The Arctic is responding to climate change

A new study was recently published in the journal Science that chronicles three decades of arctic animal movements. The study is called Arctic Animal Movement Archive. There have been over 200 studies addressing the impacts on 86 species of animals that call the Arctic home.

"There's changes everywhere you look – everything is changing," said Dr. Gil Bohrer, an author of the new archive.

The culmination of 30 years of studies had been carried out by more than 100 universities, government agencies and conservation organizations in 17 countries. These studies involved tracking of wildlife from caribou to golden eagles to bowhead whales across the Arctic region. Dr. Bohrer saw a chance to combine the data from all that research and develop a universal, bigger picture of how animals of all types are reacting to the changes in the Arctic.

"Everyone that we knew that ever tracked anything in the Arctic - we tried to approach them and ask them if they're willing to participate," Bohrer recalled. The result is a growing database, one that is still being expanded and added to with new studies, which allows researchers to analyze things on a scale that simply wasn't possible before, Bohrer said.

Change has been documented in a caribou sub-population giving birth farther north in the Arctic and shifting calving dates to an earlier time. It's probable that this sub-population of caribou is adapting to environmental changes. Yet, adaptation is not the same for all arctic species. Many barren-ground caribou are experiencing low calf-survival rates, and their overall numbers are declining.

Meanwhile, Arctic temperatures are climbing. Mid November 2020 temperatures across the Arctic basin were 12˚F above normal. In some areas, temperatures were as high as 30˚F above the norm. This past Arctic summer and fall season saw 100˚F exceeded several times. A section of The Northwest Passage that goes along the Siberian coast remained open and navigable for a record 112 days, which shattered the previous record by nearly a month.

"Researchers say that Siberia's extreme heat in 2020 would have been effectively impossible without human-caused climate change and was made 600 times more likely by human emissions of greenhouse gases," notes the author of a Nov. 24 article in Yale Environment 360.

An agreement between the United States, Denmark and Canada in 1946 and '47 respectively, established the first of just over 100 weather stations in the Arctic region.

Now for November 2020 weather data as recorded at my home weather station. First, here are the November all-time highs, lows and mean for our area. The all-time high was 69˚F in 1989, the all-time low was -10˚ in 1985, while the all-time mean is 37.5. The November high temperature was 63.1˚ on the 4th. The low was 19.4˚ on the 9th, and the mean was 38.1˚. The all-time precipitation numbers for November are as follows: all-time maximum precipitation was 3.95 inches in 1973; the all-time mean precipitation was 1.24 inches; while the all-time maximum snowfall was 17.5 inches in 1955; the all-time mean snowfall for November is 1.3 inches. For November 2020, I measured 1.38 inches of precipitation and 1.1 inches of snowfall.

Here are the December 2020 outlooks for both temperature and precipitation as provided by the Climate Prediction Center, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. We have a 40% chance of below-normal temperatures, 27% chance of above-normal, and a 33% chance of near-normal. For precipitation, we have a 41% chance of above normal, 26% chance of below normal and 33% near normal.