The stratosphere is the part of our atmosphere beginning at an altitude of ca. 10 km, and where, thanks to the absorption of the trace gas ozone, temperatures rise with increasing altitude. Normally,
While the summer minimum was reached in the Antarctic on 19 February 2020 (at 2.68 million km²), in the Arctic the extent has been growing steadily since the end of February, and hasn’t yet reached it
The standard unit used for the sea-ice volume is thousands of cubic kilometres, and offers a better measure of the state of Arctic sea ice than the extent, since the volume includes the thickness of t
On 16 May, RV Polarstern left the MOSAiC floe, which an international team of experts has been researching since last October, to pick up the crew for the next leg of the expedition off the coast of S
Despite a storm and the adverse ice conditions, he and his team reached the MOSAiC floe almost as planned. They left the floe on 16 May and reached the sea-ice edge on Tuesday, 2 June. Now Torsten Kan
For the majority of June and at the beginning of July, the extent was below the level for the same month in the record-breaking year 2019 (Fig. 1). The monthly mean ice extent was 10.03 million km² –
In the months of June, July and August, predictions can be submitted on the September sea-ice extent for the Arctic as a whole, or for specific regions. The forecasting methods vary considerably, and
Consequently, temperatures up to 6 degrees Celsius or more above the long-term average were prevalent on the East Siberian coast, which led to early snow melting and thawing soils (you can find more i
The rapid rate of ice loss observed in early July continued in the third week of the month, before dropping again rapidly (Fig. 4). The mean sea-ice extent in July 2020 was 6.85 million km 2 – the low
Since the beginning of continuous satellite observation in 1979, the daily ice cover in the Arctic and Arctic has been measured extensively, offering a record of the climatic changes in the two polar
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