Arctic report card 2011

The Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program (CBMP), the cornerstone program of the Arctic Council's Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF) Working Group, provides leadership on the biodiversity elements of the report card. [...] The wintertime increase and the summertime decrease in cloudiness resulted in greater energy flux to the surface, potentially contributing to the near record low sea ice extent this year (see the essay on Sea Ice). [...] Relative hot spots in autumn and winter are seen in regions of low sea ice concentrations for the previous summer (2010), lying north of far eastern Siberia and Alaska, in the vicinity of greater Baffin Bay and far northeastern Canada, and to some extent in the Kara Sea (see Fig. [...] The cause for the increased exchange in the last two winters is a subject for further research into whether recent changes in the Arctic are involved, whether they are the result of extreme but random events, or a combination of these and other mechanisms. [...] HTC10 in the essay on the Greenland Ice Sheet), the warm temperatures in Barrow mentioned in the Introduction, the cold temperatures in western Siberia, and kept warm storms from entering the Bering Sea.