The town of Barrow rarely hits the headlines. It lies on the north coast of Alaska just above the 70th parallel, and it attracted widespread meteorological attention on June 20th, 2000, because it experienced a thunderstorm. Barrow, you see, has never had a thunderstorm before. Thunderstorms thrive in the hot humid air near the Equator, where the high temperature and the abundant moisture of the rain-forests provide an ideal breeding ground. They become less frequent with increasing latitude, and are comparatively rare at latitudes above, say, 60 degrees, because there it is seldom warm enough for them to form.
Hence the surprise at a thunderstorm in Barrow, and it triggered the familiar fears that maybe something strange is happening to the global climate.
The Barrow thunderstorm is just one of the anomalies reported in the World Meteorological Organisation's "Statement on the Global Climate in 2000", an annual summary issued as soon as the relevant information comes to hand. It contains an interesting apercu of the world's climate in the millennium year. Preliminary figures show that the average global temperature near the Earth's surface in 2000 was about 0.32 degrees above what is currently taken as the norm - the average for the 30-year period 1961-1990. This makes 2000 very similar to 1999, which in turn was the fifth-warmest in the past 140 years. The world is now about 0.6 degrees hotter than it was at the beginning of the 20th century, and 2000 was the 22nd consecutive year with a global mean surface temperature above the norm. Most of the weather highlights of the year can be recalled from the media headlines they engendered: India and Bangladesh experienced severe flooding at the height of the summer monsoon; high temperatures and low rainfall in the southern and western United States resulted in one of worst wild-fire seasons in the last half-century; and October brought severe flooding to the north of Italy and parts of Switzerland.
A major anomaly, too, was the scorching heat wave which gripped much of southern Europe during the early summer. Many century-old temperature records were broken in June and July, as temperatures soared into the mid-40s in parts of Turkey, Greece, Romania and Italy. The heat wave claimed numerous lives across the region, and the warm and dry conditions produced 1,400 wild-fires that consumed nearly 60,000 hectares. The hurricane season, on the other hand, was not exceptional. There were 15 Atlantic hurricanes in 2000, compared to the average of 10, but in the Pacific there were only 22 tropical storms, comfortably below the average of 28.