NSIDC sea ice area and extent

Arctic sea ice

NSIDC sea ice concentration animation for last 10 days

Update 3 Apr 2026: Daily updates on this page are resuming. Caveat: the data for 2026 are based on the new NSIDC product which uses AMSR2 satellite data, whereas the data for previous years are based on the old SSMIS satellite dataset (which is no longer available for 2026). This could mean that the data for 2026 are biased low compared to previous years. The bias for sea ice area seems to be at worst ~0.2 million km2 in the peak insolation months. The bias for sea ice extent is considerably less than that, and out of the peak insolation months it is also considerably less.

The graphs and data below are calculated from the gridded sea ice concentration data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

Technical notes:

This page uses daily data, rather than the 5-day averages that are used on some other websites.
The data for 2026 are near-real-time data and may be subject to small revisions by NSIDC.
The "pole hole" (a small area around the North Pole of about 64k square km where data are unavailable) is assumed to be 100% covered by sea ice. This assumption may be replaced by an interpolation later.