What's New
NOAA’s 2021 Arctic Report Card, released today at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting, documents the numerous ways that climate change continues to fundamentally alter this once reliably-frozen region, as increasing heat and the loss of ice drive its transformation into a warmer, less frozen, and more uncertain future.
The Arctic continues to warm more than twice as fast as the rest of the globe. The October-December 2020 period was the warmest Arctic autumn on record dating back to 1900. The average surface air temperature over the Arctic this past year (October 2020-September 2021) was the 7th warmest on record.
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The Arctic Ocean has been warming since the onset of the 20th century, decades earlier than instrument observations... more
The highest temperature ever verifiably recorded on Earth—54.4 degrees Celsius (130 degrees Fahrenheit) in Death... more
For Arctic scientists, the summer of 2007 changed everything. That’s when, for the first time in history, record... more
Feature Publication
Greenhouse gas concentrations, global sea levels and ocean heat content reached record highs in 2021, according to the 32nd annual State of the Climate report, despite a double-dip La Niña event taking place in the Pacific Ocean.
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