A Few Things Ill Considered

Talking about the weather….

Posted by coby on September 10, 2012
(5)
More »

[Update: as pointed out in comments, this forecast is for a town called North Pole, Alaska, not the geographic north pole, or even the magnetic one...I must apologize for my haste and sloppiness.  On the other hand, this incident has cleared up a number of long-standing structural engineering questions I have had about Santa's Workshop...]

 

I have never checked a site like Weather.com for the North pole before, so not really sure how much to trust this forecast.  If it is accurate, we are looking at some pretty balmy weather up there for the next ten days and perhaps a late finish for the melting season.  It has highs from 49F to 58 F (that would be 9C to 14C) and overnight lows mostly above freezing for the next ten days (at least).

Today’s extent graph looks like melting may be stalled, but the weather forecast suggests it ain’t over yet.

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png

(graph inserted on Sept 9th, 2012, but it will update on its own)

Keywords: ,
(5)
More »

Comments

  1. #1 spearmint1966
    September 10, 2012

    That’s the forecast for the town of North Pole, Alaska, at 64 degrees north latitude.

    Alert, Nunavut at 83 degrees N has forecasted highs in the teens Fahrenheit for the next week, lows in the single digits.

  2. #2 het
    September 10, 2012

    I just came across another angle on Arctic weather:

    This implies a major change due to a persistent high pressure
    zone over Greenland, leading to jet stream disturbances and
    our carzy Northern Hemisphere weather lately.

    It will be nice to see a proper [ie. peer reviewed] paper on
    the subject.

    -het

  3. #3 Eric Lund
    September 10, 2012

    That’s a reasonable looking forecast for the town of North Pole, which is about 20 km southeast of Fairbanks (and about 200 km south of the Arctic Circle). But it’s not reliable for indicating how the Arctic melt is going.

  4. #4 coby
    September 11, 2012

    Well that’s more than a little embarassing…

  5. #5 Wow
    September 11, 2012

    Well, it’s a common perception that the North Pole *belongs* in the USA…

    :-0