Our one stop shopping Sea Ice Page has quickly become a world wide favorite, and Joe Bastardi of AccuWeather uses some of the graphics offered there.
To watch the AccuWeather broadcast go to:
http://www.accuweather.com/video.asp?channel=vbbastaj
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Steve Goddard writes that so far, “steady as a rock” and offers some interesting analysis:
At the beginning of June, I observed that the PIPS ice distribution in 2010 was very similar to 2006. The distributions were nearly identical, with 2010 average thickness a little lower than 2006.
Can we find another year with similar ice distribution as 2010? I can see Russian ice in my Windows. Note in the graph below that 2010 is very similar to 2006. 2006 had the highest minimum (and smallest maximum) in the DMI record. Like 2010, the ice was compressed and thick in 2006. Conclusion : Should we expect a nice recovery this summer due to the thicker ice? You bet ya.
Since then we have read seemingly endless hysterics by Joe Romm and government sources about record melt rates, and how clueless and ignorant my analysis has been. So let’s look at what has actually happened since June 1. The graph below shows JAXA extent since June 1 for 2006 and 2010.
Basically, they are two parallel lines. 2010 has tracked 2006 quite closely – just as PIPS said they should. There have been no major diversions from the pattern this summer. Summer 2010 has been almost a straight line. Apparently some bloggers “can’t see the forest for the trees.”
In the DMI record, 2010 has passed every year except 2005 and 2006. The only real question now is – will 2010 end up in the #2 or #3 spot?
Closeup below:
At the end of May, Mark Serreze and Joe Romm had a different take for 2010:
“Could we break another record this year? I think it’s quite possible,” said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
We are in the fourth quarter of the 2010 game. The score right now is :
Breathtakingly Ignorant* WUWT – 1
Experts – 0
Will the peer reviewed experts score at the last minute? What do you think?
* A term coined by Dr. Mark Serrezze
Tom P
PIPS has been an incredibly valuable data source for forecasting ice behaviour. My short and long term forecasts have been almost perfect this year as a result.
Compare the accuracy of my forecasts to those of the experts.
Icarus says:
August 10, 2010 at 5:35 am
You sure do like straight lines. Given how much you like them, how far back do you think they go from before 1979? 10 years? 50 years? 1000 years? Clearly, these straight lines are just a way to visualize data and aren’t based on fundamental laws of physics, so why is your analysis so focused on it?
Can you define what is significant here? March, April, and May ALL have 3 years in a row well above your magical line. I don’t know what you consider significant, but if the number 10 you present here
Icarus says:
August 10, 2010 at 3:55 am
is any indication, you have impossibly high standards. In fact, looking at the graphs you link to, none of the months have exhibit data with more than the last three years BELOW the trendline either. Using your number of 10, there’s no way in the world you can back up your statement that the decline is accelerating, correct? Especially considering that 3 years is the most either of us can do in number of adjacent points on a side of a trendline? So why do the skeptics need 10 years on one side of the trendline, and you only need three for your claims? I guess recovery is weather, but decline is climate (with a line that has the oceans completely covered in ice not too long ago).
-Scott
RE: stevengoddard says:
August 9, 2010 at 8:30 pm
Thanks for stating the rule about calories.
I was trying to describe a dynamic but doing a lousy job. Will try again later, but no time now.
Scott: You’re right, it can’t be legitimately claimed that the decline in Arctic sea ice extent is accelerating, based on a majority of recent data points being below the trendlines, because the time period is too short to draw that conclusion – that was really my point. For that reason, which you highlighted in your reply, you certainly have to withdraw your claim that there is evidence of a ‘recovery’ based on the last 3 years of data. Agreed? All we can say *at the moment*, based on that data, is that there is no evidence of any significant deviation from that long-term decline.
I agree.
Steve,
You say “PIPS has been an incredibly valuable data source for forecasting ice behaviour. My short and long term forecasts have been almost perfect this year as a result.”
You’ve changed your tune from June when you said “I’m not interested in the ability of PIPS to forecast into the future.”
Going back to your first forecast, again in June: “Based on current ice thickness, we should expect September extent/area to come in near the top of the JAXA rankings (near 2003 and 2006.)”
Not many days left until your first prediction strikes out.
