Climate Change on the Yamal Peninsula and Its Impact on the Exogenous Processes
Authors: Shabanova Natalia , Channelliere Claire 
Published: October 2013

Oil and Gas resources of the Yamal Peninsula have been attracting more investements over recent years. Companies are interested in effective investment, so have to plan for the long-term, which in the present circumstances is impossible without taking into account the changing environmental conditions. Most of the major transformations of the environment (state of permafrost, beaches, land surface, etc.) seem related to changes in climatic conditions. Therefore, a comprehensive study of climate on the Yamal Peninsula and Kara Sea has become more relevant in recent years.

This work aims at answering the following questions: What was the climate in the past and how did it change over the Yamal Peninsula and Kara Sea? How is it evolving today? Is it consistent with the IPCC 2007 scenarios? What is the nature of climate change (natural or anthropogenic?) and what could be expected in the next 20 –30 years?

Hence a comprehensive climate change study is on-going based on the analysis of weather stations data recorded in the Kara Sea area. Data from three stations (Dikson, Marresalya, Noviy Port) have been so far analysed and presented in this paper.

Several periods of climate variation have been revealed. Temperature variability seems to follow natural processes – atmospheric circulation changes. The atmospheric circulation processes can be divided into three basic types: "zonal" (Z) when cyclones within the western transfer are active; meridional (blocking, M) when interlattitudal fluxes are predominant and blocking processes frequency is high; and southern (S) when southern rapid processes (cyclones) are powerful and relatively frequent on the background of predominant interlattitudal fluxes. The temperature is getting higher with increasing number of zonal and southern processes and lower when meridional processes are prevalent. The extreme events (high and low temperatures, draughts and floods, long storms) frequency is getting higher during the meridional periods. The latest decade has been characterized by high frequency of meridional processes resuling from high temperatures provoked both by frequent southern events and greenhousgases effect during previous periods. The temperature changes are spatially homogeneous over the Kara region. Phases of increasing and decreasing temperatures are more evident when going north because of lower variance.

Over the latest years temperature increase seems to follow some of the IPCC scenarios. But caution should be applied as the models fail to predict natural and local variability. Also IPCC temperature scenarios are based on carbon dioxide scenarios which are hard to predict as well. Still anthropogenic impact should not be neglected and valid forecast must be obtained by natural and anthropogenic impacts combination.

According to atmospheric circulation climate variation theory the intense temperature growth period stopped near 2000. Now a meridional period is occurring and is supposed to last 20–30 years. That means high temperature variability and extreme events could increase in frequency. The average temperature should stay constant or get lower. Taking into account the greenhousegases impact we should expect slight warming (not as intense as in previous years however) or stabilization in the nearest future.