February 16, 2023: Over the past week, the sea ice has continued to increase and at a slightly higher rate than last week, of 1.91%, from the level on 02/09/2023 of 14.044 M km² to 14.317 M km² for this week; for the last several weeks, the sea ice growth has really been progressively slowing down each week over the past 5 weeks now since the 2nd week in January; and so this week’s growth is almost twice the rate of the 6 six weeks.

The negative sea ice anomaly this week was a bit greater than the anomaly of -1.052 M km2 on 02/02/2023 to a greater negative anomaly of -1.104 M km2 on 02/09/2023 and so a bit more anomalously negative for this time of year.