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Arctic Sea Ice Forecast

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2022 Fall report


Arctic Sea Ice Information Center, Noriaki KIMURA (Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo)

Figure 1: Animation of predicted Arctic ice extent from October 1 to November 30.
  1. Sea ice in the Chukchi Sea will advance at a slower speed than the normal pace, and at an earlier than the normal pace in other areas.
  2. Sea routes of Russian side will close around October 13. The route of Canadian side except for Canadian archipelago will close around October 16.
Figure 2: Predicted sea ice concentration on October 1, November 1 and November 30
Figure 3: Deviation of the predicted sea ice concentration from the average for 2003-2021.
Blue indicates greater concentration and red indicates less concentration than normal years.

Arctic sea ice area reached its minimum in the middle of September and started advancing. As seen in the predicted ice concentration (Figure 3), sea ice around the New Siberian Islands and the Chukchi Sea will advance at a slower speed than normal years. On the other hand, the sea ice in the East Siberian-Laptev Seas and the Beaufort Sea along the Canadian coast will advance at a faster speed than normal years. The ice cover will reach the shore and close the sea routes around October 10 on the Russian side and around October 16 on the Canadian side except for Canadian archipelago.


The sea ice extent in the Arctic Ocean tends to increase in the opposite pattern to that of the decrease in summer. The faster the ice disappears, the slower the ice increases in fall. Thus, there is a correlation between the speed of sea ice retreat in summer and the sea ice concentration during the fall expansion (see 2017 Fall report). This is thought to be because the earlier sea ice disappears the longer the sea surface gets warmed, and it slows down the sea ice formation in fall.

The prediction has based on the correlation between the number of days when the sea ice concentration was less than 15% from May 1 to August 31 and the sea ice concentration after October 1. The data for 17 years from 2003 to 2021 (except for 2011 and 2012 when the data were not available) are used for the calculation.


For this prediction, we used the sea ice data from satellite microwave sensors AMSR-E and AMSR2.

You can also check the daily forecast on Arctic Data archive System (ADS) at National Institute of Polar Research.