NASA

NASA released a remarkable satellite image (above) of the Arctic storm discussed below. Click for background and technical details.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center has posted on what it calls “a most interesting Arctic summer,” and that is certainly the case, given this week’s powerful and rare summer storm, which is churning the Arctic Ocean’s already thin and reduced sea ice cover.

In the third installment in a running series of posts on the potent storm, the Arctic Sea Ice blog, a popular aggregator of all things related to the sheath of ice floating on Arctic seas, has proposed calling it the “Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012.”

With all of this in mind, I got in touch with William Chapman, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, researcher who maintains the Cryosphere Today Web site, which was a source for some of the content on the Arctic Sea Ice blog. Below you can read his “Your Dot” description of the storm and analysis of its possible repercussions.

But before you read on, have a quick look at this short time-lapse video of sea ice and weather conditions in the central Arctic Ocean from early July through August 8, recorded by one of the two autonomous cameras set on the sea ice near the North Pole each spring by a research team from the University of Washington (the same folks I accompanied in 2003). [ Note: The center of the storm is hundreds of miles away from the drifting sea ice cameras.]

Here’s Chapman’s look at this summer’s powerful Arctic storm and its impact on sea ice:

