Siberia suffers through coldest days in two decades as temperature dips to minus 80

In Siberia, the icebox of the Northern Hemisphere, temperatures have plunged to their lowest levels in at least two decades: around minus-80 degrees. This exceptional cold is projected to continue into the weekend.

Temperatures have fallen up to 50 degrees (27.8 Celsius) below normal amid this frigid siege, with the bitter cold stretching as far west as far Eastern Europe.

[Warm weather pushes Northern Hemisphere snow cover to near record lows]

The rural northern Siberian town of Zhilinda, home to fewer than 1,000 people, dipped to minus-79.8 degrees (minus-62.1 Celsius) Tuesday, its lowest January temperature on record, according to climate expert Maximiliano Herrera. It marked the lowest temperature in Siberia since 2002.

Computer models suggested a few spots may have been even colder — or as low as minus-81 (minus-62.8 Celsius).

Such cold has become uncommon in recent decades because of human-caused climate change. Global warming decreases the frequency and intensity of cold air outbreaks, but does not eliminate them.

Herrera noted Zhilinda was just a whiff away from setting its all-time record low of minus-82.3 degrees (minus-63.5 Celsius). The all-time record low for all of Russia, which is the lowest temperature for any inhabited area of the Northern Hemisphere, is minus-89.9 degrees (minus-67.7 Celsius) — set in February 1933.

At least a half-dozen official weather stations in Russia have reached minus-76 degrees (minus-60 Celsius) or lower in recent days. These locations are embedded within a large swath of extreme cold that stretched from around the southern Barents Sea, east of Scandinavia, to the Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan.

Zhilinda had not seen temperatures rise above minus-58 degrees (minus-50 Celsius) for six days as of Wednesday. And temperatures are forecast to fall toward minus-76 degrees (minus-60 Celsius) again in coming nights.

Olenek - southeast of Zhilinda - was among the locations that saw temperatures tumble to exceptionally low levels. Its low of minus-76.7 degrees (minus-60.4 Celsius) was the coldest at that location since January 1959, according to Thierry Goose, a climate researcher in British Columbia.

The cold is connected to a zone of very strong high pressure entrenched over the region and lobes of the polar vortex swirling around it.

Thus far this winter, the polar vortex - which is a zone of frigid air that originates near the North Pole - has been very strong and stable, bottling up cold air over Arctic regions. Because the vortex has remained mostly undisturbed, it has limited the escape of frigid air into the mid-latitudes.

The extreme cold is expected to focus over the eastern half of Russia over the next few days, gradually shifting eastward through the weekend. Computer models project temperatures as low as minus-60 Celsius.

Sometimes, exceptionally cold air that builds over Siberia spills into the eastern United States. This happened just before Christmas with the extreme Arctic outbreak that set records from the Rockies to the East Coast. Judah Cohen, a meteorologist and long-range forecast expert, recently suggested on Twitter that it takes about two weeks for cold air over Siberia to reach the Lower 48 states.

Although the eastern U.S. has seen very mild weather since that late December cold blast, there is the potential for a significant pattern change toward the end of January. Key to this change would be the development of high pressure over western North America, which would both block storms from hitting California and also potentially create a pathway for the exceptional cold in Siberia to cross into the western hemisphere.