From the Nature abhors a vacuum department comes this note from RealScience showing that Arctic sea ice has made a stunning rebound since the record low recorded in the late summer of 2012.
With a few weeks of growth still to occur, the Arctic has blown away the previous record for ice gain this winter. This is only the third winter in history when more than 10 million km² of new ice has formed.
Source data: arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/timeseries.anom.1979-2008
Of course, this is only a record for the satellite era data back to about 1980, and just like the much ballyhooed record low of 2012, we have no hard data to tell us if this has happened before or not.
Here’s the current Cryosphere Today plot, note the steep rebound right after the summer minimum, something also noted in Sea Ice News Volume 3 Number 14 – Arctic refreeze fastest ever:
![seaice.recent.arctic[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/seaice-recent-arctic1.png?quality=75)
Source: Cryosphere Today – Arctic Climate Research at the University of IllinoisThe Arctic ocean is well filled with ice right now:
![cryo_latest[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/cryo_latest1.jpg?quality=83)
Source: Cryosphere Today – Arctic Climate Research at the University of Illinois
In other news, the Antarctic seems to be continuing on its slow and steady rise, and is now approaching 450 days of uninterrupted above normal ice area according to this data: arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/timeseries.south.anom.1979-2008…which shows the last time the Antarctic sea ice was below normal was 2011.8932 or 11/22/2011.
![seaice.recent.antarctic[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/seaice-recent-antarctic1.png?quality=75)
This continued growth of ice in the Arctic Antarctic make the arguments for ice mass loss in Antarctica rather hard to believe, something also backed up by ICESAT data.
As always, you can see all the sea ice data at the WUWT Sea Ice Reference Page.
BTW Arctic ice extent today is the highest in 9 years according to DMI and NORSEX.
For the sake of argument…
In an oscillating system we expect fluctuation around a mean. Global Arctic temperatures, then, should be neutral over the very long term. The centennial trend is positive for both. Caveats apply – the Arctic data is very sparse before the 1930s. There appears to be a multi-decadal pattern, but the PDO (which I assume you are referring to, as it seems to be ENSO-related) has exhibited a cooling trend since before 2000. If by “a few years” you mean, say, 5 years, then we have not observed the Arctic responding to this hypothesised lag. Temperatures have risen since 2006 in the Arctic. The PDO oscillation does not seem at this point to have a significant effect on Arctic temperatrues.
But I digress. If summer sea ice decline is greater than the winter (which it clearly is), then the difference between them will increase, and the reformation of sea ice will continue to break records in some years. This is an obvious conclusion, and not in any way an argument against declining sea ice.
barry,
What is your problem with declining Arctic sea ice?
“With a few weeks of growth still to occur, the Arctic has blown away the previous record for ice gain this winter.”
Well, of course it has. The ice WILL grow back more in the winters where WINTER temperatures are still VERY COLD (Barrow, AK has an average February high of MINUS 11 degrees F in February, and an average February low of MINUS 25). Thin sea ice ABSOLUTELY will grow back more and more each winter…..because there is LESS and LESS ice at the end of each summer. In fact…..within a decade there will be almost NO SUMMER SEA ICE at the end of the summer. At that point….we will max out on the WINTER GROWTH of thin ice. But the ice cover will continue to come back IN THE WINTER for many decades as thin winter cover.
Steve Mosher says that the past warm periods maybe caused as much melt as today. http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif