Beaufort Sea Ice

Although Arctic-wide sea ice extent is running very low this summer - with big deficits on the Russian side of the basin - surprisingly there is much more ice than normal in the Beaufort Sea.  The following figure illustrates the striking contrast from recent years:

We have to go back to 2006 to find more sea ice in the Beaufort Sea at this date, and the ice extent is even higher than the median for the 1980s.  Rick Thoman pointed out this fact on his site, and he also notes that a considerable amount of multi-year ice has made it into the Beaufort Sea.  The following image from NSIDC is a few weeks old, but it clearly shows a zone of older ice stretching from the Canadian high Arctic to the Beaufort Sea.

The anomaly in the Beaufort Sea stands in huge contrast to the rest of the Arctic.  This figure from Zack Labe shows the rank of each regional basin's ice extent relative to other years in the satellite era.

The Chukchi Sea also has more ice than most recent years, although in the case of the Chukchi the ice is not as extensive as last year.

The NSIDC sea ice index shows the ice deficit on the other side of the pole, with nearly all ice gone in the Kara Sea already. 

Taking a look at the weather pattern from recent months, there has been high pressure centered over the Beaufort Sea, but this in itself is not unusual.  The second figure below shows the departure from normal MSLP since May 1, and the more anomalous aspect is the low pressure near Greenland (positive AO/NAO phase):

The effect of the pressure pattern has been to generate unusual northerly winds from near the pole to the western Canadian Arctic; the figure below shows the departure from normal of the vector wind.  I suspect this has helped to shift the highest concentration of ice onto the Canadian side and also accelerate the Beaufort Gyre, sending old ice westward into the Beaufort Sea.