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LOADED 22: Record high temperature predicted Saturday for Longyearbyen. But don’t kill yourself – things will be ‘normal’ again the next morning

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It’s going to be 10 degrees Celsius on Friday morning and 10 degrees again on Sunday morning, so how radically different could things possible be in the interim?

About as radical as it can get, it turns out, as the Norwegian Meteorological Institute is predicting Longyearbyen will set a new all-time record high temperature of 22 degrees Celsius, exceeding the current record of 21.3 degrees set in 1979.

recordday
The anticipated record-high temperature day in Longyearbyen on Saturday, hour-by-hour, as forecast by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.

Warm air from the east and cold air on the mainland forcing heat northward means temperatures will build up throughout Friday morning to about 18 degrees as of midnight Saturday, then keep increasing at a somewhat slower rate until peaking much of Saturday evening. Some early morning drizzle is possible, but skies will otherwise be partly to mostly clear, and there will be at best some mild breezes to take the edge of the heat off.

“The reason for these warm air masses is a low pressure over northern Scandinavia which is placed ideally for warm air advection towards Svalbard,” wrote Line Båserud, a researcher for the institute’s Division for Climate Services, in an e-mail. “The winds are flowing anti-clockwise around a low pressure so when it is positioned in Northern Scandinavia, you get cold northern winds over Norway and on the other side you get southern winds which brings warm air from Russia towards Svalbard.”

mapanimated
An animated map (click to activate) shows how heat will build up in Longyearbyen between now and Saturday. Map courtesy of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.

She noted area temperatures are expected to continue increasing over the long term, so “we expect to see more records for warmer temperatures than for cold.”

At the moment, however, “this is a rare occurrence as the normal average temperature for July is 5.9 degrees,” the weather service wrote on its official Twitter feed.

Torsten Hanssen, a journalist for Adresseavisen, noted in a response unusually warm days are an increasing norm for Longyearbyen.

“This year it is 60 years since it was first measured above 15 degrees in Longyearbyen,” he wrote. “On July 31 (that year), it was measured exactly 15.0 degrees. Since then, the 15-degree mark has been passed another 60 times, the last time on July 6 and 7 of last year (16.1 and 15.4 degrees, respectively).”

Norwaysaturday
Longyearbyen’s forecast high of 22C on Saturday is the highest for all of Norway.

The weather service’s website description of its forecast on Saturday for Spitsbergen, by the way, is a rather vague and unintentionally humous “slightly scattered rain early in the day, otherwise mostly stay-at-home weather.”

Temperatures will drop rapidly after midnight Sunday, and the long-term forecast is for a consistent temperature of about 10 degrees, overcast skies and little wind until next weekend.

The weather service’s description of its forecast on Saturday for Spitsbergen, by the way, is a rather vague and unintentionally humous “slightly scattered rain early in the day, otherwise mostly stay-at-home weather.”

The forecast high, if reached, is the highest for all major municipalities in Norway. In fact, the lows for the day in many of them are expected to reach unusual below-freezing temperatures.

Freakishly high temperatures have become something of the “new normal” in Longyearbyen for years, including a streak of 111 months of above-average temperatures that ended earlier this year. The town’s accelerated rate of climate change, with temperatures rising twice as fast as the Arctic average and up to six times fast than Earth’s, has also attracted global headlines.

About Post Author

Mark Sabbatini

I'm a professional transient living on a tiny Norwegian island next door to the North Pole, where once a week (or thereabouts) I pollute our extreme and pristine environment with paper fishwrappers decorated with seemingly random letters that would cause a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters to die of humiliation. Such is the wisdom one acquires after more than 25 years in the world's second-least-respected occupation, much of it roaming the seven continents in search of jazz, unrecognizable street food and escorts I f****d with by insisting they give me the platonic tours of their cities promised in their ads. But it turns out this tiny group of islands known as Svalbard is my True Love and, generous contributions from you willing, I'll keep littering until they dig my body out when my climate-change-deformed apartment collapses or they exile my penniless ass because I'm not even worthy of washing your dirty dishes.
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