Northern Tip Of Alaska Had Its First Cooling Degree Day Yesterday. Why That Matters

Add another place to the list of all time record heat this summer
Utqiagvik, on the northernmost tip of Alaska, had its
warmest day on record with a high of 76 and low of 56.
Normally, summer high temperatures are in the 
40s and lows are in the 30s up there. 

 The town of Utqiagvik, formerly Barrow, on the northernmost tip of Alaska, had a mean temperature of 66 degrees yesterday. 

It was the warmest day overall in that community's history (The mean temperature is adding the low, 56 and the high, 76 together then dividing by two).

Saturday was also, then the first day, Utqiagvik ever recorded a cooling degree day 

Now, bear with me, as this is going to be a little esoteric at first. A cooling degree day is the number of degrees the mean temperature was above 65 degrees. Cooling degree days are used as a rough tool to gauge air conditioning and other cooling needs in buildings. 

I don't think the fine citizens of Utqiagvik were rushing out today to buy air conditioners. After all, normal high temperatures this time of year are in the mid and upper 40s, with lows in the mid-30s. Kind of like November in Vermont. 

But this whole warm spell is another in a zillion different examples of how the Arctic is warming faster than most of the rest of the planet.  Which is why you should care.

First of all, this wasn't a one-off in Utqiagvik. The previous warmest day on record was 63.5 degrees, a record which was tied on July 19. What is now the fourth hottest day in those northern reaches was tied on July 17, as Alaskan climatologist Brian Brettschneider tells us on X, formerly known as Twitter.

(Gosh, there's a lot of "formerly known as" mentions in this post).

Meanwhile, Deadhorse, Alaska, further east near the Arctic coast in Alaska, reached 84 degrees Saturday, it's hottest day ever.

As Brettschneider points out, weirdly hot weather in Alaska doesn't stay in Alaska. Thank you, climate change. 

If there are any land-based glaciers in the heat zone, they'll melt all that much faster, contributing to sea level rise. 

Less certain is the effects Arctic warmth has on the jet stream.  Some scientists think that the warmer Arctic makes the jet stream weaker, more likely to meander wildly and get "stuck" in certain patterns. 

It's still up for debate whether that's happening, but signs are there.  Which could be one reason we in Vermont seem to have had a flash flood every five minutes most of this summer.