Multi-decadal Surface Temperature Trends and Extremes at Arctic Stations

Abstract:

The Arctic region is considered to be one where global temperatures are changing the most quickly; a number of factors make it the region where an accurate determination of surface temperature is the most difficult to measure or estimate. In developing a pan-Arctic perspective on Arctic in-situ temperature variability, several issues must be addressed including accounting for the different lengths of temperature records at different locations when comparing trends, accounting for the steep latitudinal controls on ‘seasonal’ trends, considering the often significant variability between different (sometimes a multitude) of temperature measurements made in the vicinity of a single station, and loss of detail information when data is ingested in a global archives or interpolated into gridded data sets.

The International Arctic Systems for Observing the Atmosphere (www.iasoa.org) is an internationally networked consortium of facilities that measure a wide range of meteorological and climate relevant parameters; temperature is the most fundamental of these parameters. Many of the observatories have the longest temperature records in the Arctic region including Barrow, Alaska (114 years), Tiksi, Russia (83 years), and Eureka, Canada (67 years). Using the IASOA data sets a detailed analysis is presented of temperature trends presented as a function of the beginning date from which the trend is calculated, seasonal trends considered in the context of the extreme Arctic solar ephemeris, and the variability in occurrence of annual extreme temperature events.

At the Tiksi observatory, a complete record is available of 3-hourly temperatures 1932 to present that was constructed through digitization of decades of written records. This data set is used to investigate if calculated trends and variabilities are consistent with those calculated from daily minimum and maximum values archived by the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information Global Historical Climatology Network (Daily GHCN), Version 3.