Why siberia is so cold

Oymyakon is pretty far north, and places in the north get cold in the winter owing to a lack of sunlight. We need some special sauce from the atmosphere.

Eastern Siberia is also home to what weather forecasters call the Siberian High, a semi-permanent ridge of high pressure that camps over the region for much of the winter.

The Siberian High keeps things pretty dry, but warm, not so much. Further west, storms are more frequent. That mixes the atmosphere, and allows warmer air that comes with them from the North Atlantic to regularly flush the worst of the cold away.

But the high steers those storms away from eastern Siberia for most of the winter. Instead, the high pressure ensures cold, dry air stays on tap, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of deepening chill. The snowpack that usually forms in the fall only makes things worse, reflecting the very limited warmth from the few hours of sunlight a day back into space. But what makes Oymyakon a unique island of cold in a veritable frozen sea is its geography. Landlocked areas tend to be colder than coastal locations in winter in most parts of the world.

And Oymyakon is landlocked in eastern Siberia, the heart of the coldest part of the world. Differences between atmospheric circulation models as well as incomplete treatments of the stratosphere within those models complicated the debate, Zhang explained.

In this research, Zhang and his team used an advanced atmospheric general circulation model to link sea ice loss in the Barents and Kara Seas with Siberian surface climate and weather extremes. The models, which include state-of-the-art stratosphere calculations, used observed sea ice concentration to predict sea and air surface temperatures, surface wind velocities, and cold air outbreaks, as well as circulation patterns in the troposphere and stratosphere.

Decreased sea ice concentrations weaken and shift the stratospheric polar vortex, which then causes a colder Siberia. Then they tried to find a distinct trigger. When the models considered only air circulation near the surface, the researchers found that their simulations yielded a warmer Siberia than what was observed. To get the region as frigid and windy as it has been during recent winters, they found that they needed to include stratospheric circulation as well as mixing between the troposphere and the stratosphere.

In short, they found that decreased sea ice concentrations weaken and shift the stratospheric polar vortex, a low-pressure phenomenon that helps drive regional climate patterns. This weakened polar vortex then causes a colder Siberia. East Oceania. East Oceania All the countries. Climate - Siberia Average weather, temperature, rainfall, when to go, what to pack. Index Introduction The Pole of Cold - Ojmjakon , Yakutsk North coast and islands The southern cities - Yekaterinburg , Omsk , Blagoveshchensk Eastern coasts and islands - Anadyr , Magadan , Petropavlovsk , Vladivostok Best Time What to pack Introduction In the endless territory of Asian Russia, the climate is characterized by frigid winters : in fact, the coldest inhabited places in the world are found here.

Moreover, if we exclude the northernmost part, where the climate is Arctic or sub-Arctic, and partly the east coast which has a cold maritime climate, summer is mild to warm in most of the territory because of the strong continentality, and it can sometimes even get hot. During winter, in most of the territory, the powerful Siberian Anticyclone dominates, except in the eastern seas, where the clashes between continental and maritime air masses give rise to intense low pressure areas, which can bring heavy snowfalls.

In the vast plains, in the West Siberian Plain but also in the valleys of the Central Siberian Plateau and of Yakutia, cold air stagnates to the soil, and the sky is often gray, with frequent light snowfalls, while cold outbreaks from the Arctic may lead to raging gusts of blizzard.