Northern Tip Of Alaska Just Had What Is For Them Extreme December Heat

Temperature departure map from Monday shows extreme
warmth, relative to average, over almost all of the state.

 In the winter, it's dark and extremely cold around Utqiagvik, formerly Barrow on the northern tip of Alaska. 

On Monday however, the high temperature at Utqiagvik reached 40 degrees.  

That doesn't sound too warm, but that 40 degree reading was way, way beyond what anybody had ever seen in that frigid northern settlement.

That 40 degrees broke the all-time record high for the month of December by a whopping six degrees. Not only that, it was the warmest it has ever been in Utqiagvik on any date between October 20 and April 22. 

A reading of 40 degrees in Utqiagvik is the normal high temperature for the middle of June there. It's comparable to as if it was in the upper 70s this time of year in Vermont.  

Utqiagvik also set a record on Friday, when the low temperature was 28 degrees, which was the warmest low for any date in December.

This time of year the normal high temperature in Utqiagvik is 4 above and the low would be 9 below.  It's so far north that the sun set in Utqiagvik on November 18 and won't rise above the horizon again until January 23.

So it clearly wasn't the sun's heat that caused the December heat wave in the northern reaches of Alaska. Instead, a strong storm well to the west pushed warm air from points much further south into the region.

Jokesters on social media are saying this is a current view of
Utqiagvik, on the northern tip of Alaska. In reality, it's dark
and cold there, but by their standards, just had a shockingly 
warm day that has people stunned

The air flowed down the slopes of the Brooks Range, which is to the south of Utqiagvik, which helped compress and warm the air. Also, a relative lack of sea ice along and off the coast might have also contributed.  

What passes for winter warm spells in Alaska happen from time to time, but such extreme warmth had been unheard of in northern Alaska until now.  I can't help but think climate change was a factor here. 

The Arctic is warming as much as four times faster than midlatitudes, and this can be seen in Utquiagvik.  As the Weather Channel points out, since 2015, the town has set monthly all time record highs in January, May, June, October and now December. 

The Washington Post tells us December warmth was not limited to Utqiagvik.  It's been widespread across much of northern Alaska and the Arctic as a whole. 

Umiat, roughly 170 miles southeast of Utqiagvik saw temperatures rise into the 40s in December for the first time since at least World War II.

In another part of the Arctic far from Alaska, Nuuk which is Greenland's capital, reached a whopping 50 degrees as December started. Most of the island's weather stations rose above freezing that day. Iceland got up as high as 58 degrees.

In the Arctic as a whole, the first few days of December were a good 11.5 degrees warmer than normal,  the Washington Post reports.