Post 2007 Summer Melts: Ice or Atmosphere?

The issue of what is causing the increased melt season sea ice losses post 2007 is intriguing, there seems to be two candidate players, the ice and the atmosphere. In my opinion 2013's muted melt gives a hint as to what the main player is.

ASCAT January 2014

An extremely useful tool for winter sea ice watching is ASCAT, the advanced scatterometer. I think it's worth looking at some years of ASCAT for the same day as this is instructive concerning current sea ice state.

Thinner Ice in Beaufort and Beaufort Breakups.

Last February I posted about a break up of sea ice that occurred in the Beaufort Sea, now another break up has happened over the last week. It demands a post, but one looking at the bigger picture, indeed were I to try to go over what has happened in the last week the result would read surprisingly similar to my post of February 2013.

I'm still not totally convinced this is unusual, but there is reason from the scientific literature to expect more sea ice break ups in the Beaufort Sea.

Autumn 2013

Now that PIOMAS data is out and a New Year has begun, it's worth going over some of the data regards sea ice, what I had intended to be my first post before the atmosphere going bonkers derailed my train of thought.

The Atmosphere Goes Bonkers!

For my first post of the new year I can only start looking at the atmosphere, despite PIOMAS gridded data being out. I have to start here because the atmosphere is going nuts. Here in the UK we've been hammered by a succession of storms from an Atlantic synoptic pattern that keeps defaulting to basin wide monster low pressures. Now over in the States there's a monster of an Arctic Breakout.