Press Release: Landsat 8 helps unveil the coldest place on Earth
SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Scientists recently recorded the lowest temperatures on Earth at a desolate and remote ice plateau in East Antarctica, trumping a record set in 1983 and uncovering a new puzzle about the ice-covered continent.
Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), and his team found temperatures from −92 to −94 degrees Celsius (−134 to −137 degrees Fahrenheit) in a 1,000-kilometer long swath on the highest section of the East Antarctic ice divide.
The measurements were made between 2003 and 2013 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor on board NASA’s Aqua satellite and during the 2013 Southern Hemisphere winter by Landsat 8, a new satellite launched early this year by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.
“I’ve never been in conditions that cold and I hope I never am,” Scambos said. “I am told that every breath is painful and you have to be extremely careful not to freeze part of your throat or lungs when inhaling.”
The record temperatures are several degrees colder than the previous record of −89.2 degrees Celsius (−128.6 degrees Fahrenheit) measured on July 21, 1983 at the Vostok Research Station in East Antarctica. They are far colder than the lowest recorded temperature in the United States, measured at −62 degrees Celsius (−79.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in Alaska, in northern Asia at -68 degrees Celsius (−90.4 degrees Fahrenheit), or even at the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet at -75 degrees Celsius (−103 degrees Fahrenheit).
Scambos said the record temperatures were found in several 5 by 10 kilometer (3 by 6 mile) pockets where the topography forms small hollows of a few meters deep (2 to 4 meters, or 6 to 13 feet). These hollows are present just off the ice ridge that runs between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji—the ice dome summits of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Antarctic bases sit on each of the sites and are generally not occupied during Antarctic winters.
Under clear winter skies in these areas, cold air forms near the snow surface. Because the cold air is denser than the air above it, it begins to move downhill. The air collects in the nearby hollows and chills still further, if conditions are favorable.
“The record-breaking conditions seem to happen when a wind pattern or an atmospheric pressure gradient tries to move the air back uphill, pushing against the air that was sliding down,” Scambos said. “This allows the air in the low hollows to remain there longer and cool even further under the clear, extremely dry sky conditions,” Scambos said. “When the cold air lingers in these pockets it reaches ultra-low temperatures.”
“Any gardener knows that clear skies and dry air in spring or winter lead to the coldest temperatures at night,” Scambos said. “The thing is, here in the United States and most of Canada, we don’t get a night that lasts three or four or six months long for things to really chill down under extended clear sky conditions.”
Centuries-old ice cracks
Scambos and his team spotted the record low temperatures while working on a related study on unusual cracks on East Antarctica’s ice surface that he suspects are several hundred years old.
“The cracks are probably thermal cracks—the temperature gets so low in winter that the upper layer of the snow actually shrinks to the point that the surface cracks in order to accommodate the cold and the reduction in volume,” Scambos said. “That led us to wonder what the temperature range was. So, we started hunting for the coldest places using data from three satellite sensors.”
More than 30 years of data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on the NOAA Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite (POES) series gave Scambos a good perspective on what the pattern of low temperatures looked like across Antarctica.
“Landsat 8 is still a new sensor, but preliminary work shows its ability to map the cold pockets in detail,” Scambos said. “It’s showing how even small hummocks stick up through the cold air.”
Scambos suspected they would find one area that got extremely cold. Instead they found a large strip at high altitude where several spots regularly reach record low temperatures. Furthermore, dozens of these extremely cold areas reached about the same minimum temperatures of −92 to −94 degrees Celsius (−134 to −137 degrees Fahrenheit) on most years.
“This is like saying that on the coldest day of the year a whole strip of land from International Falls, Minnesota to Duluth, Minnesota to Great Falls, Montana reached the exact same temperature, and more than once,” Scambos said. “And that’s a little odd.”
—Credit: Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center
The scientists suspect that a layer in the atmosphere above the ice plateau reaches a certain minimum temperature and is preventing the ice plateau’s surface from getting any colder.
A physical limit
“There seems to be a physical limit to how cold it can get in this high plateau area and how much heat can escape,” Scambos said. Although an extremely cold place, Antarctica’s surface radiates heat or energy out into space, especially when the atmosphere is dry and free of clouds.
“The levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, traces of water vapor and other gases in the air may impose a more or less uniform limit on how much heat can radiate from the surface,” Scambos said.
Scambos and his team will continue to refine their map of Earth’s coldest places using Landsat 8 data. “It’s a remarkable satellite and we’ve repeatedly been impressed with how well it works, not just for mapping temperature but for mapping crops and forests and glaciers all over the world,” Scambos said.
