Arctic Sea-Ice Melt Record Just Not Being Broken, It’s Being Smashed
By Rasmus E. Benestad
27 August, 2012
Realclimate.org
We noted earlier that the Artic sea-ice is approaching a record minimum. The record is now broken, almost a month before the annual sea-ice minima usually is observed, and there is probably more melting in store before it reaches the minimum for 2012 – before the autumn sea-ice starts to form.
The figure shows annual variations in the area of sea-ice extent, and the x-axis marks the time of the year, starting on January 1st and ending on December 31st (for the individual years). The grey curves show the Arctic sea-ice extent in all previous years, and the red curve shows the sea-ice area for 2012.
(The figure is plotted with an R-script that takes the data directly from NSIDC; the R-environment is available from CRAN)
Rasmus E. Benestad is a physicist by training and have affiliations with the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (met.no) and the Oslo Climate Group (OCG) . He has a D.Phil in physics from Atmospheric, Oceanic & Planetary Physics at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He is the author of the book ‘Solar Activity and Earth’s Climate’ (2002), published by Praxis-Springer, and he was a member of the council of the European Meteorological Society for the period (2004-2006), representing the Nordic countries and the Norwegian Meteorology Society. Views here are personal and may not necessarily represent those of RegClim, OCG, met.no, or the mentioned societies
e-mail: rasmus.benestad-at-met.no
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