Fuji Dome - One of THE Coldest Places on Earth?
NASA Researchers analyzed 32 years' worth of data from several satellite instruments. They found temperatures plummeted to record lows dozens of times in clusters of pockets near a high ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji, two summits on the ice sheet known as the East Antarctic Plateau. The new record of minus 136 F (minus 93.2 C) was set Aug. 10, 2010.
That is several degrees colder than the previous low of minus 128.6 F (minus 89.2 C), set in 1983 at the Russian Vostok Research Station in East Antarctica. The coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth is northeastern Siberia, where temperatures in the towns of Verkhoyansk and Oimekon dropped to a bone-chilling 90 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 67.8 C) in 1892 and 1933, respectively.
Source: The Coldest Place in the World (nasa.gov)
Below: a picture of the Fuji Dome Station, manned by Japan. One of three Stations Japan has on Antarctica, the other two are Showa Station on the Coast and Mizuho Station, kind of in between, at a slightly lower Elevation than Fuji Dome, which is at 3,810 Meters.
Dome Fuji (ドームふじ Dōmu Fuji), also called Dome F or Valkyrie Dome, is an Antarctic base located in the eastern part of Queen Maud Land. With an altitude of 3,810 metres (12,500 ft) above sea level, it is the second-highest summit or ice dome of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and represents an ice divide. (Wikipedia)
The Fuji Dome Data Pull for 1995 - 2023 from the AMRDC Depository
This Tool at the AMRDC basically lets you pull the Data for any Months for any Location on the map, when of course it is available, sometime Technical and or Extreme Weather conditions prevent the Technology of the Automatic Weather Systems (AWS) to operate.
The downside of this Data is that it is in old fashioned Flat File Format, like 4,000+ readings per Month (144 readings per day) which makes it difficult to deal with and interpret, I will show a sample of that format below.
I import the 4,000+ records into Excel, use a Template, and with a few more steps
extrapolate the Daily Average, the Daily MAX Temp and the Daiiy MIN Temp for each day of the Month.
For this project I did June, July, August and September for each year the Data was available.
Source: Welcome - AMRDC Data Repository (wisc.edu)
Below a sample of the 4,000+ Data Flat Files (the left half) Imported into Excel
The Finished Product of this Data Extraction is the following:
The Tabulation for all the Winter Months from 1995 - 2023 for the Coldest Temperature on Fuji Dome is the following:
The Long Term Trend seems to indicate it is getting Colder at Fuji Dome
