Arctic Report Card 2024

The rapid pace and complexity of Arctic change demand new and strengthened Arctic adaptation and global reductions of fossil fuel pollution

NOAA’s 19th annual Arctic Report Card (ARC) was released on December 10th at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.. The report card is a collection of invited, timely and peer-reviewed essays providing clear, reliable, and concise information on the current state of different components of the Arctic environmental system. The ARC is intended for a wide audience interested in the Arctic environment and science, including scientists, teachers, students, decision-makers, policymakers, and the general public.

The Arctic Report Card is NOAA supported, but is not a report about NOAA activities. The report card has from the start been a collaboration across borders (this year 97 scientists from 11 countries) and increasingly is a collaboration across cultures, with Arctic Indigenous Peoples and community members gaining a voice in the Report Card. Diverse perspectives are essential to understand the scale and complexity of the physical and ecological changes observed across the Arctic as well as their implications for societies within the Arctic and beyond.

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ARC 2024 Highlights

For the quick summary of the 2024 ARC with lots of evocative imagery and graphics, NOAA produced a short video to accompany the report card (below). There are also many resources on the ARC website, including graphics and links to all the past essays.

The Arctic as a Carbon Source Region

One of the important essays in this year’s Arctic Report Card was led by Dr. Sue Natalie with the Woodwell Climate Research Center and looked at the very complex topic of terrestrial carbon cycling in the Arctic. Based on data from the past 20 years, the permafrost regions of the (sub)Arctic have transitioned from being a net storage region for carbon to a carbon source, with increased wildfire being a significant contributor to the shift. There is considerable regional (and interannual) variation, but overall, boreal forest regions remain a sink, while tundra areas, in spite of increased summer plant uptake, are now a source.

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Climate Highlights

Here’s a representative list of atmosphere and ocean highlights. I want to stress that nearly all these physical features are interconnected.

• Arctic annual (Oct 2023 to Sep 2024) surface air temperatures ranked as second warmest since 1900 and the last nine years are the nine warmest on record in the Arctic.

• Arctic precipitation has shown an increasing trend from 1950 through 2024, with the most pronounced increases occurring in winter. This year, summer 2024 across the Arctic was the wettest on record.

• In September 2024, the extent of sea ice was the sixth-lowest in the 45-year satellite record, and all 18 of the lowest September minimum ice extents have occurred in the last 18 years.

• Arctic Ocean regions that are ice-free in August have been warming at a rate of 0.5°F (0.3°C) per decade since 1982.

• Snow accumulation during the 2023/24 winter was above average across both the Eurasian and North American Arctic but despite above-average snow accumulation, the snow season was the shortest in 26 years over portions of central and eastern Arctic Canada.

• Greenland Ice Sheet mass loss mass for the 27th consecutive year, but the September 2023 to August 2024 loss was the lowest since 2013.

Environmental Highlights

• Ocean primary productivity—plankton blooms—between 2003 and 2024 continues to increase in all Arctic regions, except for the Pacific Arctic. However, in 2024, lower-than-average values were dominant across much of the Arctic.

• Tundra greenness, a measure of expanding shrub cover due to warming temperatures, ranked second highest in the 25-year satellite record.

• Ice seal populations remain healthy in the Pacific Arctic, though the ringed seal diet is shifting from Arctic cod to saffron cod with warming waters.

• Generally smaller coastal herds of the western Arctic caribou have seen some recovery over roughly the last decade, but Arctic migratory tundra caribou populations have declined by 65% over the last 2-3 decades, with previously large inland herds are continuing to decline or remain at the lowest populations noted by Indigenous elders.

Indigenous Expertise

Following on last year’s essay on the Alaska and Arctic Observatory and Knowledge, this year the Report Card featured a contribution from Sherry Fox and Mike Jaypoody with the Ittaq Heritage and Research Centre in Kangiqtugaapik (Clyde River), Nunavut, Canada. They report on the community-centered work in supporting traditional skills in the modern world and as they forcefully note, hunters are the original Arctic researchers.

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Full Disclosure

I’ve been a co-author on the surface air temperatures essay in the Arctic Report Card since 2015 and have served as one of three general editors since 2020. This year’s lead editor was Dr. Twila Moon, Deputy Lead Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The ARC is supported by the Arctic Research Program in NOAA’s Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program.

As always, all opinions herein are mine alone and not those of NOAA or UAF.