Be sure to click the Antarctic button. Arctic (the default) shows 2012 as the lowest record.
For Antarctica, last year was the previous minimum and was 2-sigma from the mean. Additional iso-sigma curves are not shown but I'd guess this year is at least one more sigma off the mean. I progressively activate past years and do not spot an obvious trend. So, last two years have deviated significantly with this year deviating yet more so.
On the other hand, given the number of measurements, we would expect about two measurements to be outside of 2-sigma. If we do not attribute anything to 2022 and 2023 being correlated, then this is just a fluctuation.
On the gripping hand, 2022 and 2023 may be the first two points of an explosive trend.
Thanks for pointing to the source data. As much as I would be careful eyeballing a trend I would be with eyeballing the absence of one. I really would love to see a proper analysis of this data, but I am in my phone right now.
Arctic doesn't really matter much in this regard because the arctic ice doesn't influence the sea level, which I think is the main (but not only) point of the article.
You can play with the data a bit here:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-i...
Be sure to click the Antarctic button. Arctic (the default) shows 2012 as the lowest record.
For Antarctica, last year was the previous minimum and was 2-sigma from the mean. Additional iso-sigma curves are not shown but I'd guess this year is at least one more sigma off the mean. I progressively activate past years and do not spot an obvious trend. So, last two years have deviated significantly with this year deviating yet more so.
On the other hand, given the number of measurements, we would expect about two measurements to be outside of 2-sigma. If we do not attribute anything to 2022 and 2023 being correlated, then this is just a fluctuation.
On the gripping hand, 2022 and 2023 may be the first two points of an explosive trend.