It was a long wait, what with the US government shutdown and a new year requiring spreadsheet updates, but here is the first PIOMAS update of 2019.
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Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center:
Good news! So far, the winter has been good for Arctic sea ice. The past three months have been relatively cool, especially when compared to the previous three winters, which broke all temperature records for the Arctic (see Zack Labe's excellent graph here). Of course, PIOMAS has responded in kind. With 3456 km3, January was well above the 3179 km3 average for the 2007-2018 period. And so, 2019 starts out as 7th lowest on record, a whopping 2500 km3 behind ranking leader 2017, almost doubling the gap since the end of November.
Here's how the differences with previous years have evolved from last month:
Wipneus hasn't updated his version of the PIOMAS graph yet, so we move on to the anomaly graph. Here too, it's clear that things are going relatively well for the ice, with the trend line venturing into 2 standard deviation territory:
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