Arctic Sea Ice in deplorable state -- enormous leads forming -- and this is in the dead of winter!

Dear Readers,


You can visually follow the state of the Arctic sea ice by looking at these IR images (they are updated several times per day):  

http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/data/satellite/hrpt_dfo_ir_100.jpg

I've been looking at these images for about 4 years now, and never have I seen anything even closely comparable to the current state of the ice in the dead of winter when the ice should be growing and becoming more tightly knitted.


But the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf did not disintegrate for no reason after thousands of years of stability.


I'm expecting to see a decline in volume after this month, no matter what the PIOMAS graph is saying right now.


For one thing, NSIDC's sea ice extent graph is also showing a decline (see below).


Perhaps if one could differentiate between the region around northern Greenland and that of the Chukchi Sea, but we only see the aggregate.

Right now the graph shows the data up through December 31, 2011.  Check back in February to see what happened with the January numbers.


Below is their daily chart.

Further, we have a situation where the jet stream has moved north, and it appears this results in more warm air moving into the Arctic. You can see this at the link below which is a current animation of the water vapor streams, from the view of looking directly down at the North Pole. Very concentrated activity. Most all heat from the Atlantic being driven into the Arctic via the North Atlantic. http://synoptic.envsci.rutgers.edu/site/sat/sat.php?sat=nhem&url=../imgs/wv_nhem_anim.gif