The 2016 melting season

[Michael Hauber]

Hudson Bay totally melts each year, but forms ice again in winter.  Why should the Arctic basin be different?

Also the chart comparing model predictions against actual conditions is for CMIP4.  CMIP5 models are more aggressive and the model vs reality comparison is pretty close.

edit:  What is most important for albedo feedbacks is what happens around June 21 - peak solar insolation.  Ice free at Sep 21 is not particularly important because at that date the sun is pretty much gone and there is no significant feedback.

A quick look at NSIDC data suggests 21 June was a bit over 12m in the early 80s.  During 2012 it dropped to 10.3m.  So we have used up only a small amount of the potential albedo feedback.  Currently the ice edge at June 21 is only partially inside the Arctic Basin, and is much shorter than it might otherwise be if not constrained as much by land as it is.  I would suggest that as the ice edge in June advances further to cover the complete length from Laptev to Beaufort that the rate of ice area drop in June will get faster and the albedo feedback impact will increase at a more rapid rate  Then when we hit 0 ice in June the impact of albedo feedback will stop going up.

[oren]

All of the above was hotly debated a while ago in the "Slow Transition" thread started by Chris Reynolds. Basically, according to models even a totally ice-free arctic will bounce back in the following years, as the winter contains enough freezing degree days (FDDs) to recreate first-year ice of almost the same thickness regardless of initial conditions. So a "bad luck" year that melted all the ice would not cause a tipping point. Hence a slow transition to an ice-free state and not an irrevocable meltdown. At the time I thought the work was very convincing at my basic level of knowledge, but still felt it was missing something in its assumptions.

I didn't mean to start a whole theoretical discussion when I referenced that important work (maybe the thread should be revived? Or hopefully Chris will summarize it better than my poor efforts here), I just meant to point out that maybe this year might provide an example of where the assumptions could be wrong. Total number of FDDs was much lower than normal, and the melting season seems to have started much earlier than normal.

Do you have a link to that thread? I searched but could't find it. If the reason they concluded it will be  a slow transition was the freezing degree days, it might need to be reopened.
http://cires1.colorado.edu/~aslater/ARCTIC_TAIR/index_80_t2m.html

This is the thread (warning: a long one)
http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,933.0.html

And here is a post on Chris's blog (Dosbat) explaining it all - The Slow Transition: The Thickness Growth Feedback
http://dosbat.blogspot.co.il/2015/01/the-slow-transition-thickness-growth.html

[Archimid]

This is the thread (warning: a long one)
http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,933.0.html

And here is a post on Chris's blog (Dosbat) explaining it all - The Slow Transition: The Thickness Growth Feedback
http://dosbat.blogspot.co.il/2015/01/the-slow-transition-thickness-growth.html

Thanks!

[6roucho]

Interesting discussions of models vs. rapid change there.

There's a saying in finance that black swans have black feathers. Complex systems may include other complex systems. Whether those are stabilising or de-stabilising depends on their own propensity for rapid change, and their combined effect can quickly become impossible to calculate, even if we understand the physics of each of them quite well. The trigger for a tipping point can thus be unexpected.

As a sea ice layman I can't see any reason why a combination of substantially higher winter temperatures, weather, the relative absence of multi-year ice, and a longer melt season can't result in a substantially ice-free Arctic any year now. What physics prevents that?

Of course the intra-seasonal feedbacks leading to the state of the ice in following years are more complex, but that cuts both ways too. Reality's a great physics lab.

One thing we know is that models break in these situations. So-called black swan events are by definition instances of model incompleteness. Declaring them in or out of bounds based on model extrapolations thus becomes circular.

[epiphyte]

One thing we know is that models break in these situations. So-called black swan events are by definition instances of model incompleteness. Declaring them in or out of bounds based on model extrapolations thus becomes circular.

Exactly.

... not to mention that predicting increasingly chaotic system behavior based on comparing current with past day-by-day ice extent is like guessing the patient's prognosis by looking at his shadow in the sunlight.

... or that at this point, the effect of an unexpected departure from the model is far more dramatic on the downside than on the upside. Think of it as a fighter jet flying 50 feet above the ground. Everything looks, and may well in fact be, normal. But the pilot knows that there are a million unlikely things that could could change that in an instant; things that would be insignificant at an even slightly higher altitude. At this height though, any one of them could kill him before he even knew it.

