The monthly average extent for May 2016 is more than 1m sq km below that observed in May 2012.
May's average extent was 680,000 sq km (224,000 sq miles) below the previous record for the month, set in 2004.
This was just half of its average extent during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and nearly twenty per cent less than its extent in 2007, the previous record-low year.
In Antarctica, the average extent of sea ice in November was 14.54m sq km (5.61m sq miles), which is 1.81m sq km (699,000 sq miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average.
Arctic sea ice extent set another record low, with the average extent for May 2016 becoming the lowest extent for the month since satellite observations began, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center This record low may not come as a surprise, however, following a record low extent in January, February, and April 2016.
Still, the scientists, at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said that the ice in the Arctic this summer was 33percentt below the average extent tracked since satellites started monitoring the region in 1979 and that the trend continued toward an ice-free Arctic Ocean within a few decades.
(That area of "maximum extent" is actually the average extent from the previous 5 days).
We prove that the iterative application of the algorithm gradually reduces the average extent of the propagation per target triangle, tending to affect only two triangles.
d Average extent of snow cover for March May in Eurasia, data from Rutgers University Snow Lab (http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=eurasia&ui_season=2; T. Estilow, personal communication, 2013).
It may be noted that the actual data for the Sea of Okhotsk show a fall in annual average extent (mn k m2) from 0.58 in 1979 to 0.37 in 1990.
