This web portal gives access to the latest products and information about sea ice, snow and permafrost - the cryosphere - from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.

News

Svalbard: trends in snow cover and sea-ice area

January 19, 2021

Satellite monitoring over 1982-2015 shows earlier onset of snow melt on Svalbard. The most pronounced shift is in valleys, where the ground is snow-free 1-2 days more every year during summer. Snow cover variability in lowlands correlates with the variability of sea ice in the adjacent seas, especially in June.

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Svalbard

Svalbard: the state of the cryosphere 2020

January 7, 2021

2020 was the warmest year on record for Norway since the temperature measurements began more than 120 years ago. For Svalbard, although not beating the record from 2016, 2020 was also a warm year with the warmest summer in the 121-year record for Svalbard Airport. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute conducts in-situ measurements and remote sensing observations of the cryosphere: terrestrial snow cover, permafrost and sea ice. What types of cryospheric observations are available on cryo.met.no for the Svalbard area, and what characterized these for 2020?

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Svalbard

Sea Ice Extent plot with updated minimum years

January 7, 2021

Arctic sea ice extent2020 holds the second-lowest sea-ice extent on record in the Arctic, following the record-low in 2012. Therefore we update our daily Arctic sea-ice extent figure which includes the two recent years with the lowest sea-ice extent as reference curves. 

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Sea-ice

OSI SAF Sea Ice Index v2.1 - new climate indicator of sea ice

December 14, 2020

sii graphsOn behalf of the OSI SAF sea-ice team, we are happy to present the new OSI SAF Sea Ice Index v2.1. The index consists of both the sea-ice extent and sea-ice area information and is provided as global, hemispheric, and regional data.

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Sea-ice

Ice Watch and App-development

November 18, 2020

Over the last six months, we have received many contributions through Ice Watch and testing of our new mobile application IceWatchApp. In total, the database consists of close to 10 000 individual sea ice observations from research, operations and polar tourism cruises in remote polar waters. To name a few vessels we currently have in our Ice Watch database; RV Kronprins Haakon, KV Svalbard, HI Sverdrup, Polarstern and Akademik Fedorov.

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Ice Watch