March has arrived, so it’s time to start taking a serious look at where and when the 2023 maximum Arctic sea ice extent will occur.

To start with here’s Zack Labe’s overview of previous years’ maxima:

Zack’s graph displays the JAXA/ViSHOP version of Arctic extent, so here too is JAXA’s own graph of the current sea ice extent:

It doesn’t look as though the 2023 maximum has been achieved yet, but extent on March 1st was 14.01 million km². That is evidently not going to be the lowest in the satellite era!

[Edit – March 8th]

As Tom has already mentioned below, JAXA extent has declined significantly since the (so far!) peak extent of 14.12 million km² on both the 2nd and 3rd of March:

It’s too soon to be certain of course, but we certainly now have a good candidate for the 2023 maximum JAXA extent.

NSIDC 5 day averaged extent is still increasing, but let’s see what this afternoon’s update (UTC) reveals…

Which is a decrease of 0.001 million km² from March 6th, leaving a current NSIDC maximum extent of 14.62 million km²!

Finally, for the moment at least, AWI’s “high resolution” AMSR2 extent looks a lot less convincing than JAXA’s:

[Edit – March 11th]

NSIDC Arctic sea ice extent took a tumble yesterday, so with only mild trepidation I’m calling the 2023 maximum extent. In the case of the NSIDC’s 5 day average metric that’s still a rounded up 14.62 million km² on March 6th:

The JAXA/ViSHOP maximum extent remains at 14.12 million km² on March 2nd:

The “high resolution” AMSR2 based metric from AWI peaked at 14.24 million km² on March 5th:

Watch this space!