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Quite something when such warm anomalies can be considered to constitute a relatively "cool" year, though.
Was thinking same thing, too. Went on to see a few regional maps in locations of large rivers entering the ocean - those places have SSTs for thousands square kilometers of the ocean being some 18...20 degrees C. Looking back at the one i posted here with my previous message, i see that some most anomalously hot regions are indeed ones where big rivers come in.
And then i see two large and rather red anomalously warm regions near Greenland. What is it? Greenland melt waters? If yes, and if to assume that the temperature of melt waters there should be much lower than temperature of rivers going into Arctic ocean from continents, - for a simple reason that rivers go largely through now ice-free areas for hundreds of kilometers, being warmed up by the sun - while Greenland melt waters are going through/under ice and thus are being kept rather close to freezing point - then, with such an assumption, some wild guess about the volume of melt waters there - is really scary. That is, if melt waters are indeed near freezing point temperature, then it must be extremely very huge volume of melt waters to produce those large anomalously warm regions near Greenland.
This speculation i just did would not be significant enough to post here, if not this:
Last 2 years, it's a sea level rise of some 10-11mm every year; could it be that Greenland is indeed dropping much more - possibly, times more, - meltwater every year in compare to what it was just some 3+ years ago? Could it be happening because Greenland's under-ice lake-like reservoirs of liquid water are now "full", while until some ~3 years ago they still were not, and much of melt water was not dropped into the ocean, but was still filling up those land-based "lakes" in Greenland itself (under ice)? This would be something which never happened before (last couple thousands years at least, i guess); just like ~10mm/year sea level rise - which, obviously from the graph, never happened before (in recent past) for 2 consequetive years.
I'd be glad if someone would show me where my guess is demonstrably wrong; cause if i am not wrong, then it's quite a new mode for the whole Arctic, and its sea ice in particular: huge amounts of meltwater where there was times less of it before - would be massive and increasingly powerful factor, influencing currents, bottom melt, salinity, quality of (relatively nearby) masses of MYI, you name it...
