Southern Russia is in for a ten-year cold spell starting this year, the Russian Academy of Sciences warns.
Last year brought freak storms in early summer and unusually early snowfall in some parts of the country followed by an exceptionally warm winter in other places.
Russia's meteorological center has named last year the hottest in recorded history citing increasingly warm winters. But Russia’s south is about to experience an opposite trend, one scientist has warned.
"The climate is cyclical, and a 10-year cold period is awaiting the south of Russia starting in 2018," Gennady Matishov, chairman of the Academy's southern science center, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday.
Matishov pointed to freezing temperatures in the Caspian and Azov seas, longer periods of ice covering estuaries of the River Don, and unusually cool springs. The change in weather is already affecting fruit harvests, he said.
