From the “we told you so years ago” department comes this interesting study that might explain the 8 °C red spot in the Russian Arctic that NASA GISS always seems to have:

From Science News:

A novel form of the “urban heat island” effect might contribute to why the far north is warming faster than the rest of the globe, a study of five Arctic cities finds.

Sunlight can heat dense building materials. When night falls, buildings will release some of their solar energy into the air. This helps explain why urban centers tend to be a few degrees warmer than nearby rural areas.

“We decided that our Russian Arctic cities should also show this phenomenon,” says Mikhail Varentsov, a climatologist at Lomonosov Moscow State University. But indoor heating — not the sun — would be the major heat source, at least in winter, when the sun shines little if at all. To test that idea, he and colleagues set up weather stations to collect data in the five cities north of the Arctic Circle for about a week during the polar night (with 24 hours of darkness). Apatity, with a population of about 59,000, showed the strongest effect. Its city center was up to 10 degrees Celsius warmer than outlying areas. Murmansk, with more than 300,000 residents, showed a similar, but smaller, in-town increase of about 3 degrees Celsius. Varentsov shared his team’s findings January 28 at the international Arctic Frontiers conference.

They used a vehicle mounted weather station and drove transects through the city, much like I’ve done in the past with my own research. A similar technique done in Svalbard shows UHI is present there too.

Here is the paper:

M. Varentsov et al. Experimental research of urban heat island effect for the biggest Arctic cities. Arctic Frontiers conference, Tromsø, Norway, January 28, 2016.

P.I. Konstantinov, M.Y. Grishchenko and M.I. Varentsov. Mapping urban heat islands of Arctic cities using combined data on field measurements and satellite images based on the example of the city of Apatity (Murmansk Oblast). Izvestiya, Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics. Vol. 51, December 2015, p. 992. doi:10.1134/S000143381509011X.

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