Cecilia Bitz, Director of the Program on Climate Change (PCC) and Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, contributed her perspective on the recent warming in the Arctic in an opinion piece in The New York Times. Her piece sheds some light on weather the recent warming event is connected to climate change or anomalous weather. Accompanying the opinion piece, are two separate animations of surface temperature change over the last 30-years and last few months.

The video detailing the last 30-years, averages temperature over December-March in five-year intervals from 1980-2017 and the animation showing the few months averages over five-day intervals. Data in the 30-year animation comes from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) interim reanalysis and the data from the animation detailing just the last few months comes from the National Environmental Prediction Center (NCEP) reanalysis of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).