2024-09-04 22:52:29
Northern Norway, situated above the Arctic Circle, recorded record temperatures in August, well above the maximum recorded last year, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute announced.
Lapland, a region in the far north of Finland, also experienced record temperatures in June, July and August, the Finnish Meteorological Institute announced.
At several measuring stations in northern Norway, temperatures last month were 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above the record set in August 2023.
“It is very unusual, almost unreal, to see changes of such magnitude in so many places in northern Norway and Svalbard,” an archipelago halfway between Norway and the North Pole, Jostein Mamen, a researcher at the institute, told AFP.
At Hammerfest Airport in Finnmark, for example, a peak of 16.9°C was recorded in August, 3.1°C higher than last year’s record, although temperatures have only been measured since 2008.
The Arctic climate is defined, among other things, by temperatures generally below 10.0 °C in summer. According to Mamen, these records are due to “a combination of factors related to climate change and natural variations.”
In Lapland, “the summer has been the hottest on record,” said Mika Rantanen, a climate change researcher at the Finnish institute.
The average temperature between June and August was 16.2°C in Finland, a record high since 1937, and the country experienced droughts and fires.
According to a study published in 2022 in the journal Nature, the Arctic warmed almost four times faster than the planet between 1979 and 2021.
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© Agence France-Presse