“The uses for Landsat 8 data are broad and diverse,” said James Irons, Landsat 8 project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “And Scambos’ work is an example of some of the intriguing science that can be done using Landsat 8.”
In the longer term, Scambos and his team will try to design weather stations and set them up in the area where the record temperatures occur to confirm the data from Landsat 8 and MODIS. Currently, most of the automated weather stations in the vicinity do not work properly in the dead of winter.
“The research bases there don’t have people that stay through the winter to make temperature measurements,” Scambos said. “We will need to investigate electronics that can survive those temperatures.”
“Just because one spot on Earth has set records for cold that has little to do with global warming because it is one spot in one place, said Waleed Abdalati, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado and NASA’s former chief scientist. Both Abdalati, who wasn’t part of the measurement team, and Scambos said this is likely an unusual random reading in a place that hasn’t been measured much before and could have been colder or hotter in the past and we wouldn’t know.”
But it is OK to draw warming conclusions from the Arctic using that analysis…./sarc
It does not seem at all strange that the temperature is around -93C minimum and is similar wherever you look. The plateau is quite near the tropopause which has a temperature around -90C. Above the tropopause the temperature of the air starts to increase again. It is hard to see how the land could get much colder when it is surrounded by such a “warm” blanket. As has been pointed out by others the air above will still have CO2 in it, given the very low partial pressure ( below 0.3 millibars ), and even though it is “very dry” the partial pressure of water will be similar. These molecules will be radiating energy downwards as well as upwards keeping the surface from cooling any more.
steverichards1984 says:
December 10, 2013 at 5:52 am
I find it interesting that they said “most of the automated weather stations in the vicinity do not work properly in the dead of winter.”
The problem is the batteries: no battery works below -50°C and heating costs a lot of energy. Solar cells don’t give help during 6 months of darkness and wind energy only helps when there is wind, which in general is not the case for the coldest periods.
How have we measured temperatures at the poles prior to satellite data availability, and what effect could this have on global averages if included?
There are a few stations which are manned year round, which can keep their equipment inside the buildings with the probe outside. I don’t know if these data were/are included in global averages.
I guess Al Gore recently visited Antarctica. 😉
@A.D.Everard said: “That is COLD. They won’t be popular, looking for cold areas when climate-fretfuls are searching for the missing heat. Good on ‘em.”
The upside for the warmists is they can measure it next year. If it’s -115, they can do press releases announcing an unprecedented heat wave in Antarctica.
This needs to be incorporated into the global average temperature and then smoothed into adjacent regions ASAP.
−134 to −137 degrees Fahrenheit and the polar ice is melting?
johnmarshall says:
December 10, 2013 at 3:25 am
Nope! Look at the map. The records dates are in July and August, the Antarctic WINTER.
“The levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, traces of water vapor and other gases in the air may impose a more or less uniform limit on how much heat can radiate from the surface,” Scambos said.
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How can the Antarctic be cold when there is (as calculated by NASA) on average 340W/m2 of back radiation due to GHG reaching the surface 24hrs/day 365day/year?
This is about the same amount as incoming from the sun (what a co-incidence), so why is the Antarctic so much colder than any other place with all this back radiation from CO2 reaching the surface?
Could it be that H2O, not CO2, is the primary GHG?
Peter Miller says:
December 10, 2013 at 1:11 am
Once these temperature figures are officially ‘homogenised’, then it’s anyone’s guess what they will end up being.
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homogenized = warmer.
🙂 It’s not known for its barbecue-summers either.
More than 30 years of data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on the NOAA Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite (POES) series gave Scambos a good perspective on what the pattern of low temperatures looked like across Antarctica.
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So why don’t we use this data instead of a few widely spaced thermometers to calculated polar temperatures? Why does the satellite temperature record not have high resolution polar coverage if the data is available? Why do we even bother with surface thermometer readings, given the poor job they do in providing coverage?
Maybe the geo-engineering kooks can set up a CO2 “snow” ski resort at the highest elevation in central Antarctica. The snow-machines would use CO2 cylinders instead of water.
jono1066 says:
December 10, 2013 at 12:17 am
Yeah, I know what you mean. Today it was 32°C outside and 26°C in the house. That’s 58°C.
(i.e. I’m betting your data logger didn’t show -33°C because your freezer thermostat won’t go down that far.)
