The last Arctic sea-ice minimum dates from September last year. At that time, I was so occupied by other things that I didn’t look into the Arctic sea-ice trend back then. I now started to wonder what the Arctic sea-ice minimum did in 2023.
Let’s start with the volume data. This is how it looks like without any trendlines:
The linear trend is often used and is het most dramatic:
However, it seems to me that a polynomial trend fits much more snugly. This is the cubic trend:
When the deathspiral projection from 2012 (that started my interest in the Arctic sea-ice trend) is superimposed to the minimum volume data, the change in trend of the last decade becomes pretty obvious:
Apparently something happened around 2012, otherwise there wouldn’t be any sea-ice left in summer.
Let’s do the same for the extent data. This is the canvas we are working with:
It looks like this with a linear trend:
And like this with a cubic trend:
Finally, when the deathspiral projection is superimposed, similar to that of the volume data above:
The 2023 values of both volume as well as extent were slightly below the 2022 values, but not by that much. So, the plateau that started somewhere around 2012 still seems to be continue.
via Trust, yet verify
March 31, 2024 at 03:33PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 