On Ice with a Twist

Thanks to reader “DrC” for the tip about a new paper which takes a new view of variations in arctic sea ice. Most of us are familiar with the usual measures of sea ice. Using satellites we can estimate both sea ice area, which is the area of the sea which is ice-covered, and ice extent, which is the area of ocean which has 15% or more ice cover. Both measures are commonplace, perhaps extent is a bit more commonly reported. It’s easy to get daily up-to-date data on arctic ice extent from JAXA, and on arctic ice area from cryosphere today.