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Anonymous Coward writes:

On Christmas Day, a thousand mile wide storm front rounded the tip of Greenland and started heading for Iceland and the Northern Arctic.

On the morning of December 30th, it dropped a low pressure zone of 930mb [vedur.is] on the Northern part of Iceland -- an unprecedented deep low, comparable to Hurricane Sandy. This is only the storm center -- linked up with it are two more strong lows of 965 to 975mb and numerous other low pressure zones.

In short, this thing is shaping up to be one heck of a daisy-chained extreme storm system.

All along its eastern side, the system is sucking in warm winds originating to the west of Spain, and hurling them towards the North Pole. By Wednesday (aka today), that North Pole region is expected to see average temperatures of 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, or between 30 [noaa.gov] and 40 degrees [whoi.edu] Celsius above the annual mean temperature.

According to the latest weather data [washington.edu], one buoy [NPEO 2015 SVP-7 Buoy 558750 ] already indicates a temperature of minus 0.1 degrees Celsius.

This heating up follows a November month which itself was strongly anomalous compared to the average over the period 1985-2010 (figure 2b, figure 3 [nsidc.org]); unusually high pressure differences, and an unusually small ice zone.

Hypothesis about what's really behind this here [robertscribbler.com], but feel free to chime in with your own resources.

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