Warming of Barents Sea

Key highlights of the study-

• Such intense warming has never been observed in the Arctic region before.
• The study was published by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute in the journal Scientific Reports.
• It said the region around the northern Barents Sea, a shallow shelf sea north of Scandinavia, has been warming two to two-and-a-half times the average warming of the Arctic region and five to seven times the warming in the rest of the world.
• In just the last 20 years, the average temperature northeast of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard has increased by more than five degrees Celsius.

• The researchers collected and analysed a new large dataset of observations from weather stations on Svalbard and the Russian archipelago of Franz Josef Land in the northern Barents Sea.
• The dataset has temperature observations from northern and eastern Svalbard for the first time.
• The scientists have also used the new climate dataset CARRA, which combines observations with climate models.

• It was already well known that the Arctic is the fastest warming region in the world and the reason for this is a closed loop of melting sea ice and faster warming.
• Lightning strikes, which were once rare in the region, have increased by eight times in the last decade.  
• The warming of the region since the 1980s has resulted in the northward shift and increase in abundance of Atlantic fish species and a decrease in the abundance of Arctic fish species.
• The warming of the Barents Sea also led to an extreme snowfall event, often dubbed as the ‘Beast from the East’, across most of Europe in 2018.
• The extreme weather events south of the Arctic are linked to the region’s warming through the Arctic jet stream.