Wet week starts tonight – And the clearing North Hole

We got pretty lucky on the weekend. After a few showers on Friday and Saturday (but less than anticipated) it cleared right up on Sunday and we were treated to another beautiful summer day!

Today has already started out pretty well and we should have more sun than clouds for the majority of the morning. By afternoon it should start to cloud over and the rain will start around 3 or 4PM.

Here is what it looks like right now on the Satellite picture:
You can see we are nicely out of the clouds.

And here is the forecast for 3PM just as the front is off the west coast. It will move in pretty fast, there are also going to be strong winds on the West Coast up to 70kph.

The rain should last into the small hours of Tuesday and then it will only be showery for Tuesday and Wednesday. Another front with significant rain is slated to come at us on Thursday morning.

The North Hole, poised to open

I haven’t talked much about Arctic ice this summer. Mostly too busy with other things but also because compared to last years dramatic record low, this year has been less crazy. That said, it appears the only thing that has kept it from being more dramatic is a very cloudy and thus cooler weather regime.

The ice is extremely thin and fragile up there right now, and to those watching it very closely over the past many years, were it not for this years coolness, we would have had massive holes in the ice where we’ve never seen them before.

Here are a couple fantastic images stitched from multiple satellite images of the actual North Pole as it has been over the past week or so.

The pink rings in one of the images represent 25kms each.

The images speak for themselves really. For hundreds of kilometres around the pole, the ice is fragmented, thin, and dispersed.

If conditions were to be perfect for melting over the next few weeks, which is unlikely, there would be a chance a gap without any pack ice could open stretching clear from Europe to America overtop the Pole. There are about 4 more weeks left in the melting season.