Will Santa be sweating in his suit this winter? UTM professor says it’s a possibility

With the toy workshop in full swing and gift delivery schedules to plan, Santa Claus has enough to keep him hot and bothered without worrying about warm North Pole temperatures this December. However, based on an analysis of last year’s winter warming event, Kent Moore, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto Mississauga, says Santa “had better watch out.”

In late December 2015, there was excitement in the meteorological community because forecasts predicted that the temperature at the North Pole would rise above zero degrees Celsius. Although these predictions turned out to be unduly optimistic, during the 24 hours from 6 a.m. on Dec. 29 to 6 a.m. on Dec. 30, the North Pole experienced an upswing in temperature from −26.8 °C to −0.8 °C, and temperatures in the vicinity of the pole actually did rise above the freezing mark.  In addition, rain probably fell at the pole. Soon afterward, the temperatures returned to more seasonal values.

“The late December 2015 warming event at the pole was associated with a perturbed polar vortex that advected [transferred horizontally] warm and moist air into the North Pole region from the adjoining Nordic Seas,” says Moore in a paper published in Scientific Reports on Dec. 15. (The polar vortex is the region of the upper atmosphere where colder air is situated.) “Contrary to popular belief, the warming was not connected to the tornadoes in Texas or the flooding in Britain that took place around the same time.”

Polar warmings generally happen once or twice a decade, says Moore, and he suggests that midwinter warming events may become more common at the North Pole as the region makes a transition to warmer, wetter winters overall.

“It is proposed that this enhanced trend in extreme warmth and moisture at the pole is associated with the loss of winter sea ice from the adjoining Greenland and Barents Seas that is moving the reservoir of warm and moist air that exists over the Nordic Seas closer to the pole, allowing for a greater efficiency of cyclones in transporting this heat and moisture polewards,” writes Moore in his paper.

In order to determine what had really occurred weather-wise at the North Pole during the last days of December 2015, Moore analyzed data from seven meteorological ice buoys that collect weather information in the vicinity of the pole; data from the nearby archipelago of Svalbard; numerical weather prediction model data from a number of countries; and satellite measures of daily mean sea ice concentration.

Moore, a professor in the Department of Chemical & Physical Sciences, predicts that the increased frequency of warming events will place increased stress on the animal and plant life that inhabit the North Pole and High Arctic regions.

“Santa and his reindeer may want to consider relocating to the South Pole for a while, because—in contrast to conditions at the North Pole—the sea ice there is increasing,” Moore says with a chuckle.