After briefly being near the bottom of the historical range at the beginning of the month, AWI’s high resolution AMSR2 area metric is now back near the top of that range:

However, although it’s not visible on the area graph extent has recently taken a bit of a tumble:

Here’s an animation showing the motion of sea ice in the Arctic over the last month:

The first Sea Ice Outlook of 2023 has been published by the Sea Ice Prediction Network, and the “dynamic models” seem to be consistently predicting a lower September 2023 extent than the “statistical” methods:

This year’s median forecasted value for pan-Arctic September sea-ice extent is 4.54 million square kilometers with an interquartile ranges of 4.34 to 4.90 million square kilometers. This is nearly the same as last year’s June median forecast for September, but higher than the three previous years (2019–2021). The lowest sea-ice extent forecast is 2.95 million square kilometers, from UC Louvain, which would be a new record low for the satellite period (1979-present); the highest sea-ice extent forecast is 5.60 million square kilometers, from the HEU Group, which would be the highest September extent since 2006. Only one Outlook forecasts a new record minimum September extent, though two others (Met Office, NCEP-EMC) forecast an extent that is essentially the same as the record low September (3.57 million square kilometers).

Watch this space!