Historic Moscow, Russia Heat Summary

I haven't blogged about the Russian Heat Wave and Drought yet because we've been covering it well in our news stories, the latest of which is entitled "Deadly Wildfires Still Rage Near Moscow." The toll for the nation is being put at 15,000 lives and $15 billion. But today I wanted to provide some images of the unusual weather, the first from NASA showing the weekly temperature anomaly for the last week in July:

The image is very impressive and note that the hottest weather (compared to normal) was south of Moscow -- the article says "Bloomberg reported that temperatures in parts of the country soared to 42 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Fahrenheit)." Here's a summary of what happened in Moscow (the 101 degrees was a new all-time record - the city had never been hotter in recorded history.

NASA also has a satellite image of the fires and says in the heat article that "Bloomberg reported that 558 active fires covering 179,596 hectares (693 square miles) were burning across the Russian Federation as of August 6, 2010." and in the smoke article "The... smoke plume [is] spanning about 3,000 kilometers (1,860 miles) from east to west. If the smoke were in the United States, it would extend approximately from San Francisco to Chicago." Can you imagine the disruption in air travel if this were the U.S.?

So what's caused all this? Basically a "blocking" pattern in the atmosphere that has disrupted the normal west-to-east flow, keeping cooler air from moving from the North Atlantic into western Russia. For more information on the pattern that led to the extreme heat, read Mark Vogan's post "MOSCOW: HELL ON EARTH? A SERIES OF NATURAL EVENTS OR GLOBAL WARMING?" which also addresses the media's concern that climate change caused it.