[sofouuk]

Hudson Bay totally melts each year, but forms ice again in winter.  Why should the Arctic basin be different?

on this topic I'm in (virtually) complete agreement with crandles and Michael, but one difference is presumably the amount of mixing - I guess it would be significantly greater in an ice free September Arctic Ocean than in the Hudson, as A-Team says, tho I've no idea how much that would matter; even with plenty of mixing heat is going to vent and the autumn snow falls into water, leading to generally greater winter thickening. yes there are plenty of unknowns, but the scientists who model this for a living don't seem to think they're very important, and I'm willing to defer to them in the same way that I defer to scientists who study climate change for a living

[Frivolousz21]

Plummeting.  And no sign of it slowing down

[A-Team]

I benefited from a refresher on the Great Arctic Cyclone of August 2012. We had plenty of quality coverage here on the forums and there was journal analysis later.

On 2 August 2012 a dramatic storm formed over Siberia, moved into the Arctic, and died in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago on 14 August. During its lifetime its central pressure dropped to 966 hPa, leading it to be dubbed ‘The Great Arctic Cyclone of August 2012’. This cyclone occurred during a period when the sea ice extent was on the way to reaching a new satellite-era low, and its intense behavior was related to baroclinicity and a tropopause polar vortex.

The pressure of the storm was the lowest of all Arctic August storms over our record starting in 1979, and the system was also the most extreme when a combination of key cyclone properties was considered even though climatologically summer is a ‘quiet’ time in the Arctic... http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2012GL054259/full free

There were 92 subsequent articles that cited this early paper; it takes time for scientific snowflakes to settle so the 7 from 2016 would be the best place to see where the storm analysis is today:

* Physical processes contributing to an ice free Beaufort Sea during September 2012

* Wind and wave influences on sea ice floe size and leads in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas during the summer‐fall transition 2014

* Recent changes in sea ice area flux through the Beaufort Sea during the summer

* Enhancement of Arctic storm activity in relation to permafrost degradation in eastern Siberia

* The impact of radiosonde data on forecasting sea‐ice distribution along the Northern Sea Route during an extremely developed cyclone

* Axisymmetric Structure of the Long Lasting Summer Arctic cyclones

* Three Dimensional Structures of the Arctic Cyclones

[Neven]

I'm at the EGU General Assembly today and attended a press conference earlier on Arctic sea ice loss. It seems that sea ice volume according to CryoSat-2 is as low as 2012. Will try to post better images later, but here are two from the press conference.

[AbruptSLR]

I'm at the EGU General Assembly today and attended a press conference earlier on Arctic sea ice loss. It seems that sea ice volume according to CryoSat-2 is as low as 2012. Will try to post better images later, but here are two from the press conference.

The linked EGU General Assembly article discusses reasons why 2016 could set a new low summer minimum Arctic sea ice extent record:

http://www.carbonbrief.org/arctic-sea-ice-could-shrink-to-record-low-this-summer-say-scientists

Extract: "The record low for the summer minimum currently stands at 3.41m square kilometres, from 2012.
Speaking to Carbon Brief at EGU, Dr Marcel Nicolaus, a sea ice physicist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, says the 2016 summer could equal, or surpass, this record.
Sea ice conditions over the recent months are similar to those seen before the 2012 record, Nicolaus says. He identifies three main reasons why this year’s summer minimum could rival 2012:
“We did see a stronger melt last summer than usual, so we went into the winter in November with thinner ice than the previous years. We saw, due to the warming, less freezing and less build-up of ice mass [during winter]. And we do see a shift of secure ice towards the northern end of the Fram Strait of the Atlantic Ocean, where it’s very likely to be exported [away from the Arctic and into the North Atlantic] over the course of spring and summer.”"

[seaicesailor]

These reasons won’t guarantee a new record, Nicolaus adds, because sea ice melt also depends on the warmth and storminess of spring and summer – but they do boost the odds.

And the article brings more comments from other scientists along the same lines.

[Lord M Vader]

If one is to put any belief in the absolutely most recent GFS 12Z run the big high pressure should weaken and a switch to more cyclonic weather should emerge by the beginning of May. At least on the Atlantic side together with a nonexistent Greenland high pressure.

If the EURO backs the scenario in the coming runs we may dodge a bullet.

In any case, it is troublesome that the SIV (Sea Ice Volume) is as low as it was during 2012. The big question is whether we will see a strong high pressure over the North American side or not.

