February 20, 2025: The  Arctic sea ice has continued to to increase for this week but at a lower rate of 1.66% (as opposed to last week’s increase rate of 2.05%), from the level on 02/13/2025 of 13.673 M km² to 13.904 M km² for this week.  So after two anomalous weeks in a row of decreasing sea ice extent, the seasonal shift to the melting season has in fact not yet started for this year as we now have two straight weeks of sea ice increasing.  

The negative sea ice anomaly this week was lower than the anomaly of -1.1852 M km² on 02/13/2025 to a lesser negative anomaly of -1.0951 M km² on 02/20/2025, and so less anomalously negative for this time of year.