Eighth day in a row for absolute ice records in Antarctica!!

The Antarctic sea ice now covers an area that is larger than United States and Canada combined, or more than twice the size of Europe..

Another way to look at the ice cover size is, if the landmass of Antarctica is included, the ice cover is larger than Asia.

The amount of ice over last years absolute record is larger in area than the country of Spain.

Notice the ice extent goes all the way up to the 55th latitude, where a change in the albedo from the ice has a substantial cooling effect since a large portion of the sunlight gets reflected rather than absorbed. At the 55th latitude the sun is now 35 degrees above the horizon. The sun in the Arctic by contrast is now only 10 degrees above the horizon at the 80th latitude, so the effect of the Arctic ice is much less important.

This will probably not be mentioned at the United Nations’ Summit on Climate Change September 23 in N.Y. Instead President Obama will say something like “warmest August on record”, referencing a press release from NASA, confirmed by NOAA. These were preliminary figures excluding the polar regions, but when they are included, according to NASA’s own data http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts.txt  it was the eighth warmest August, and the 89th warmest month overall.

This highlights the importance of the polar regions to be included when calculating the earth’s temperature and energy balance.

Here are the 30 highest values in square kilometers since satellite records begun.

 

2014,    09,  19,   20.12703,   Absolute record since satellite monitoring begun

2014,    09,  18,   20.11297,   Record 2 days ago

2014,    09,  17,   20.05201,  Record 3 days ago   

2014,    09,  16,   19.91462,   Record 4 days ago

2014,    09,  15,   19.81305,   Record 5 days ago

2014,    09,  14,   19.75260,  Record 6 days ago

2014,    09,  13,   19.73444,  Record 7 days ago

2014,    09,  12,   19.62641,   Record 8 days ago

2013,    09,  30,   19.57892,        2013 final absolute record

2013,    09,  28,   19.57295,         2013 record

2013,    10,  01,   19.57088,

2013,    09,  21,   19.56010,        2013 record

2013,    09,  14,   19.55145,         2013 record

2014,    09,  11,   19.54671,

2013,    09,  20,   19.53172,

2013,    09,  27,   19.51465,

2013,    09,  13,   19.50511,         2013 record

2013,    09,  22,   19.50450,

2013,    09,  29,   19.50390,

2013,    09,  18,   19.50078,

2013,    09,  17,   19.49298,

2014,    09,  10,   19.48881,

2013,    09,  19,   19.48110,

2012,    09,  22,   19.47713,       2012 new absolute record

2012,    09,  25,   19.47159,

2013,    09,  16,   19.47074,

2013,    10,  02,   19.46862,

2012,    09,  26,   19.47649,

2013,    09,  26,   19.46622,

Source: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/south/daily/data/