A few years ago in 2009, I was the first to notice and write about a failure of the instrumentation for one of the satellites used by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) to show Arctic Sea Ice extent. I was told initially by NSIDC scientist Walt Meier that such an observation “wasn’t worth blogging about”. Later, after chastising me, they had to pull the plug on the data. Today, we have what appears to be a similar problem with satellite sea ice measurement. Note the big uptick similar to (but opposite in sign) what happened before in 2009:

There is this small notice on the NSIDC page:

The daily sea ice extent images are currently displaying erroneous data. NSIDC is investigating.

It looks to be a problem with the DMSP F17 satellite.

Makes you wonder how long this has been going on and if the anomalously low readings we’ve seen for awhile are due to a slow sensor degradation.

Time will tell.

Added:

DMI looks even worse:

Added:

The NSIDC graph for Antarctica has a similar glitch, in the opposite direction.

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