[magnamentis]

this and not only is it low, it's also in a "bad" shape, loose floats glued together by thin ice, once all that stuff starts drifting around we shall get a very low albedo as well as low area, not to forget about the by far greater surface attacked by warm(er) waters.

[seaicesailor]

Just like one year ago, we are reaching that moment when the recently open sea seems to refreeze but not getting there ... change of sign in the radiation budget Andreas?

[Frivolousz21]

Just keeps getting worse and worse.

[jdallen]

Here's what the cci folks think will happen a week out.

Snow rolling up to the Kara, and within a couple hundred KM of the Beaufort/CAA.

[bbr2314]

DMI shows nearly-open water expanding along the Alaskan shoreline through the next few days. With the polar ridging/heat projected to expand into the Beaufort in the intermediate timeframe this thin ice could quickly give way to open water, with the Bering Strait already nearly clear (in parts) as well.

This turns the melting front on the "Pacific" side of the Arctic into a massacre, spanning from Russia to the CAA instead of being stuck below the Bering Strait through the early summer, as in previous years. While the Atlantic side's shabbiness is concerning, the orientation of ice mass on the Pacific side may turn out to be just as damaging, given what has transpired with the Beaufort Gyre (massive cracking).

The ensuing feedback from the albedo decrease at the height of solar insolation is likely a very bad sign for what's coming this summer.

[Tor Bejnar]

There is much about conditions in the Arctic that portend early and possibly massive melting this melting season, and many posts on these threads admirably describe these. (Do you hear the "but" coming?  )

There is one feature that I'm seeing that is already in place that may prevent a record minimum this year.  (Weather, of course, is the #1 influence, and we don't know what that will be like.)  It looks to me that the Beaufort Gyre, while clearing the near-shores of ice these days, is also moving some of the thickest CAB ice to the northern part of the Beaufort Sea (or just north of that) and neighboring areas.  If this continues to develop, it will be not a "thin" line of thick ice attempting to protect the thin interior ice (which has been the set-up in some years, where it sometimes holds and other years it melts), but a fairly massive bulky lot of ice.  Therefore, I don't see a lot of CAB melting out on the Pacific/Alaska side this summer.

Am I off base?

[cesium62]

This seems pretty hard to overcome to me.

The growth rates will all be lower with milder temperatures but the shape remains. Also if there was a significant ocean warming effect, wouldn't we expect to see rapid ice extent growth delayed by more than about a week that we have seen so far?

With the graph shape above, losing a week so far and maybe another week over the next decade or two, isn't going to affect the maximum ice volume much. The main part of the volume loss in past decades has been thick multi-year ice. With that gone, any more ice melted in summer tends to mainly grow back in winter.

Yes, but once you lose all the multi-year ice, any ice that freezes in winter melts by the end of summer.  (modulo weather)

[cesium62]

Hudson Bay totally melts each year, but forms ice again in winter.  Why should the Arctic basin be different?

Hudson Bay is a more enclosed body of water and contains fresher water than the Arctic as a whole.

[I'm saying that implies anything.  I'm just pointing out it's different.]

[cesium62]

There is much about conditions in the Arctic that portend early and possibly massive melting this melting season, and many posts on these threads admirably describe these. (Do you hear the "but" coming?  )

There is one feature that I'm seeing that is already in place that may prevent a record minimum this year.  (Weather, of course, is the #1 influence, and we don't know what that will be like.)  It looks to me that the Beaufort Gyre, while clearing the near-shores of ice these days, is also moving some of the thickest CAB ice to the northern part of the Beaufort Sea (or just north of that) and neighboring areas.  If this continues to develop, it will be not a "thin" line of thick ice attempting to protect the thin interior ice (which has been the set-up in some years, where it sometimes holds and other years it melts), but a fairly massive bulky lot of ice.  Therefore, I don't see a lot of CAB melting out on the Pacific/Alaska side this summer.

Am I off base?

Yes, a lot like last year.  And this year doesn't seem as warm around Alaska as last year.  On the other hand, the ice seems thinner overall.

arctic-news.blogspot.com has a nice comparison graphic:

[bbr2314]

If HYCOM is accurate a majority of the AK coast will open up over the next week with the Bering clearing out and Fram export getting ready to rumble. The latest GFS/EURO show multiple surges of melt weather deep into the Arctic in the medium/long-range and April seems poised to end with a bang.



