In the next week or so, the sea ice floating atop the Arctic Ocean will shrink to its smallest size this year, as summer-warmed waters eat away at the ice’s submerged edges.
Record lows for sea ice levels will probably not be broken this year, scientists say. In 2020, the ice covered 3.74 million square kilometers of the Arctic at its lowest point, coming nail-bitingly close to an all-time record low. Currently, sea ice is present in just under 5 million square kilometers of Arctic waters, putting it on track to become the 10th-lowest extent of sea ice in the area since satellite record keeping began in 1979. It’s an unexpected finish considering that in early summer, sea ice hit a record low for that time of year.
The surprise comes in part because the best current statistical- and physics-based forecasting tools can closely predict sea ice extent only a few weeks in advance, but the accuracy of long-range forecasts falters.
IceNet, a sea ice forecasting system developed by the British Antarctic Survey, or BAS, is “95 percent accurate in forecasting sea ice two months ahead — higher than the leading physics-based model SEAS5 — while running 2,000 times faster,” says Tom Andersson, a data scientist with BAS’s Artificial Intelligence lab. Whereas SEAS5 takes about six hours on a supercomputer to produce a forecast, IceNet can do the same in less than 10 seconds on a laptop. The system also shows a surprising ability to predict anomalous ice events — unusual highs or lows — up to four months in advance, Andersson and his colleagues found.
Record lows for sea ice levels will probably not be broken this year, scientists say. In 2020, the ice covered 3.74 million square kilometers of the Arctic at its lowest point, coming nail-bitingly close to an all-time record low. Currently, sea ice is present in just under 5 million square kilometers of Arctic waters, putting it on track to become the 10th-lowest extent of sea ice in the area since satellite record keeping began in 1979. It’s an unexpected finish considering that in early summer, sea ice hit a record low for that time of year.
The surprise comes in part because the best current statistical- and physics-based forecasting tools can closely predict sea ice extent only a few weeks in advance, but the accuracy of long-range forecasts falters.
IceNet, a sea ice forecasting system developed by the British Antarctic Survey, or BAS, is “95 percent accurate in forecasting sea ice two months ahead — higher than the leading physics-based model SEAS5 — while running 2,000 times faster,” says Tom Andersson, a data scientist with BAS’s Artificial Intelligence lab. Whereas SEAS5 takes about six hours on a supercomputer to produce a forecast, IceNet can do the same in less than 10 seconds on a laptop. The system also shows a surprising ability to predict anomalous ice events — unusual highs or lows — up to four months in advance, Andersson and his colleagues found.
