How cold at -69.C!

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A new coldest temperature has been discovered. Klinck station in Greenland, close to the summit of the ice sheet, recorded -69.6C on 22 December 1991, a substantially lower reading than the -67.8C recorded in Verkhoyansk in Russia in February 1892, and in Russia’s Oimekon site in January 1933.

Searching through the WMO archives of heat records from weather stations at the top of the world, researchers found the coldest temperature reading came from an automatic weather station in Greenland in midwinter almost 30 years ago, nearly 2C (3.6F) colder than the previous known records.

All three are exceptional for the northern hemisphere, but beaten to the coldest ever recorded on the planet by the decidedly chilly -89.2C struck on 21 July 1983, midway through the southern hemisphere winter, at the high-altitude Vostok weather station in Antarctica.

Extremes of weather in the polar regions are of particular interest to climate scientists as they create models of past and future climate. The Verkhoyansk weather station, whose record low was tumbled by the discovery from the archives, showed a temperature of 38C on 20 June this year, which the WMO is now considering as a candidate for the record highest temperature seen north of the Arctic Circle.

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Searching through the archives allows scientists to check temperature patterns, and provides valuable data for climate models. The Klinck station operated for two years in the early 1990s, before its automated instruments were sent for use in the Antarctic.

The record came to light only after a WMO group tracked down the original scientists. The data had to go through rigorous checking before the new record was accepted. The assessment is published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.