After diminshing to the lowest levels of the satellite era (since 1979) this past September, the arctic ice has recovered dramatically and coverage is about 1 million square km greater than last year at this time and within 500,000 square km of the longer term average. The ice has increased 11 million square km since the September minimum.

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In the Southern Hemisphere, the ice which set a new record last winter is already increasing rapidly and is running nearly 40% ahead of where it was last year at this time. See the anomaly chart here. Below is the Southern Hemisphere ice extent graph.

See larger image here

Not surprisingly the global sea ice extent is above the long term average. Also not surprising that the alarmist PR machine picks this time to issue a release and Andy Revkin of the New York Times to blog on the report from World Mountain Glacier Monitoring Service, which is supported by the United Nations Environment Program, that the world glacial melting is increasing with no end in sight (report covers the years through 2006). They will return their attention to the arctic ice when the normal spring melt begins, ignoring once again the incredible ice happenings in the Southern Hemisphere.

Despite this increase in arctic ice extent, the loss of old, thick ice has continued through the winter months, despite the unusually cold weather deriving from La Nina conditions in the Pacific according to NASA. It is being replaced by less saline first year ice. The winter ice loss is thought to be driven mainly by the transport of old flows from Arctic waters out into the Atlantic Ocean as was the case last summer. The currents driving this are stronger than usual as a consequence of another natural cycle, the Arctic Oscillation. First year ice is more easily melted than old ice. It will be interesting to see what happens in the months ahead with a more negative AO (it was positive much of the winter leading to cold but a flow out of the arctic into the Atlantic).

Anthony Watts has an interesting post this morning entitled Deja-Vu All Over Again: Climate Worries of Today also Happened in the 20’s and 30’s with newspaper stories you could reprint today on temperature, glaciers and arctic ice worries.