Bering Sea Ice

Rick Thoman put up a post about Arctic sea ice earlier this week, and it's well worth reading, as usual.

https://alaskaclimate.substack.com/p/arctic-sea-ice-update

Recent warm weather across the Bering Sea has prevented new ice growth since the turn of the year, and the latest daily ice extent number from NSIDC is nearly 20% below the median of the last 30 years.  However, we're still some way above the low ice conditions of 2015 and 2017-2018; compare the latest daily map to the same date in 2018:

Here's a look at daily temperature departures from normal since October 1st for Nome, Bethel, and St Paul Island:

December was quite chilly, as I noted here, but the rather persistent warmth since then has become a more significant and long-lived anomaly.

It's not really surprising, of course: the northwestern North Pacific is so warm, and across such a wide area, that winds from the south and west are bringing air with higher temperatures than normal.  Here's the average vector wind at 850mb since January 1: lots of southerly flow across western Alaska.

And here's the global sea surface temperature analysis from December, expressed in terms of standardized departure from normal (to reveal the local significance of the anomalies).