It’s time again to take the temperature of the Far North and home planet Earth. In a word: feverish.
So how warm was it? Just ask them up in Nome Alaska, arrayed along the Bering Sea on not-so sunny shores of the Seward Peninsula. As the Nome Nugget reported last week, the “City of the Golden Sands” simmered above freezing from May 29 to Sept. 30, the second longest period of zucchini-growing weather in the city’s history.
“Bye, bye skirts and hello long underwear,” wrote Diana Haecker in the Nugget’s Oct. 4 issue. “A distinct chill in the air on (Oct. 1) signaled the approach of the season when a change in wardrobe is called for.”
A day short of breaking the record, Nome posted 125 frost- free days, officially bringing the summer to end last Monday, when temperatures dropped to the 32 °F mark at the Nome airport. … This year’s frost-free season missed the record by one day. The record was set in 1989 and stands with 126 frost-free days.
Elsewhere on Earth, the January-to-September period posted the highest average temperatures ever recorded for land areas since 1880, with the Northern Hemisphere also experiencing the warmest nine-month period on record, with temperatures about 1.33 °F above the long-term average.
Somewhat less-warm ocean temperatures kept the global average from busting all-time records. The oceans were only the seventh warmest on record.
“Anomalously warm temperatures have covered much of the globe throughout the year,” the National Climate Data Center reported in its latest climate update.
The January-September 2007 map of temperature anomalies shows the presence of warmer-than-average temperatures across all land areas, with the exception of the southern countries located in South America and the south central states in the contiguous U.S.
The NCDC ranked September as fifth warmest since 1880 for land and ocean surface temperatures combined. But land alone, minus the sea, caught the fever.
The September land surface temperature ranked second warmest on record, while the ocean surface temperature ranked ninth warmest in the 127-year record. The global surface temperature for the combined January-September year-to-date period was the fourth warmest January-September on record, while the global land surface temperature ranked warmest on record for January-September 2007.
Alaska experienced the 12th warmest September since 1918, with temperatures averaging 2.61 °F above the 1971-2000 average, the NCDC reported.
Other Far North tidbits:
- Alaska had its 2nd warmest July-September on record, with a temperature 2.38 °F above the average.
- Alaska had its 24th warmest January-September on record, with a temperature 0.61 °F above average.
- Nome, Alaska was frost free for the entire months of June, July, August & September. October 1, the temperature dipped to 32 degrees, ending the 2nd longest frost-free season in Nome’s 100+ years of climate record keeping.
- Anchorage, Alaska was warmer and wetter than normal. September 2007 was the 12th wettest on record in Anchorage with 4.30 inches, 1.43 inches above normal. Anchorage’s average high of 56.9 degrees was 1.9 degrees above normal, and the minimum average temperature of 43.9 was 2.5 degrees above normal.
The NCDC also offered a few more details on the unprecedented meltdown of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska.
- Sea ice extent for September was 39 percent below the 1979-2000 mean.
- Sea ice extent for September has shrank 10.2 percent per decade since 1979, with high latitude temperatures rising about 1.2 °F per decade.
- Sea ice extent for September shrank 23 percent below its previous record set in 2005.
Living at an almost equatorial 57.67°N, September was positively chilly. The UK Met Office tells us that down here in Scotland we had the coldest September since 1994. Despite this, though, we were still warmer than the 1971-2000 mean. So far, October has been much warmer than September was.
I was a bit surprised at this:
I do follow the statistics posted by NASA GISS, and (for combined land & sea) they have September as 4th warmest, not 5th.
I’d also calculated (from the NASA GISS figures) that we probably had the second warmest Jan-Sep period in the record, and (since 1998 actually had quite a cold October and November) we were quite likely to see 2007 as the second warmest year to date.
This doesn’t tie in with the NCDC, though. I could accept that my maths is probably clumsy compared to theirs, but they put 1998 as warmer than 2005 (in contrast to NASA GISS).
I know that NASA GISS, WMO, and the UK’s Hadley Centre all monitor global temperatures with slightly different results – I’d kind of assumed that the NCDC and NASA used the same data, but this now appears not to be the case.
Can anyone point me to anything that explains why the NCDC’s figures are different from NASA’s?
Not that this is important – the trends are pretty much the same no matter which source you use, and we’re clearly warming. I’m just curious, and would like to know more.
Sorry – I’ve confused myself (again).
The quote I had problems with was:
I do wish there was a preview button ….