Khatanga, Russia

Tourism Khatanga is sometimes visited by Western sightseers touring the surrounding natural wilderness in Siberia. It has a hotel, a natural history museum, and weather reporting stations. In 2019, mayor Yevgeny Vershinin announced plans to develop the locality to act as a hub for travelers on their way to the North Pole, hoping to compete with Longyearbyen, a Norwegian town on the island of Svalbard, for Arctic tourists. The locality has been used as a pit stop for northern expeditions in the past, with helicopters coming from Krasnoyarsk occasionally stopping there on their way to the North Pole. The Khatanga airport is one of the largest and most operable in the Russian Arctic, with the main runway receiving renovations in 2009. However, the rest of the airport, especially the terminal, was found to be in extremely poor condition in 2019. ==Climate==

Khatanga has a subarctic climate (Köppen climate classification Dfc). Winters in Khatanga are bitterly cold, although not as extremely frosty as more southern inner Siberia, due to the slight moderating influence of the Arctic Ocean. Summer temperatures are mild, with an average July temperature of 12.7 °C (54.9 °F). They are also relatively high for its latitude (72 °N), with a record high of 36.7 °C (98 °F) in July. Khatanga is the northernmost town in the world below the treeline, as summers are warm enough for trees to grow. The only tree that can grow there is the Dahurian larch (Larix gmelinii). Precipitation is quite low, but is somewhat higher in summer (when it falls mostly as rain) than in the rest of the year (when it falls mostly as snow). ==References==