatever features are present on the ground, LiDAR imagery is an incredibly powerful tool for a multitude of purposes, from climate science to archaeology. And while the Mexico REDD+ project was interested in documenting the forests, Auld-Thomas was interested in what might be hidden beneath them.
“One scientist’s noise is another’s entire field of study,” says Walker. “In our other projects, like Climate Smart Martha’s Vineyard, we see historical structures like stone walls that aren’t necessarily meaningful to our work but could be of interest to archaeologists.”
In Mexico, the large areas surveyed by Woodwell Climate revealed not just individual human-built structures, but the plazas, reservoirs, and ball courts of an entire, previously undocumented city. The discovery, published in the journal Antiquity, supported the theory that the region was, in fact, densely settled during the height of Classic Maya civilization.
“We knew that it was close to a lot of interesting sites and settlements— areas of large-scale landscape modification that had been mapped and studied— but none of the survey areas themselves were actually places that archeologists ever worked, making it a really exciting sample to work with,” said Auld-Thomas.
Auld-Thomas had specifically been on the hunt for a pre-existing LiDAR dataset like the one Walker helped create— a survey conducted for completely non-archaeological purposes and therefore free of any biases. Essentially a “random sample” of the region. That randomness, and the subsequent discovery of an entire city, allowed Auld-Thomas and his colleagues to more strongly argue their point about intense urbanization in the Yucatán.
“If you’re only going to places where you know there’s going to be something, then of course, you’re going to find something significant, right? These random samples, not collected for archeological purposes, are gold in some respects,” said Dr. Marcello Canuto, who co-authored the paper. Canuto directs the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane, where the research for this study was conducted.
The unexpected outcome of the LiDAR survey offers a textbook example of the value of open data access. Sharing data and resources both within and between fields of science can jumpstart discovery and distribute the costs of an otherwise expensive data collection effort.
“Just look at what came out of the moonshot,” says Canuto. Thousands of technologies, developed in humanity’s pursuit of the moon landing, have found unforeseen applications in today’s world— including LiDAR.
“Certainly, many of us have produced datasets that have led to incremental advances in closely related fields,” says Walker. “But here is a special case of open source data advancing discovery in an entirely unrelated field of study.”
Advancements across fields continue to better our understanding of the world around us. And the lessons learned from a civilization like the Maya have very real parallels to today’s climate crisis.
As Auld-Thomas and Canuto show, the Maya densely settled the Yucatán Peninsula, maxing out the capacity of the surrounding environment to support their population. And then the regional climate shifted. A long-term drought settled in, resources became scarcer, governments became unstable, people started leaving the cities, and the infrastructure of the larger civilization collapsed.
“The reason environmental scientists collect LiDAR data of the forest, is that they are trying to understand environmental processes in order to help human societies conserve the landscape,” says Auld-Thomas. “As archaeologists, we try to understand how people in these exact environmental contexts have confronted deforestation and climate change and all of these other things before.”
For Canuto, the lesson to be learned lies not just in the environmental perils, but in the societal ones. Because what complex societies hate— be they the Classic Maya or today’s modern culture— is a lack of predictability. If a system cannot adapt, it will fail.
“The collapse was more than just climate change,” says Canuto. “It was a failure of a political system to respond to climate change.”
A winter weather puzzle is raising the risk of meteoric energy inflation
A winter forecasting enigma is poised to send prices for energy and food on a bumpy ride in the next few months, with commodities from natural gas to wheat at risk of breakneck gains against a backdrop of geopolitical turmoil.
Earlier in the year, meteorologists expected this December, January and February to be dominated by the La Niña climate pattern, which influences the world’s weather in specific ways. But La Niña has yet to arrive, and if it does, it will probably be weak. That makes the outlook for the northern hemisphere’s winter much more uncertain.