Arctic sea-ice at lowest levels since observations began

[This article was first published on Revolutions, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

RealClimate.org used the R language and data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center to create this chart showing the extent of Arctic sea-ice in each year since satellite observations began in 1978, and the current extent of ice coverage (in red). Even though there are several weeks of annual melting yet to come, the area of ice covering the north pole is at already at a record low:

RealClimate-nsidc
The record low is the horizontal red line. You can track how far this year's melt will exceed that record by running this R script, which will download the latest data from NSIDC to create an updated chart. (R users may also be interested in the use of readJPEG and rasterImage to create the background for the chart.)

Putting those time series into geographic context, NASA has also released the visualization below, which shows the average minimum extent of sea ice compared with a current satellite view. The yellow line is the average ice pack of all previous years, i.e. the low point of each of the white lines above.

NASA_seaiceextent_aug262012

BadAstronomer has more details about how the image above was made.

RealClimate.org: An update on the Arctic sea-ice

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Revolutions.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)