“Just because one spot on Earth has set records for cold that has little to do with global warming because it is one spot in one place”, said Waleed Abdalati, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado and NASA’s former chief scientist
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yet, almost all the warming is at the north pole. an area where there are few thermometers and poor satellite coverage. even though we now find out there is high resolution data covering 30 years.
so how, if the warming is mostly at one spot – the Arctic – how can this have much to do with global warming? Doesn’t the fact that most of the warming is only in one place, at one of the poles, doesn’t this argue strongly that this cannot be the result of well mixed CO2?
Doesn’t this argue that whatever is happening at the North Pole, it must be something related to the North Pole, not to the earth globally? For example, maybe what we are seeing in the Arctic is related to the very high rate of movement of the magnetic north pole. Much faster than at any time previously recorded.
Is it not much more likely that localized warming at the North Pole is somehow related to other changes at the North Pole, rather then the result of well mixed CO2? How does the well mixed CO2 know to only affect the North Pole but not the South?
As was linked above, Seth Borenstein is covering this, if only to provide damage control for the cult, noting that record cold doesn’t disprove global warming.
… you have to be extremely careful not to freeze part of your throat or lungs when inhaling.
I’m guessing that writing your name in the snow is probably out then.
Didn’t read all the comments, so maybe someone’s already asked this:
If they can use this satellite to measure temps in the inaccessible (in winter) areas of Antarctica then why do they have to “fill in” with math algorithms all those North Pole areas that are missing real temp data? Why not just get the satellite readings for all the areas missing land-based data, instead of essentially using educated guesses?
Maybe the satellite coverage is not available in the north?
As others have already pointed out it is the partial pressure of carbon dioxide that matters in the phase diagram and not the total air pressure. This is a repeat of a discussion from a few years ago. I find that problems such as this are useful indicators as to whether one truly accepts the atomic (statistical) nature of matter, gasses in particular. If you do not, you think that it is reasonable for the air molecules to coordinate their individual motions so as to knock back any solid carbon dioxide molecule in order to prevent it from subliming (Maxwell’s Demon). If you do, you realize that sublimation and condensation are ongoing processes that have to balance on the phase equilibrium line to give a lasting amount of solid. If there is not enough vapor phase to get there the solid disappears, or does not form to begin with.
Nitrogen liquefies between -321 F and -346 F. Now that’s cold.
But would anyone drink it? Yes.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9637665/Teenager-who-lost-stomach-after-drinking-liquid-nitrogen-cocktail-speaks-of-her-ordeal.html
ferdberple says:
December 10, 2013 at 7:30 am
yet, almost all the warming is at the north pole. an area where there are few thermometers and poor satellite coverage. even though we now find out there is high resolution data covering 30 years.
so how, if the warming is mostly at one spot – the Arctic – how can this have much to do with global warming? Doesn’t the fact that most of the warming is only in one place, at one of the poles, doesn’t this argue strongly that this cannot be the result of well mixed CO2?
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Arctic warming has to do with warmer oceans which mean a greater volume of the Gulf Stream circulates into the Arctic Ocean. Thus your lower summer’s end sea ice extent. But now a new equilibrium obtains and the ice minimum will fluctuate as it has the last 4-5 years. There will be no “death spiral”.
By the way, CO2 cannot warm the ocean. Sea surface temperature is determined solely by insolation; the greenhouse effect has no effect on SST. So much for AGW.
I thought that one reason that the poles would warm more than the rest of the globe is because there are so few water vapor molecules to compete with the CO2 in terms of absorbing and re-radiating certain wavelengths of radiation. It does not look like the CO2 is really that potent.
More missing heat! That is the ls the final proof, if any was still needed. Only anthropogenic global warming could make it THAT COLD. That is totally unprecedented in all of recorded history.
Clear proof that CO2 is “toxic”.
One of the potential causes of the bi-polar seesaw is variations in the speed of the MOC. When running faster more heat is transported to the Arctic and more cold upwelling occurs around Antarctica. Just the opposite when it slows. The MOC variations on longer scales are likely responsible for the RWP, dark age cooling, MWP, LIA and our current warming.
If this satellite data is available for both poles it would certainly help understand the recent changes that are only guessed at today. I wonder if Dr. Spencer is aware of this data? Wouldn’t it be nice if this could be included in UAH and RSS data sets.
They assumed that the heat [keeping the temperatures from getting colder] is coming from the land. Did they take land temperatures? Where is the heat coming from? The land, the atmosphere, those deep not frozen lakes?
This is why we have trouble understand heat flow around the planet: assumptions.