Guest post by Eric Worrall
The following is a slideshow of images from the NOAA National Ice website, showing snow and ice cover over the Northern Hemisphere. The images are loaded directly from the NOAA site – I just provided the slide show mechanism.
The days chosen are the 1st day of the year (top left), the 90th day of the year (top right), the 180th day of the year (bottom left), and the 270th day of the year (bottom right). In a few cases images for that exact day are unavailable, so instead I display the nearest adjacent day.
I’m not making any particular statement about the ice. You can see the fall in Summer ice cover in the bottom right panel, which excited various parties into making dubious predictions about an imminent “ice free arctic”. You can also see a moderate recovery in ice cover in recent years.
The most remarkable feature of this series IMO is that minimal visible variation in winter snow and ice cover – so it seems we may have quite a long wait, until the “end of snow”.
Note that viewing the slideshow requires a fairly up to date web browser – if the images don’t update every few seconds, make sure your browser has been upgraded to the latest version available for your computer. For example, the slideshow won’t work if you use an old operating system such as Windows XP, but it should work in Windows 8, if your system is fully up to date.
