Record Cold Arctic Summer 2013

My interpretation of this is that the Arctic atmosphere is now cooling naturally as a result of low solar activity causing a much reduced period of temperatures above freezing.

Note that rises and falls in Arctic temperature are more pronounced in winter than in summer due to increased northern hemisphere cyclonic activity in winter which involves more and larger flows of warm air into and cold air out of Arctic regions.

The more warm air is advected into the Arctic in the northern winter the faster the climate system as a whole cools.

Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory anticipates the greatest warming in polar regions. A failure of the Arctic to warm in summer is significant.

I expect Arctic sea ice to recover over coming years.

For northern hemisphere snow cover relative to ‘normal’ see here:

http://moe.met.fsu.edu/snow/

In recent years the excess in winter has exceeded the deficit in summer so the coming 2013/14 season will be of interest.

During a global cooling spell more meridional (looping more poleward and equatorward) jetstreams naturally result in larger swings of snow cover above normal in winter and below normal in summer so what matters is the net effect which has been an increasing snow cover trend in recent years.

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