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Widespread coastal melting occurred in Antarctica through the second half of December and is continuing in the first few days of the new year in several areas. Nearly every region with routine surface snowmelt has had more days of melt than is typical for this time of year.

Air temperatures in December 2024 were above average over the entire Arctic Ocean, continuing the pattern set in November. Average Arctic sea ice extent for December was the lowest in the satellite record, in considerable part due to delayed ice growth in Hudson Bay and low extent in the northern Barents Sea. Antarctic sea ice has declined at a slower-than-normal pace since mid-November, erasing the record and near-record low extents of October and November and finishing the year very close to the 1981 to 2010 average.

Most of Greenland’s meltwater takes weeks to reach the ocean. A recently published study highlights an innovative new method to track Greenland’s meltwater movement: monitoring the bedrock under the ice.

Since beginning to migrate data to the NASA Earthdata Cloud, the NSIDC DAAC has worked to develop resources and tools to ensure an easy transition for data users. The newest of those tools to come to the NSIDC DAAC is NASA Earthdata Harmony data transformation services, or Harmony for short, which the NSIDC DAAC has adopted for ICESat-2 data. Harmony is a framework that serves many NASA Earthdata data sets across NASA DAACs. These data transformation services include spatial, temporal, and variable subsetting, reformatting the data, combining multiple files together in one file, reprojection, and more.

Following the pattern seen in recent years, autumn freeze up has been slow in the Arctic, reflecting the growing heat gain in the ocean mixed layer during summer and higher air temperatures. In the Antarctic, the rate of spring ice loss slowed somewhat during November, ending the month above the extreme low levels of 2016 and 2023.