Arctic sea ice: possible record-low maximum extent occurring

Dear Readers,

We have a situation here.

In the past, I looked little at the Arctic sea ice extent numbers because I considered the sea ice volume to be a far more important measure of what was going on in the Arctic.  However, consider this -- say 5-10 years ago, the ice in general was much thicker.  There were even land-fast ice shelves attached to the Canadian archipelago that were more than 100 feet thick (those are all gone), and multi-year ice could easily be well over 5-6 meters thick, and there was a lot more of it.

These days, in general, all of the ice is fairly thin, thus making the extent graph much more significant.

Have a look (CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE IT IN FULL):

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png

During the summer melt seasons, it was often (but not always) the case that when the Arctic Oscillation Index was strongly positive, the rate of melt was much higher, primarily due to warm air masses entering the Arctic via the North Atlantic.

Have a look at the current AO Index -- 2 is a fairly normal number, but above 5 is quite extraordinary:

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao_index.html



Then have a look at the satellite photos of water vapor moving into the Arctic via the North Atlantic and the Bering Strait:

Animation of the satellite images here:

http://synoptic.envsci.rutgers.edu/site/sat/sat.php?sat=nhem&url=../imgs/wv_nhem_anim.gif


And here we can see warm air being pushed into the Arctic at 79 km/h (CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE):

http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/overlay=temp/orthographic=317.12,75.45,1382


And what does the University of Maine's ever useful Climate Reanalyzer website tell us?

http://cci-reanalyzer.org/DailySummary/





Oh, wait! Is that a red beanie baby toad on top of the North Pole?