Last month of Arctic spring fails to bring sea ice to its knees, even in Southern Hudson Bay
Posted on July 11, 2024
Polar bear habitat for June — the last month of spring in the Arctic — is still within 2 standard deviations of the long-term average despite sea ice experts’ predictions that catastrophic declines can be expected any year now.
The Arctic sea ice cover in June 2024 retreated at a below average pace, leading to a larger total sea ice extent for the month than in recent years. NSIDC, 3 July 2024
Oddly, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) employees who wrote up the sea ice summary for June felt it appropriate to bring up a recently-published prediction of impending doom for Southern Hudson Bay polar bears based on a sea ice prediction (Stroeve et al. 2024), which I covered here. The inclusion of this topic is a naked promotion of the Stroeve sea ice modelling paper which not only doesn’t fit the reality of this year’s sea ice conditions but their discussion doesn’t include a single piece of evidence that Southern Hudson Bay polar bears came off the ice earlier than usual.
Arctic Summary
Here is the NSIDC chart and graph for June sea ice:
Extent this year for June, at 10.9 mkm2, compared to previous years was just about exactly what it was in 2006 and slightly lower than it was last year, as the graph below shows:
https://polarbearscience.com/2024/07/11/last-month-of-arctic-spring-fails-to-bring-sea-ice-to-its-knees-even-in-southern-hudson-bay/
