2005 sea ice record
Credit: NSIDC
Sea ice failed to rebound this winter in the Arctic Ocean, closing out the annual floe-forming season with the second-smallest extent ever recorded in March.
Now a team of Colorado forecasters give one-in-three odds that sea ice will shrink to the smallest extent ever by September 2007, continuing a meltdown that has seen record or near-record coverage just about every month for nearly a decade.
The newest Pan-Arctic Forecast says there’s a 33 percent chance the sea ice extent will shrink below 2.1 million square miles and break the record set in 2005.
And it’s almost certain — they give it a probability of about 70 percent — that the area capped with ice will be among the bottom five seasons since reliable satellite monitoring began 30 years ago, according to release posted online this week.
Shrinking sea ice has become a major harbinger of Arctic climate change and it seems to be accelerating, due to warming temperatures combined with shifts in air and ocean currents. As the dark ocean absorbs more solar energy instead of reflecting it back into space, the meltdown goes even faster, endangering polar bears, seals and other species that depend on the ice as habitat.
The lack of protective sea ice has been exposing Native communities to storms, surf and devastating erosion. If the trend continues, some scientists say Arctic ice will almost certainly disappear completely during summer by 2100.
Credit: NSIDC
By analyzing satellite images and temperature records, then feeding the data to gig-chewing computer programs, scientists with the Center for Astrodynamics Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder conjure forecasts of what’s likely to happen with the Arctic Ocean’s frozen cap in the season ahead.
In its fifth season, and funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA, the group says it is the only organization issuing large-scale sea ice forecasts based on probability.
Here are the odds:
There’s a 57 percent chance that 2007 will at least be runner-up, with its ice pack shrinking below the 2.27 million square miles observed in 2006, the second lowest on record.
There’s a 70 percent chance that the 2007 sea-ice floor will rank among the lowest five years on record, dropping below 2.33 million square miles, said to Research Associate Sheldon Drobot of CCAR’s Arctic Regional Ice Forecasting System group.
Here’s more detail from a release:
While regional sea ice declines were sharpest in the western Arctic over the past few years, large declines also occurred last year in much of the eastern Arctic, according to Drobot.
Such regional variation is of interest to the maritime industry, including government agencies, international shipping companies, energy exploration corporations and tourism cruise lines active in the far North, he said.
“The practical offshoot here is that people operating ships in Arctic waters can use these forecasts to try to plan activities several months in advance,” said Drobot.
The prediction comes amid lots of other warming news. Arctic sea ice extent for March was the second smallest since satellite coverage began, only 1.7 percent larger than minimum record set in March 2006, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. At the same time, the Earth experienced the second warmest January-to-March period since 1880, according to a new report released April 17 by the National Climate Data Center.