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have caused forest
fires, which covered a considerable part of the territory in the
south of France and in Portugal in July and August. The summer of 2003 in
Western Europe was apparently the hottest over the period after the year 1540. The
heat wave in France killed 11,000 people. In Germany that summer was the hottest
in the 20th century and (except some regions of northern and north-western
Germany) the hottest over the whole period of instrumental observations.
The most substantial anomalous situations that happened in March 2003
included:
(1) extremely intensive precipitation in the middle part of the Atlantic Ocean, in
the south-east and eastern coast of the USA;
(2) extremely low SAT values and unusual snowfalls over the European territory
of Russia;
(3) 546 tornados in May in the USA, which was unprecedented;
(4) a long-term drought in the west of the USA, where in some regions it was the
fourth and 50 year of a considerable de
ciency of precipitation;
(5) heavy brush
fires in the eastern part of Australia in January and powerful forest
fires in the south of California in October;
(6) anomalously intensive precipitation in Western Africa and in Sahel;
(7) return to the normal level of precipitation on the Indian sub-continent in the
period of summer monsoon; and
(8) close-to-record extent of the
“
ozone hole
”
in the Antarctic reaching a maxi-
mum of 28.2 million km
2
in September 2003.
C) marked the 10th warmest
year since record keeping began in 1880. It also marked the 36th consecutive year
with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average
annual temperature was 1976. Including 2012, all 12 years to date in the 21st
century (2001
The globally averaged temperature for 2012 (14.6
°
2012) rank among the 14 warmest in the 133-year period of record.
Only 1 year during the 20th century
-
was warmer than 2012.
Last years have been marked by an increased interest in study of the present
climate change in high latitudes of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, which is
mostly determined by decision to conduct in 2007
—
1998
—
2008 the Third International Polar
Year. The major conclusions concerning the Arctic climate diagnostics are concen-
trated on analysis of the spatial-temporal variability of polar climate instead of
exaggerated attention to unfounded simpli
-
cation of the situation as manifesting
itself through a homogeneous anthropogenic enhancement of climate warming in
high latitudes. In this context, of great interest are new results of the paleoclimatic
analysis of an ice core from the station
(Vakulenko et al. 2004), which
demonstrated a negative correlation between changes of CO
2
concentration in the
atmosphere and air temperature. Paleoclimatic developments become a more and
more actual way to study the laws of present climate dynamics (Widmann et al. 2004).
From the data on the Antarctic discussed in the report (Levinson and Waple
2004), it follows that the last decade in this region was anomalously cold. From the
late 1970s to the mid-winter of 1990, the sea ice cover extent round the Antarctic
continent was growing.
“
Vostok
”
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