EURO shows a blowtorch into Beaufort beginning at D5 and continuing through D10. Wow.

[Andreas T]

Just like one year ago, we are reaching that moment when the recently open sea seems to refreeze but not getting there ... change of sign in the radiation budget Andreas?

I wish I could answer that question. I guess the reason that this information is not so easy to find is that it isn't all that easy to measure. Only very few weather stations seem to report incoming shortwave and longwave radiation .
But the significance of the areas which are opening now is of course that they absorb the short wavelengths which are now coming in more strongly. This absorption is not all taking place at the surface and therefore heats a quite large volume which makes the temperature rise so much slower than that seen on snow free land.

[Frivolousz21]

There is much about conditions in the Arctic that portend early and possibly massive melting this melting season, and many posts on these threads admirably describe these. (Do you hear the "but" coming?  )

There is one feature that I'm seeing that is already in place that may prevent a record minimum this year.  (Weather, of course, is the #1 influence, and we don't know what that will be like.)  It looks to me that the Beaufort Gyre, while clearing the near-shores of ice these days, is also moving some of the thickest CAB ice to the northern part of the Beaufort Sea (or just north of that) and neighboring areas.  If this continues to develop, it will be not a "thin" line of thick ice attempting to protect the thin interior ice (which has been the set-up in some years, where it sometimes holds and other years it melts), but a fairly massive bulky lot of ice.  Therefore, I don't see a lot of CAB melting out on the Pacific/Alaska side this summer.

Am I off base?

Yes

[Frivolousz21]

If HYCOM is accurate a majority of the AK coast will open up over the next week with the Bering clearing out and Fram export getting ready to rumble. The latest GFS/EURO show multiple surges of melt weather deep into the Arctic in the medium/long-range and April seems poised to end with a bang.



EURO shows a blowtorch into Beaufort beginning at D5 and continuing through D10. Wow.

Hycom will not be right

[Jim Hunt]

Hycom will not be right

In what way will Hycom "not be right"?

http://GreatWhiteCon.info/resources/arctic-sea-ice-images/winter-2015-16-images/#Beaufort

[Buddy]

If HYCOM is accurate a majority of the AK coast will open up over the next week with the Bering clearing out and Fram export getting ready to rumble. The latest GFS/EURO show multiple surges of melt weather deep into the Arctic in the medium/long-range and April seems poised to end with a bang.

CCI Reanalyzer shows continued warm anomaly to persist over the next week in the Arctic:  3 - 5 degrees C above normal.  Northern coast of Alaska.......north-central coast of Russia.....and southern and western Greenland/northeastern Canada being the main culprits.

The "set up" for the melting season continues to play out in a bad way (accelerated melting).  There are now too many "weak spots" in the Arctic ice for mother nature to attack.  And that is why as we get down "towards the end" of the Arctic ice (these last 3 - 5 years IMHO)....it can go rather quickly.

[A-Team]

The Beaufort is making for a great animation over the next few days. Below is an overview of the entire Arctic Ocean for 01-21 Apr 16. I'll add a zoom animation for new Beaufort cracking development in a bit when the full April 21st arrives. These take a bit of special processing on the contrast side as there is a lot more in this Worldview imagery than white on white.

The second image below shows the situation on 20 Apr 16; the blue square shows the area zoomed to in the partial scene available for the 21st. The inverse is shown for the 21st to bring out the expanding crack system.

[Nick_Naylor]

The Earth can't take any more Captain - she's breaking up!

[jai mitchell]

Just like one year ago, we are reaching that moment when the recently open sea seems to refreeze but not getting there ... change of sign in the radiation budget Andreas?

Or is it more likely the increased warming of Pacific current intrusion that Maslowski warned us about in 2011?  http://www.oc.nps.edu/NAME/Maslowski%20et%20al.%202012%20EPS%20Future%20of%20Arctic%20Sea%20Ice.pdf

[CraigsIsland]

huge hat tip to A-Team et al. on this site for the communication provided in graphical form - that animation of Beaufort is absolutely stunning and flawless in execution.

[Frivolousz21]

I mis-read that as the Alaskan coast would be ice free not the majority would be ice free. 


My mistake.

[Comradez]

The Beaufort looks so bad.  I've seen it look like this in early June in some recent years.  This is at least a month ahead of schedule.

