February 2, 2023: Over the past week, the sea ice has continued to increase but at a slightly lower rate than last week, of 1.19%, from the level on 01/26/2023 of 13.734 M km² to 13.899 M km² for this week; for the last few weeks, the sea ice growth has really been progressively slowing down each week over the pat 4 weeks since the 2nd week in January.

The negative sea ice anomaly this week was a bit greater than the anomaly of -0.998 M km² on 01/12/2023 to a greater negative anomaly of
-1.052 M km² on 02/02/2023 and so a bit more anomalously negative for this time of year.