A ‘heat wave’ and snowfall: Why researchers are puzzled by Antarctica’s recent weather

Antarctica

The alarmist Guardian’s ‘climate disaster’ turns out to be ‘climate mitigation’, due to the massive snowfall. A so-called heatwave where temperatures reached a chilly 10 degrees Fahrenheit (-12 Celsius), seems to have fooled a lot of people. The Guardian speculates that ‘climate breakdown could be accelerating’, but seeing what you wanted to see doesn’t always work.
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While researchers say it’s too early to know what role, if any, climate change plays here, the event has their attention because it’s so extreme, says NBC News.

It’s been a strange stretch for the icy desert at the bottom of the world.

In mid-March, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica soared 70 degrees Fahrenheit above average. It was high enough for researchers living there to brave the elements for a bare-chested group photo.

The comparatively balmy temperatures, which reached around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, arrived courtesy of a history-making atmospheric river — a plume of concentrated moisture that flows through the sky.

This one brought an incredible dump of snow in the inner reaches of the ice sheet, something quite rare for the area.

And in what could be a separate development, the Conger Ice Shelf — a hunk of ice similar in area to Los Angeles — collapsed into the sea right around the same time, satellite imaging shows.

Researchers are scrambling to make sense of what has happened. The surprising temperatures and moisture are already changing how they think about weather in Antarctica and raising questions about what impacts the continent could see if such a wild temperature swing had happened in summer — or in a warmer future.

And while researchers say it’s too early to know what role, if any, climate change is playing here, the event has their attention because it’s so extreme.

“It was something we didn’t think was possible in Antarctica, the magnitude of heat, especially in what should be the cold season in Antarctica,” said Jonathan Wille, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Grenoble Alpes in France, of the heat wave. “We’ve never seen the atmosphere behave like this over Antarctica.”

The heat wave and dramatic inland snowfall highlight the importance of a better understanding of the complicated dynamics of atmospheric rivers — which today bolster the ice sheet but could be cause for concern in the future. Better grasping these patterns could be key to understanding the polar region’s future.

Having snowfall during a heat wave might sound counterintuitive, but this is Antarctica, after all, where inland winter temperatures routinely fall beneath 60 degrees below zero.

The recent atmospheric river event played out over several days. March 17 was the fourth-wettest day since 1980 for the ice sheet, according to modeling and analysis by Xavier Fettweis, a climatology professor at the University of Liège in Belgium.

A day later, temperatures at the Concordia station, a research station nearly 700 miles from the coast, spiked to a high of about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, stunning researchers.

“An extreme event of this magnitude has never been observed at Dome C,” said Peter Neff, a glaciologist, climate scientist and assistant research professor at the University of Minnesota, referring to the Concordia area.

Coastal temperatures rose above freezing levels, and rain pattered the coast. Intense snowfall across the interior of East Antarctica added an estimated 69 gigatons of water mass to the ice sheet, according to modeling by Fettweis. That’s the equivalent of nearly 28 million Olympic-size swimming pools of added water mass that came down in frozen form. That represents more than a third of the yearly ice loss in Antarctica.

“It added much more mass to the ice sheet than it took away,” Wille said. “Events like this, they help mitigate some of the sea level rise caused by climate change” by storing water as polar ice.

Such snowfall offers important protection, too.

Full article here.