And this is coming at exactly the time in the season where these leads will not re-freeze over, and where they are getting more and more sun wattage.  If this were happening a month earlier, you could make the case that this would help the sea ice survive the summer by venting more heat from the ocean than it was taking in from the albedo change.  But not now.

[A-Team]

a month ahead of schedule..when these leads will not re-freeze over ... more and more sun.  If this were happening a month earlier this would help the sea ice survive... not now

I'll have to fish through the archives to see what and when the Beaufort last looked like this; i dimly recall animating this in 2012 or so. Looking now at just the 21 Apr 16 image, it would apper much more cracked at 250 m resolution than it appears at 1 km, making me wonder what a 10 m Sentinel 2A would reveal about the state of the ice.

The scene below takes a click (or open in new tab) to display at full size. I've processed this Aqua Modis image from the WorldView portal to emphasize the cracks, neither is not natural color (what you would see out an airplane window). I'll post the three week animation here along with the angular rotational velocity in a bit. (Did someone say above this weather is continuing to the end of the month!?!))

The third image uses three consecutive days, 19-21 Apr 16, dropped to grayscale and then reconstituted as RGB to show movement. The fourth image shows a peculiar non-arcuate region in the central upper third of the early two image at the maximal resolution available, 250 m.

[magnamentis]

If this were happening a month earlier, you could make the case that this would help the sea ice survive the summer by venting more heat from the ocean than it was taking in from the albedo change.  But not now.

Can you please elaborate why one month later when there will be stronger insolation (higher angle) that would suddenly have the opposite effect?

[Csnavywx]

Long range ensemble runs keep positive height and surface pressure anomalies through the first week of May almost right where they are. Combined with the persistent negative pressure and height anomalies near the Bering/Aleutians, this favors southerly flow over the Beaufort, Chukchi and eventually the CAB itself, resulting in widespread warmer than normal temperatures. The details will vary a bit (indeed the high is forecast to temporarily weaken in a few days as a small upper low meanders around), but the large scale pattern looks to remain unchanged through early-mid May. If it continues much further past that, we'll have record early snow melt and melt ponding over a fairly large area.

The upcoming warm episode in western Siberia and a few days later in NW Canada/AK looks to remove most of the remaining snow cover over those areas. In fact, the latest EC run begins developing an omega block over western Canada from day 7 onwards, which, if correct, would melt the snowpack back all the way to the Arctic Coast right around the start of May. Ensembles show some support for it.

[A-Team]

Very helpful weather digest, thx cs.

Here is the movement of the Beaufort Gyre for 01 - 21 Apr 2016. The second view emphasizes development of what seems to be open water and slush. These animations are open source, feel free to circulate.

[Neven]

A-Team, I had a cursory look at cracking in earlier years, but 2012 seemed to start later, and 2015 was less extensive at this time of year. But I would have to check more thoroughly to be sure.

Still, I think what we're seeing now, is quite unprecedented.

[A-Team]

It looks like this particular Aqua satellite goes back to 08 May 2012 on Nasa's incredible Worldview portal. That may be the most efficient way to check.

http://tinyurl.com/jcm77qx

It says I registered on the forum on 29 July 2013 but posts are only archived back to June 26, 2014. That would rule out 2012? That suggests 2013 for my earliest animations. 



Now is some guy talking already about a third Beaufort Gyre animation back on 23 June 2010 so maybe we already have a longer term archive of the BG:

http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2010/06/animation-3-beaufort-sea.html

And later he is still going on with that line of thought ...

Some speculate that this is a sure sign that the ice is thin and thus easier to boss around. Of course, all the cracks and polynyas are freezing over again as it's still freezing in the Beaufort Sea. This is extra ice, and the 2013 cracking event (see here*, here* and here*) taught us that though ominous-looking such cracking can actually increase volume by a fair share, and a cold start to the melting season may then be enough to spare a large part of the (multi-year) ice in this crucial zone.

* http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/the-cracks-of-dawn.html
* http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2013/03/crack-is-bad-for-you-and-sea-ice.html
* http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2013/04/on-the-move.html

These are the magic links. It was a VERY early onset that year, like February. Chris Reynolds reviewed the whole issue of timing back to 1999:

"I've done some digging around regards this long fracture/lead in Beaufort. Nothing as big has occurred since 1999 in QuikScat or Ascat, the weather doesn't seem that abnormal, so I think it's probably mainly due to abnormally thin sea ice."

