Weather in Greenland 2023- up

[Mark]

Greenland’s ice sheet is currently carrying far more surface snow and ice than normal.


Latest DMI data put accumulated surface mass balance near 590 billion tonnes—roughly 100 billion tonnes above the 1981–2010 mean for this point in the season. Despite summer melt well underway, 2026 remains near the top of the recent range.

And this is not a one-year blip.

Of the past nine seasons (plotted since 2018), six finished—or, in 2026’s case, are currently running—above average:
https://electroverse.substack.com/p/greenland-still-impressing-record

[Mark]

Greenland’s ice sheet logged another net surface gain on July 23, adding 0.095 gigatons—95 million metric tons—during the heart of the melt season. Not a large gain, but the fact that there was a gain at all is the story. It’s the height of summer.

The latest map shows widespread gains, with small losses largely confined to two coastal margins in the SW and NE.


The 2025-26 accumulated surface mass balance (SMB) now stands at 573 Gt, well above the 1981-2010 mean:


Surface mass balance (SMB) measures snow and ice accumulation against meltwater runoff, sublimation and evaporation; it does not include iceberg calving or melting beneath the ice sheet. This is a counterpoint often used by alarmists. Fine. But even when taking everything into account, total mass balance (TMB) shows a clear recovery trend in recent decades:

Greenland Ice Sheet annual mass balance from GRACE/GRACE-FO satellites. Total balance is recovering.


A note of perspective for the alarmists: Greenland contains roughly 2.7 million Gt of ice. Satellite records put its average net loss between 1992 and 2020 at 169 Gt a year—about 0.006% of the ice sheet annually.

Proportionally, the headline decline is tiny.

[NSIDC and Otosaka et al. (2023)]


For further perspective, Greenland’s glaciers and ice caps are larger today than they were through much of the Holocene. From about 8,000 to 3,700 years ago, at least 75% of the reconstructed glaciers were smaller than today or absent entirely. During the peak warm interval, roughly 6,800 to 5,900 years ago, that figure reached 94% (study).

Larocca and Axford, Climate of the Past (2022), Figure 5b-c.

https://electroverse.substack.com/p/greenland-adds-more-summer-mass-freeze
High Arctic temperatures are telling a similar inconvenient story.