Arctic sea ice - no record this year, despite a late acceleration in melt.

[Paul Garvey]

There has been an acceleration in the rate of melt through the second half of August, but this is highly unlikely to take the final figure to a record low this year. It'll be one of the lowest Arctic ice years on record, but conditions almost all summer, have been very unfavourable for melt, with low pressure dominating. Even with these stormy conditions, with a lot of cloud cover, ice melt has been far more rapid than in almost all years past and shows that summer Arctic ice continues its long term decline. 

There will always be years where melt is slower, when weather conditions are more stormy than usual, but there will also be years where conditions are favourable to melting and new record lows will be set, until there will be only the oldest ice, packed into channels that fails to melt. The rest of the Arctic will be ice free in summer, one summer soon.  When? Very difficult to say. Peter Wadham has again said it could be in the next few years that you can sail across the high Arctic in summer. Most scientists don't agree and say perhaps by 2030. The only (almost) certainty is that it will happen. 

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

[xmetman]

Paul

Yes although 2016 has now the second lowest extent since 1979, it still has a higher extent than the record low year of 2012 had on the same day of the year (31 August).

Bruce.

[Paul Garvey]

HI Bruce, 

Can you lay all the other years on there, or is that a big ask?

Paul

[xmetman]

I know the kind of graph you're thinking about - but I would have to knock up some code! 

Maybe this weekend if it's wet...

Here are some other graphs that I have in the main dashboard of the application...