Hot Times

A cold front came through yesterday - I almost wished I had put on a long sleeved shirt or maybe even a jacket while I was walking around campus. A big change from the 80 F plus days we had been having. Meanwhile in the Arctic, the temperature today is almost 7 C warmer than the mean for this time of year, and some places it's 20 C above normal. Not coincidentally, sea ice for this time of year is more than 1.5 million km^2 below the modern mean, a record and by a bunch. At this time of year, we can usually expect 3 to 5 weeks more of Arctic sea ice increase, but it has been decreasing for twelve days now and a big recovery doesn't look in the cards.

Should we expect a record melt this year? Too early to say, but it surely could be like that.

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