Arctic sea ice: chasing 2007

[pscot]

Arctic sea ice declined slowly through most of April. Because of the slow decline in April, ice extent for the month as a whole did not approach record lows, as it did in March. However, ice extent began to decline more quickly towards the end of the month.

Central Russia saw an early retreat of snow cover, as a result of prevailing warm conditions during the past winter over the eastern Arctic and Siberia.

Figure 1. Arctic sea ice extent for April 2011 was 14.15 million square kilometers (5.46 million square miles). The magenta line shows the 1979 to 2000 median extent for that month. The black cross indicates the geographic North Pole. Sea Ice Index data. About the data.
—Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center

High-resolution image
Overview of conditions
Mean ice extent for the month was 14.15 million square kilometers (5.46 million square miles). This is 850,000 square kilometers (328,000 square miles) below the average for the reference period of 1979 to 2000.

Ice extent was lower than average in much of the northern North Atlantic, including the Barents Sea and Greenland Sea, and in the Canadian Maritime regions and Sea of Okhotsk. Only scattered areas in the Bering Sea and Baffin Bay had more extensive sea ice than average for this time of year.

[hatrack]

1. Stunning - no one could have predicted this!

:eyes:

[pscot]

2. The sea ice limbo

[The Croquist]

5. I'll wait before I panic

The monthly sea ice extant for April was 14.2 million sq km compared to 13.9 for 2007. The daily number is currently a shade less (it's at 99.5% of 2007) but it's still above 2004 & 2006 and they only post 9 years of daily records.


Monthly
http://nsidc.org/cgi-bin/bist/bist.pl?annot=1&legend=1&scale=100&tab_cols=1&tab_rows=3&config=seaice_index&submit=Refresh&mo0=04&hemis0=N&img0=extn&year0=2011&year1=2007&year2=2009

Daily
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv


Interestingly the Antarctic isn't doing as well. I only have monthly figures and it's the 4th lowest in the 33 year history but these numbers a quite volatile. 2008 set the record high just 3 years ago.

[OnlinePoker]

6. Chryosphere today has Antarctic above average by about 123,000 sq km

[pscot]

7. But then there's this

The CU-Boulder research team believes the lowest annual maximum ice extent of 5,650,000 square miles occurred on March 7. The maximum ice extent was 463,000 square miles below the 1979-2000 average, an area slightly larger than the states of Texas and California combined. The 2011 measurements were tied with those from 2006 as the lowest maximum sea ice extents measured since satellite record keeping began in 1979.

http://www.chem.info/News/Feeds/2011/03/topics-alternative-energy-measurements-of-winter-arctic-sea-ice-shows-contin/

[Systematic Chaos]

3. kick just because

:kick:

[XemaSab]

4. .