We speculated a few days ago about whether the “Son of Storm Frank” might have battered Britain by now, and be sending a 10 meter swell past Svalbard towards the Arctic sea ice edge. That’s not quite how things have worked out in practice however! We haven’t had another named storm affecting the United Kingdom directly, but we have received a series of long distance swells from a sequence of hurricane force storms further out in the North Atlantic. I even managed to test my Arctic surfing equipment by personally partaking in the swell generated by Hurricane Alex!
Sorry to disappoint you @AvaPlaint. I'll update it eventually, but I'm just editing a #HurricaneAlex #Surfing video! pic.twitter.com/2sqaZD46FL
— Jim Hunt (@jim_hunt) January 18, 2016
Moving from the water into the air, here’s the Danish Meteorological Institute’s forecast for Greenland tomorrow:
If you’re at all familiar with isobars you’ll note yet another storm off Southern Greenland and that comparatively warm, moist air will be heading up the east coast of Greenland towards the Fram Strait, albeit not at the speeds generated by Storm Frank! As a consequence here is Climate Reanalyzer’s surface temperature anomaly map for first thing tomorrow:
and here is how it looks by Wednesday lunchtime:
As you can see, the ultimate effect of the recent hurricane force storms in both the Atlantic and the Pacific is to attack the Arctic with warm, moist air from both sides. Whilst we wait to see exactly how this much shorter term forecast pans out, particularly at the North Pole itself, the DMI’s graph of temperatures in the central Arctic has burst back into life after a “brief hiatus” in the New Year. Here’s how it looks at the moment:
