Arctic Halloween Ice Roaring Back

The animation shows the last 3 weeks of Arctic ice recovery, from October 10 to October 31, 2022. On the lower center right, Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) freezes over entirely more than doubling up to 832k km2, 97% of its maximum.  Center bottom Beaufort Sea closes off the NW passage, reaching 1 Wadham in just that basin, 95% of its max.  On the left, the Russian shelf seas fill with ice, closing off the Northern Sea Route.  Laptev and East Siberian seas reached 100% of their maxes, together adding 2 Wadhams of ice extent.

The graph below shows October daily ice extents for 2022 compared to 16 year averages, and some years of note.

The black line shows during October on average Arctic ice extents increase ~3.4M km2 from ~5.0M km2 up to ~8.4M km2.  The 2022 cyan MASIE line started the month 145k km2 above average and on day 304 increased its surplus to 327k km2.  The Sea Ice Index in orange (SII from NOAA) tracked MASIE the entire month with slightly lower extents. 2007 started October with an 800k km2 deficit, but ended just 200k km2 below average. 2020 had the lowest extent in the record, ending October 1.76M km2 in deficit.

Why is this important?  All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels.  The lack of additional warming is documented in a post Still No Global Warming March 2022

The lack of acceleration in sea levels along coastlines has been discussed also.  See USCS Warnings of Coastal Flooding

Also, a longer term perspective is informative:

The table below shows the distribution of Sea Ice on day 304 across the Arctic Regions, on average, this year and 2007.

The overall surplus to average is 303k km2, (4%).  Note large surpluses of ice in Beaufort and East Siberian seas,  as well as in Laptev, CAA and Baffin Bay. The main deficits to average are in Kara, Barents and Hudson Bay, more than offset by surpluses elsewhere. Note that 2022 ice extent exceeds that of 2007 by more than half a Wadham, most of the difference being in Chukchi, East Siberian, Kara and Baffin Bay.

Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides. It is a visual representation of scientific datasets measuring Arctic ice extents.