Sea Ice Outlook | 2009 Outlook

• Pan-Arctic
• Regional

At this point, the regional outlook on ice conditions indicates that the large-scale weather patterns, which dominated in August with cooler conditions and advection of ice into the eastern North American Arctic, can also help explain much of the observed ice distribution at the local level.

The prognosis for the Parry Channel of the Northwest Passage not opening up due to presence of multiyear ice and near-normal ice break-up patterns appears to have been correct. In the first week of September, the coverage of multiyear ice in the western Parry Channel region was comparable to 2008, with roughly half the extent of what is normal for the 1968–2000 time period. Ensemble model simulations suggested that the Northwest Passage would open up in this region. While a detailed evaluation will be forthcoming, the lack of high-resolution ice thickness fields in this topographically complicated region hampers such simulations.

In the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, ice distribution mimicks the Beaufort Gyre circulation pattern with advection of ice from the high Canadian Arctic into the Beaufort Sea and export of ice northward in the Chukchi Sea. The slowdown of the melt season starting in mid-June may have allowed more and thinner ice to survive melt than in either 2008 or 2007. Only a detailed analysis of buoy data and field observations will help resolve this question, but an ice mass balance buoy placed on 1.4 meter thick first-year ice north of Barrow in April has managed to survive into the late melt season, drifting 1,000 kilometers to the North over the course of the summer. It is currently shown to be in very low ice concentration in a large embayment formed in the central arctic ice pack. Only after freeze-up will we be able to assess whether ice extent in this region may have been underestimated due to the highly ponded nature of remaining ice (see also discussion of comparable conditions in 2008 Outlook Summary). As anticipated, traces of ice lingered in northern Chukchi coastal waters into early August.