Global sea ice records broken (yet again)
This is starting to become an annual tradition, here on the Arctic Sea Ice Blog. Just like last year and the year before that, the record for lowest global sea ice minimum has been broken. The lowest global sea ice extent minimum on record (NSIDC and JAXA) was reached two weeks ago. I wanted to wait a bit and see whether the record for NSIDC global sea ice area would be broken too, but it wasn't, although the minimum came in at a solid second place, practically on a par with last year.
Here's the graph, as provided by Wipneus:
And here you see the anomaly of all those trend lines in chronological order, having hovered between 2 and 4 s (standard deviations) since the 2016 crash:
Not enough Antarctic sea ice melted to clinch the lowest Antarctic sea ice minimum record (coming in second lowest 'only'), and so the decisive nudge was given by the sea ice in the Arctic, refusing to freeze along some of the edges, most notably in the Bering Sea. Here's how the graph for that region looks as of today, with some of the open water even spilling into the adjacent Chukchi Sea, which is highly unusual for this time of year:
But that's not all. The Arctic has been extremely mild all winter, and still is, with temperatures forecast to soar above zero degrees at the North Pole a few days from now, in the dark, dead of winter (Robertscribbler has an excellent piece on that, as do Mashable, The Washington Post and Weather Underground). There's so much heat coming into the Arctic from both sides that the temperature north of 80° is spiking to new record heights, as shown on Zack Labe's rendition of the DMI 80N temperature graph, and it will most probably climb some more:
Which also has consequences with regard to Freezing Degree Days. As Nico Sun's graph shows, 2018 has caught up with 2017 anomaly-wise since the start of the year (for the freezing season as a whole this year is in second spot):
Much more is going on, of course, avidly followed by Arctic Sea Ice Forum members on the 2017/2018 freezing season thread. It looks like it's another bad winter for the Arctic sea ice, the third one in a row (not that they were all that great before that), but as we've seen in 2016 and 2017 a bad winter does not a record breaking melting season make. Maybe the Arctic will get record cold during March and April to help thicken the ice to a reasonable shape, or large amounts of snowfall help keep the surface reflective for a bit longer in May and June, but as things stand right now, it looks like the Arctic will have to try and dodge another bullet/cannonball in the upcoming melting season. Because if it doesn't, it'll head our way.
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