[ktonine]

Some speculate that this is a sure sign that the ice is thin and thus easier to boss around. Of course, all the cracks and polynyas are freezing over again as it's still freezing in the Beaufort Sea. This is extra ice, and the 2013 cracking event (see here*, here* and here*) taught us that though ominous-looking such cracking can actually increase volume by a fair share, and a cold start to the melting season may then be enough to spare a large part of the (multi-year) ice in this crucial zone.

"Ice factories" are those areas that see ice blown away from the coast so that new ice can then be made on newly opened waters. Widespread cracking events can accomplish the same function.

At this time of year, though, it is unlikely that the newly opened waters are refreezing.  Leads at higher latitudes are probably refreezing, but the area for this to occur is getting smaller everyday as insolation increases.

The dispersal of the MYI will be interesting to watch as the season progresses. If the warmest weather hotspots align with the MYI, we'll see slowdowns as the MYI doesn't melt out quickly.  OTOH, if the weather hotspots align with thinner ice we may see a final shape to the ice never seen before.  I fully expect Maslowski's prediction to be borne out this year.

[slow wing]

huge hat tip to A-Team et al. on this site for the communication provided in graphical form - that animation of Beaufort is absolutely stunning and flawless in execution.

Hear! Hear! Terrific graphics & analysis on this site! Kudos to those responsible.

Awe-inspiring and alarming to see the Beaufort ice getting ripped up this early in the melt season. And on the other side of the Arctic, the heat already in the water north of Svalbard is gobbling up the advancing ice floes.

[werther]

Extent numbers are plunging. Which is not surprising looking at an April analysis through NCEP/NCAR daily composites:



A regular ridging pattern contributes to Bering Sea ice loss at great speed. Weatern Alaska has +4-+6 dC temp anomalies at sea level.
I assume rapid extent loss could pause a bit in the coming weeks, when the Bering Sea is depleted of ice. But the ridging pattern also shows possible effects over Baffin Bay and Kara Sea.
That, combined with the preconditioning by an anomalously warm winter, is bound to keep holding our attention.

[Meirion]

Climate Reanalyser forecast to end of April now even warmer implying episodes of melting in all areas except CAA

http://cci-reanalyzer.org/Forecasts/#NH-SAT

[Revillo]

Here's the same spot over the beaufort for today's date, 2013-2016.

[Frivolousz21]

The 00z models are relentless.

1. The kara and the laptev have 2M temps above 0c for parts to nearly all of the next 72 hours. 

2.  Snow pack over GIS and Western Russia gets decimated. 

3.  Gis gets very early and consistent surface melt over the Southern 1/2 upwards of 2000M. 


4.  WESTERN NA/CANADA/ALASKA GETS POUNDED WHEN PERSISTENT WARM SOUTHERLY FLOW

BRINGING MAJOR SNOW,MELT ALL THE WAY TO THE SHORES OF THE ARCTIC BASIN.


5.  Winds are relentless at pushing ice away from the Alaskan coast. 

Ice formation has almost stopped and will stop the next few days.

[Frivolousz21]

Here's the same spot over the beaufort for today's date, 2013-2016.

Awesome but the 2013 imagine is off

[Revillo]

Ran into a hitch because it seems the worldview photos don't export correctly for the 2013 and earlier data so I cropped it from a screen shot. And good catch - it was also one day off. I've reuploaded it.

[Frivolousz21]

Looking back May 17th to May 26th 2011 had insane warmth with a massive ridge and Southerly FLOW into the Pacific side.

Amsr channel 89ghz shows the ice abruptly deteriorate from dry and solid to so wet the sensor almost thought the surface was purely water.

 Then a cool down for 2 weeks in laye May into mid June prevented a likely complete Western Cab collapse.

[Jim Hunt]

It looks like this particular Aqua satellite goes back to 08 May 2012 on Nasa's incredible Worldview portal.

However N.B.

On 2013-06-06 the polar projections for some layers changed as follows:

The Arctic projection changed from Arctic Polar Stereographic (EPSG:3995, "Greenwich down") to NSIDC Polar Stereographic North (EPSG:3413, "Greenland down"). Coastlines and Graticule in the older projection can be found in the Add Layer tab by searching for "EPSG:3995".

[wanderer]

I bet we will see a new record. Temperatures are much higher than in 2012...