January 2020 warmest on record in Europe – Earth matched its warmest January on record – “The lack of snow and the warmth is really unheard of. Monthly records were not just broken, they were shattered with large margins.”

Satellite view of Northern Europe on 22 January 2020, showing Stockholm, Helsinki, and Copenhagen totally free of snow. For the first time on record, there was a January when Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Copenhagen were above freezing (0°C) every day of the month. Photo: Mika Rantanen / Twitter

By Matthew Cappucci
4 February 2020

(The Washington Post) – Europe just concluded its warmest January on record, coming on the heels of a toasty December and making the 2019-2020 winter season a contender for the warmest Europe has observed. Although the calendar has flipped to a new decade, there has been no slowing in the growing list of locations experiencing record temperatures amid a quickly warming climate.

The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Tuesday morning that January 2020 was Europe’s warmest January on record, edging out previous record holder January 2007 by 0.36 degrees.

The month was a staggering 5.6 degrees above the 1981 to 2010 baseline of “average” January temperatures across the European continent as a whole, with much of northeastern Europe surpassing benchmark values by nearly 11 degrees.

It was also Earth’s warmest January on record, essentially tying with January 2016. Technically, January 2020 was a hair — 0.054 degrees — warmer.

Surface air temperature anomaly for January 2020 relative to the January average for the period 1981-2010. Data: ERA5. Graphic: Copernicus Climate Change Service / ECMWF

Helsinki, the capital of Finland, made it above freezing every day in January — bizarre, considering its average January high is only 30 degrees (minus-1.1 Celsius). The typical January morning low? Twenty degrees (minus-6.7 Celsius).

But not this year. Only seven hours since the start of the year have been below 20 degrees, the month briefly dipping to 17.6 degrees (minus-8 Celsius) on Jan. 10. In contrast, some 723.5 hours have climbed above 30 degrees, a 103-to-1 ratio.

“The lack of snow and the warmth is really unheard of,” wrote Mika Rantanen, a research meteorologist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, in a Twitter direct message. “Monthly records were not just broken, they were shattered with large margins.”

Helsinki wasn’t the only Scandinavian city to see temperatures rise above freezing every day. So did Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen. And according to Rantanen, all but Oslo were totally snow-free. Scant snowfall, in many places replaced with rain, also contributed to the ever-present imagery of a rapidly warming climate.

Oslo recorded a little more than an inch of snow on the final day of January.

“In our capital city Helsinki the month was first January without snow on record,” he wrote. Records in Helsinki date back to 1845. [more]

‘The warmth is really unheard of’: Europe just posted its warmest January on record