Will this year match last summer’s record-low sea ice extent? Only time will tell

By Summit Voice

FRISCO — Since reaching its maximum extent in mid-March, Arctic sea ice has closely tracked the 2012 extent, which ended up at an all-time record low for the satellite era, going back to 1979.

In an early June update, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that May’s average daily decline was about 14,100 square miles per day, slower than the 1979 to 2000 average of  17,000 square miles per day.

Overall, the May extent was the 10th-lowest during the satellite observation era, and about 151,000 square miles above the record low of 4.95 million square miles, set in 2011.

FromThe Denver Post (Colleen O’Connor):

Dirt is almost all that people can talk about these days in communities along U.S. 50 and 287. Photos of fierce dust storms rolling across the state’s Eastern Plains are showing up on Facebook and local TV news, harking to the Dust Bowl years that devastated southeastern Colorado in the 1930s. Farmers and ranchers are tolling their losses. People are praying for rain. It’s the inevitable result of three seasons of extreme drought in the area — D4 this year, the worst on the U.S. Drought Monitor scale, and no relief in sight, said state climatologist Nolan Doesken. “The first year, it was very dry, but there was still reasonable vegetative cover,” he said. “That started deteriorating last year, with more and more bare ground.”

For miles on either side of U.S. 287 between Kit Carson and Lamar, the earth is brown and bare…

… setting a record.