February 6, 2025: The Arctic sea ice has had another surprising decrease this week at a rate of 0.45% (as opposed to last week’s decrease rate of 0.28%), from the level on 01/30/2025 of 13.454 M km² to 13.393 M km² for this week.  Not really sure what to make of that at the moment, but that’s two weeks in a row now. I am not quite ready to call it a seasonal shift to the melting season just yet as the decrease rates have been relatively small, but temps across the Arctic (atmosphere and ocean) have been pretty above normal warm this season. This is the earliest turnaround in the ice extent from growth to melting that I have seen, and what is it that the philosopher once said, “One time is an outlier; twice is coincidence, and three times is a pattern…”; and so we’ll have to see what holds for next week…

The negative sea ice anomaly this week was higher than the anomaly of -1.0153 M km² on 01/30/2025 to a greater negative anomaly of -1.2833 M km² on 02/06/2025, and so more anomalously negative for this time of year than last week.