Normal Arctic Ice Mid July 2023

 

The previous June Arctic ice update showed that shallow basins on the Pacific side lost their ice rapidly.  The animation above shows in the last 15 days how Hudson Bay (bottom right) is nearly all open water. And Baffin Bay (center right) is down to 22% of its March max. The images also show CAA (Canadian Arctic Archipelago–center bottom) is still blocking the Northwest Passage, despite open water in Baffin Bay and in Beaufort Sea to the west.  Also the Russian shelf seas (left) are starting to open. This is all normal melting of Arctic drift ice, presently at 56% (8.4 M km2) of last March maximum, heading toward the September minimum.

The graph for the last 30 days shows the normal melt is ~2.5M km2 down to 8.3 M km2.  2023 was above average for 3 weeks, and matching average the last week.  SII tracked the MASIE average throughout, as did 2007 in June, but dropped lower toward the end.

The table for day 197 shows how the ice extent is distributed across the Arctic regions, incomparison to 17 year average and 2007.

Region 2023197 Day 197 Average 2023-Ave. 2007197 2023-2007
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 8356350 8252843  103507  7963047 393303 
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 843873 864156  -20283  825810 18063 
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 736044 627024  109019  550547 185496 
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 891273 909597  -18324  729250 162022 
 (4) Laptev_Sea 632760 547279  85481  525724 107036 
 (5) Kara_Sea 313437 331825  -18389  401874 -88438 
 (6) Barents_Sea 64976 54022  10954  60637 4339 
 (7) Greenland_Sea 433035 394327  38708  434750 -1715 
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 397917 292326  105591  314783 83134 
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 649440 710624  -61184  711889 -62449 
 (10) Hudson_Bay 165147 348600  -183452  183962 -18814 
 (11) Central_Arctic 3227307 3169018  58289  3222022 5284 

The table shows that Hudson Bay is the anomaly, melting out early, but will soon be matched by the average there.  CAA is also in slight deficit to average, while surpluses appear in Chukchi, Laptev, Baffin Bay and Central Arctic.  2007 was nearly 400k km2 lower than yesterday.

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 and snow cover.

One comment

  1. Jamie Spry's avatar
    Jamie Spry · July 17, 2023

    Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
    “ Fifteen years ago I wrote this article making fun of expert forecasts predicting the imminent demise of Arctic sea ice. Since then there has been no change in average Arctic sea ice extent.
    #ClimateScam
    https://twitter.com/tonyclimate/status/1680599848301793286?s=46

    Like

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