NEWS Drawing on the latest findings from NOAA’s Arctic Report Card (2025), record warmth and precipitation, shrinking early-summer snow cover, and unprecedented glacier losses in Scandinavia indicate that the Arctic system is changing faster and in more interconnected ways than previously observed. Together, these signals form a shared evidence base for researchers seeking to frame new questions, strengthen proposals, and connect local observations to pan-Arctic processes.
NOAA’s Arctic Report Card 2025 (ARC 2025) is a peer-reviewed annual “stocktake” of Arctic climate and environmental conditions—now in its 20th year—covering the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and tundra, alongside focused essays on emerging phenomena.
Arctic observing is globally consequential as “to observe the Arctic is to take the pulse of the planet”. The region is warming several times faster than the global average, with cascading effects on ecosystems, livelihoods, and global climate dynamics.
The report documents another year of exceptional warmth and a strengthening hydrologic cycle. Arctic-wide surface air temperatures from October 2024 to September 2025 were the warmest in the instrumental record back to 1900, and total precipitation over the same period set a record high. Snow conditions underline the “faster, wetter, more variable” character of a warming Arctic: snowpack was above normal across much of the Arctic through May, yet June snow cover extent still dropped below normal—part of a long-term decline in which June snow cover is now about half of what it was six decades ago.
Glaciers in Arctic Scandinavia and Svalbard experienced their most negative mass-balance year on record in 2023/24, linked to persistent warmth over northern Scandinavia and the Barents Sea. Tundra ecosystems continue to transform, with circumpolar maximum tundra greenness ranking third highest in the 26-year satellite record, extending a run of near-record values since 2020. Meanwhile, permafrost-driven biogeochemical change is becoming visible: in Alaska alone, more than 200 watersheds now show “rusting rivers,” where iron and other elements mobilised by thawing permafrost discolour streams, increase acidity, and release toxic metals, degrading aquatic habitats—raising direct concerns for drinking water and subsistence fisheries.
Winter sea ice reached the lowest annual maximum extent in the 47-year satellite record (March 2025), and September 2025 recorded the 10th lowest minimum extent—continuing a pattern in which the 19 lowest September minima have all occurred in the last 19 years. The oldest, thickest multi-year ice has declined by more than 95% since the 1980s, with resilient ice now concentrated mainly north of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago. In the Atlantic-sector marginal seas, August 2025 sea-surface temperatures were ~7°C above the 1991–2020 average—an extraordinary marine heat anomaly. ARC 2025 also highlights “Atlantification”—the northward spread of warmer, saltier Atlantic-origin waters—now detected in the central Arctic Ocean, with implications for sea-ice formation, ocean stratification, weather, and ecosystem structure.
The report presents a practical and citable synthesis of the conditions that shape environmental risk, infrastructure needs, food security, and governance challenges. It also models how knowledge is produced: Indigenous-led and community-driven monitoring is treated as essential, not supplemental, and the report explicitly notes that observing gaps still limit what can be assessed and managed. For researchers developing proposals or new questions, the Report Card is both baseline evidence and an idea generator—an annual reference point for what is changing, where, and why it matters.
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Read the highlights, watch videos, or read the full Arctic Report Card (PDF).
