Update to the 2021 Iceberg Season Forecast

A new measure has been introduced to the forecast, which predicts that the yearly peak in iceberg numbers will occur in April 2021.

An iceberg in the north west Atlantic

The iceberg season usually takes place between January and July, however some icebergs may be sighted beyond this time. The ‘peak month’ in iceberg numbers, defined here as the month in which the greatest number of icebergs pass 48°N in a given year, usually occurs in April or May. Therefore, a new measure has been added to the 2021 iceberg forecast that uses a machine learning approach to predict when the peak month will take place.

The models predict either: January-March, April, May or June onwards. As this measure has four possible outcomes and has been the most recently introduced, it has the lowest accuracy out of the four machine learning approaches (see full forecast for details on the other measures).

One model predicts a late peak from June onwards. The other two models predict a peak in April, and as one of these, the Quadratic SVM, has the highest accuracy, the forecast is for April to be the peak month.