On 20/02/2017 16:55, Crusader wrote:
On Tuesday, 14 February 2017 14:48:05 UTC, N_Cook wrote:
The Antarctic sea-ice new record extent stood at 2.287 million sq km
yesterday and likely to be still dropping for a week or so.
27 Feb 1997 previous satellite era record of 2.290 million sq km using
the NSIDC algorithm and output at
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ch...sea-ice-graph/
new record confirmed here
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...at-both-poles/
some background here
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/ind...,1759.450.html

It is no great surprise given that when the Austral winter was in full force, there was a dearth of much warmer water further south in the Pacific because of El Nino. This warmer mass of water was then distributed around the southern ocean easily over the summer (aiding melting at the surface/ice shelf margins) due to there being no land mass to divert it, like there would be in the northern hemisphere.

I was stationed in the South Atlantic for another couple of El Nino years and we observed that exact occurrence back then too.

The only difference to nowadays was that back then, most of the ice extent was measured by ship reports and manual readings where as now, we rely on satellites which cannot see the ice through cloud...of which there is a massive amount over the Antarctic and Arctic for a lot of the summer months.
So there is an awful lot of "interploation" that goes on to produce the current stats.
I personally do not find that particularly scientific, though the main reason for it is cost and efficiency I suppose.

Hope this is useful for someone.

I thought clouds were the reason they used microwave for sea-ice
monitoring.