NOAA Releases 2015 Arctic Report Card

The governments committed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and set a more ambitious goal of achieving a 1.5-degree limit.

But both these targets are too high to stop or reverse the thaw of the Arctic.

For instance, in the Barents Sea, cold-water Arctic fishes have seen their habitat shrink, as warmer-water predators such as cod, beaked redfish and the flatfish called long rough dab have invaded the colder reaches of the sea, Kovacs said.

“There is a possibility, but not a certainty” that this year’s El Nino could impact the Arctic, said Jim Overland, an oceanographer and Arctic scientist for NOAA. The temperature reached a record +4 degrees Celsius from October to December of the year. “That’s based upon the Carbon dioxide that we’ve already put into the atmosphere and will be putting in for the next 20 years”.

“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic”, Spinrad said. Only the District of Columbia, New Mexico and Nevada had lower graduation rates during the 2013-14 school year.

Warm dry conditions and below average snow cover in central Alaska contributed to the state’s almost record-breaking summer fire season, said Martin Jeffries, an Arctic science advisor with the U.S. Office of Naval Research. And so was the spreading infleunce of ice sheet mass and sea ice. This minimum ice coverage last September was apparently the fourth lowest on record.

This year, over half of the surface of the Greenland ice sheet melted, representing its first significant melting since 2012.

NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources.

A new report card on the Arctic confirms what villagers in Alaska see on a regular basis – sea ice continues to melt while temperatures on land and sea keep rising. How this trend might effect food chains in the arctic is unclear.

Freshwater discharge: In 2014, and for the first seven months of 2015, the combined discharge of fresh water from eight Eurasian and North American rivers into the Arctic Ocean was 10 percent greater than the discharge in the decade of 1980-89.

Vegetation: Arctic tundra greenness, a measure of live vegetation (grasses, sedges, mosses, lichens, shrubs) productivity and biomass, had been increasing over the past two to three decades, as indicated by the satellite record. Scientists aren’t sure what is causing this switch or exactly what its ramifications might be. Marine animals are struggling to adapt to changes occurring at an alarming pace. Scientists estimate that Pacific walrus populations have fallen by half as a result of declining sea ice and hunting. Overcrowding is also a concern, as the sea mammals have been observed rushing onto beaches by the thousands as previous icy haunts melt into the sea. That represents a 5.4-degree-F (3 degrees C) increase from the average air temperatures in 1900. The warmer temperatures are not a thing to embrace because they have consequences related to them.

This sea ice retreat is a considerable threat to animals such as walruses where they use ice for mating, birthing and getting out of the water.

The Arctic has warmed more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit since 2000 because of human-driven climate change, scientists announced Tuesday.

At a recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, NOAA chief scientist Rick Spinrad warned that warming weather is happening more than twice as fast in the Arctic than anywhere else in the world, and NOAA “knows” this is because of climate and drastic changes in weather patterns.

The regions in the Arctic are warming at a rate that is twice that of the rest of the Global Village.