![]() ![]() The committee commended the station’s original project scientists in the careful maintenance of the calibrations and metadata for an observation made so long ago. The record came to light only after a WMO blue-ribbon international panel of polar scientists tracked down the original scientists involved. This was before WMO began evaluating global extremes, as the World Weather and Climate Extremes archive was established in 2007. The automatic weather station operated for two years in the early 1990s as part of a network established by the University of Wisconsin-Madison to record the meteorological conditions around the Greenland Crest during the Greenland Ice Sheet Project. In 1994 it was returned to the laboratory for testing and then sent for use in the Antarctic. Such was the case with the just-concluded evaluation of a nearly 30-year-old weather record of an automated weather station at the remote Greenland site named Klinck, located at an elevation of 3,105 meters close to the topographic summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet. While most climate extreme observations evaluated by the WMO’s Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes have been made within the last few years, occasionally climate historians uncover long overlooked weather data that contain important climate information that must be analyzed and verified. “It is testimony to the dedication of climate scientists and weather historians that we are now able to investigate many of these older records and secure a better global understanding of not only current, but also historical, climate extremes,” said Professor Taalas. This newly recognized cold record is an important reminder about the stark contrasts that exist on this planet,” said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas. “In the era of climate change, much attention focuses on new heat records. That ongoing investigation, following the lead of this evaluation, will also examine possible past occurrences of high temperatures north of the Arctic Circle. WMO is currently verifying whether this is a new record high temperature north of the Arctic Circle (a new category for the archive). The weather station at Verkhoyanksk, which previously held the northern hemisphere low temperature record, hit the headlines when it recorded a temperature of 38☌ on 20 June during a prolonged Siberian heatwave. The WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes includes records such as the world’s highest and lowest temperatures, rainfall, heaviest hailstone, longest dry period, maximum gust of wind, longest lightning flash and weather-related mortalities. The world’s lowest temperature record, of -89.2☌ (-128.6☏) on 21 July 1983, is held by the high-altitude Vostok weather station in Antarctica. It eclipses the value of -67.8☌ recorded at the Russian sites of Verkhoyanksk (February 1892) and Oimekon (January 1933). The temperature record was uncovered after nearly 30 years by “climate detectives” with the WMO Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes.
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