Peculiarities of weather and ground freezing conditions in Siberia and Russian Arctic in winter and spring period of 2019/2020

Abstract

As a reason of anomalous warm winter 2019/2020 in Russia, as well as in Europe and USA along with the global warming is considered a non-typical situation in Arctic, where the extremely stable area of low pressure in the vicinity of North Pole was present during long time period and which does not let the cold air masses to move away from its borders. Such situation lead to the consequence, that on the most of the territory of Russia, USA, Northern Europe and Eastern Canada the temperature of winter months was on a few degrees more than usual. Due to these warm winter months 2019/2020, largely increasing in recent decade’s amount of snow and snow cover thickness and hot spring months 2020 in Siberia and Russian Arctic the winter ground freezing was not very intensive and active layer thickness at the beginning of the summer was rather high. This led to the oil tank construction damage in Norilsk on 29 May 2020 due to the instability of the basement and catastrophic oil spill into the river happened.