It's Official: New Record for Winter Sea Ice

I posted about this earlier, but it's now official. The wintertime maximum of north polar sea ice extent is the lowest on record, according to an article posted by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at http://tinyurl.com/kcydsrh. This graph tells the tale:

The solid blue line is this year's day-by-day sea ice extent as measured by satellite observations. The grey swath shows the 95% prediction interval (under the assumption that the ice extent is normally distributed -- not a bad assumption, but it is an assumption). This year's trace drops almost to the level of being a full three standard deviations below the long-term mean. Even for a small sample, that's remarkable.