Monthly Arctic sea ice analysis returns after a year without funding

A monthly plain-English summary of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice conditions is back after losing its funding, restored days before Arctic ice hits its lowest point of the year.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is not a federal agency, lost the money for its Sea Ice Today monthly narrative summary in summer 2025. Climate specialist Rick Thoman reported the loss and the resumption in his Alaska and Arctic Climate newsletter. The summary is written by NSIDC scientists and covers ice at both poles.

For Alaskans, that narrative is the plain-English layer on top of the raw numbers. NSIDC is a primary source for the sea ice charts used along the state's northern and western coasts, from Utqiaġvik and Wainwright to Kotzebue and the Bering Strait villages, where ice timing shapes subsistence travel, hunting access and how hard fall storms hit an unprotected shoreline.

Effective Oct. 15, 2025, NSIDC suspended new monthly and mid-month analysis posts and its sea ice analysis, volume and spatial comparison tools, while keeping daily Arctic and Antarctic images, the ChArctic interactive graph of daily ice extent and the annual maximum and minimum announcements. NASA funding had ended.

Monthly posts restarted in September 2026 with backing from the Climate Science and Communication Fund from Surge Climate Talent. "However, mid-month posts and some tools are still suspended," NSIDC says on the Sea Ice Today site.

NOAA terminated its support for the two-decade-old Arctic Report Card in early August, Thoman wrote. Issued annually since 2006, it has a new online home, and Thoman said the American Geophysical Union, Climate.us, CU Boulder and the University of Alaska Fairbanks are providing support to keep it on track for 2026 and beyond. He is one of its three editors, a stake he discloses. The report card's own site is more guarded, saying many needs are not yet met for a full release.

Thoman's late-August update put the annual minimum in mid-September, likely rather than certain, with extent, the ocean area holding at least some ice, 11th lowest in the NSIDC record as of Aug. 30. He read that as typical for the post-2010 era.