JAXA/ViSHOP extent is no longer “lowest for the date”! After “flatlining” for most of April the metric is now in the midst of a close knit group of the other years in the 2020s:
The high pressure area over the Central Arctic persisted through the second half of April, and so did the consequent drift of ice from the Pacific side of the Arctic to the Atlantic periphery:
AWI’s sea ice area for the Greenland Sea is currently “highest for the date” in the AMSR2 record that started in July 2012:
The offshore winds along the Laptev Sea coast have continued, and sea ice area is now “lowest for the date”:
The first signs of a break in the high pressure dominance are appearing. GFS currently forecasts that a low pressure area will enter the Central Arctic, bring above zero temperatures over the Kara Sea on Sunday:
Much further into the future (and hence much less likely to verify!), GFS is forecasting temperatures above zero at the North Pole in a week’s time:
PIOMAS Arctic sea ice volume had reached a 2025 maximum of 21.85 thousand km³ on April 24th:
The PIOMAS sea ice thickness map for April 30th once again shows a large area of thick ice on the Siberian side of the Chukchi Sea, together with a band of thin ice on the Alaskan side.
There is also an arm of thick ice in the northern Beaufort Sea, but areas of thin ice in the Amundsen Gulf and McClure Strait:
CryoSat-2/SMOS data processing stopped for the summer season on April 15th. Here is the “near real time” thickness map:
Thick ice in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas is conspicuous only by its absence two weeks ago. It will be interesting to sea what the “reanalysed” version reveals in due course.
Here too is the latest SMOS/SMAP “thin ice thickness” map:
Watch this space!
Here’s a recently published paper in Geophysical Research Letters:
“Regime Shift in Arctic Ocean Sea-Ice Extent”
According to the abstract:
Well, we have reached a point where on a bad year, only the most difficult to melt ice remains in September, ie the thick ice north of the CAA, Greenland, and of course the melt season is very short north of 80°.
The sea ice has melted completely in the past, so it’s not illogical to assume it can melt again.
It doesn’t look like its ready to go, in immediate future, though come back in 2050, we might be looking at a different picture.
In my mind the question is, what will be the final straw?
Maybe the warmer water below surface will finish it off, maybe the multi year ice will thin to the point where it exports through the Nares and CAA all winter.
It’s still not, as some have suggested, making any recovery…
It’s certainly not making a “recovery” Tom!
England et al. (2025) assure us that:
That remains to be seen, but with little prospect of the mythical “Net Zero” being achieved in the foreseeable future it seems certain that at some point the rapidly warming Arctic will overcome the sea ice “growth–thickness” negative feedback referred to in Bitz and Roe (2004).
“May you live through interesting times” as the Chinese proverb goes.. we’re watching the biggest experiment in human history!