All-Time Low in Summer Antarctic Satellite Snow Melt Index

The summer of October 2008 through January 2009 saw an all-time record low Antarctic snow melt according to satellite microwave observations from 1980 to 2009.  The all-time high snowmelt was the summer of October 1992 to January 1993.  The snowmelt record was just published by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in Geophysical Research Letters.  The history is plotted below:

The pattern would be that this will be given little attention in the newspapers and televised media, where the upper melt rates in the periodic changes are given much more attention than the lower melt rates are given.