Meteorologists were shocked this week when three thunderstorms from Siberia to northern Alaska crossed the snowy Arctic as scientists unleashed lightning on the phenomenon of global warming.
Commenting on the hurricane that began on Saturday, Ed Pullum, a climate forecaster at Ferbanx National Weather Service, said:
Normally, the air in the Arctic Ocean, especially when the water is frozen, does not have the transport heat needed to generate lightning storms, but climate change is warming the Arctic better than the rest of the world, and this is changing, scientists say.
Summer lightning units in the Arctic Circle have tripled since 2010, a trend that is directly related to climate change, and the loss of sea ice in the northern hemisphere, scientists say in a March study in the Journal of Geophysical Research. As sea ice melts, more water can be inhaled by increasing humidity in the warmer atmosphere.
“It goes along with the temperature,” says Robert Holworth, associate professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Washington in Seattle. -The summer sun of the hour.
In Russia, Borrel Siberia has more lightning than in any other Arctic region, Holzworth said, adding that the paper has recorded lightning several times in the Arctic tree-free tundra regions as well as over the Arctic Ocean.
In August 2019, lightning struck 60 miles (100 km) from the North Pole, and the researchers found that if current weather trends in Alaska alone continue, thunderstorms will triple by the end of the century. Two studies by scientists at the National Center for Climate Research in Bolder, Colorado, published last year in Climate Dynamics magazine.
“In the past, there were very few unusual things,” says Rick Tomman, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska. This week’s Arctic hurricane showed lightning in unexpected places.
In the Arctic, “I have no memory for three consecutive days.” With lightning fastening, Siberia has seen an increase in forest fires in recent years. This week, the Russian military is deploying drones to irrigate nearly 2 million hectares (800,000 hectares) of forest fires, and the worst-affected region of Yakutia has been under a state of emergency for weeks.
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