Icing conditions over Northern Eurasia in changing climate

Icing conditions, particularly in combination with wind, affect greatly the operation of overhead communication and transmission lines causing serious failures, which result in tremendous economic damage. Icing formation is dangerous to agriculture, forestry, high seas fishery, for land and off coast man-made infrastructure. Quantitative icing characteristics such as weight, thickness, and duration are very important for the economy and human wellbeing when their maximum values exceed certain thresholds. Russian meteorological stations perform both visual and instrumental monitoring of icing deposits. Visual monitoring is ocular estimation of the type and intensity of icing and the date of ice appearance and disappearance. Instrumental monitoring is performed by ice accretion indicator that in addition to the type, intensity and duration of ice deposits reports also their weight and size. We used observations at 958 Russian stations for the period 1977–2013 to analyze changes in the ice formation frequency at individual meteorological stations and on the territory of quasi-homogeneous climatic regions in Russia. It was found that hoar frosts are observed in most parts of Russia, but icing only occurs in European Russia and the Far East. On the Arctic coast of Russia, this phenomenon can even be observed in summer months. Statistically significant decreasing trends in occurrence of icing and hoar frost events are found over most of Russia. An increasing trend in icing weights (IWs) was found in the Atlantic Arctic region in autumn. Statistically significant large negative trends in IWs were found in the Pacific Arctic in winter and spring.