But as Groucho Marx nearly said, “If you don’t like my predictions, I have others”…
But this new prediction of yours actually overestimated the melt by quite a margin for the last two months: http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/4500/goddardpredict.png
I’ve a new prediction, that like a stopped clock that is right twice a day, sometime in in the next month your dotted line will intersect the JAXA plot. But I’m also sticking with what I wrote at the beginning of June: “I think it’s very likely that this year’s minimum ice volume will be lower than the 2007 value, as calculated by either PIPS or PIOMAS.”
“”” Beth Cooper says:
August 10, 2010 at 6:55 am
“Teacher! Leave them kids alone…”
Stevengoddard, I used to sing that song to my students in the eighties.
George E Smith: “So I had to map out my own drainage ditches…have stepped in a few myself, but seldom the same one.” Classic case of Karl Popper’s Searchlight Theory of Learning. No question it’s been effective in your case. Must say I’ve gleaned a bit from your musings these last couple of years. “””
Beth, It only takes a single post such as yours to convince me that it is well worth putting in the effort here at this wonderful forum.
And if we can have some laughs at ourselves at the same time; that is always good. I came here to learn like I suspect most do; and I didn’t set out to try and convince folks who probably know a whole lot more about this stuff than I do.
If I can help just one person to see some of these issues in a clearer light; then it is well worth the time it takes.
As I have said quite often:- Ignorance is NOT a disease; we are all born with it. But stupidity has to be taught; and there are plenty who for their own ends are willing to teach stupidity. And I have only contempt for those who do have special knowledge; but choose to use that to obfuscate; often for some agenda they prefer we don’t discover.
George
From the looks of things, I would suppose that the AGW skeptics will be needed to find a term for their sea ice “recovery” which is really of course a non-recovery from the longer term decline it has been in…perhaps…um, “recovery spiral”?
Excerpt from: Tom P on August 10, 2010 at 9:41 am
Since PIOMAS exists to show declining Arctic sea ice, which it does quite faithfully, and you only will accept a PIPS volume calculation done your way, your ice volume prediction has about as much value as predicting it won’t snow in central Pennsylvania tomorrow.
Which is a shame, as we could really use some precipitation. Stupid
Anthropogenic Global Warming based long term climatic shiftweather!Amino Acids in Meteorites said:
August 10, 2010 at 7:24 am
” The earth had cooled from ~1945 to ~1976 and that created a larger ice mass at the Arctic that lasted into the 80′s.”
But that doesn’t tally with what Crysosphere are suggesting on the graphs
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
Fom 1945 to 1976 there is no increase at all. Indeed the drop off seems to have started before the 1980’s and the satellite record.
Or is that graph just completely wrong?
Andy
Icarus says:
August 10, 2010 at 9:17 am
You’re sort of comparing apples and oranges here because you’re making your claims based on positioning of points relative to a ~30-year trendline, whereas my claims were based on starting the measurements at 2007 instead of a possible high point of ~1980. However, I do agree that claiming recovery this early should not be done, but nor should there be claims of “no recovery”, as the trendlines since 2007 look to me to be positive, and that’s what initially aggravated me. That and using a 30-year trend to ensure that any recent upticks were ignored.
I agree with this statement only if the line “long-term decline” is replaced with “last 30 years”. We simply don’t know enough about the ice status before then, particularly LIA versus MWP. That was my point. If warmists want to claim a 30-year trend as being representative, what’s wrong with me choosing a 3- or 4-year trend? I’d much prefer at least hundreds of years of data to see how significant an effect humans are having.
-Scott
Bart says:
August 10, 2010 at 1:06 am
“Does anyone know whether a climate scientist (pro AGW) has stated on the record giving an outline of what would falsify AGW theory?”
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Data can falsify the AGW theory, nothing else. There is no need for AGW sceptics to come with a better theory. The data can falsify the AGW theory in two ways. A) The warming turns out to be predominantly not negative. B) The warming as predicted does not take place in a significant way.
So maybe someone else has commented on this, but Dr. Serreze terms WUWT as “breathtakingly ignorant” when it makes the same prediction as his own NSIDC? I find that interesting…
-Scott
RE: Icarus says: (August 10, 2010 at 9:17 am) “All we can say *at the moment*, based on that data, is that there is no evidence of any significant deviation from that long-term decline.”
That is quite true; however, there is also no proven reason to expect that any such decline should continue indefinitely. Recently there has been a strong positive signal that may be the first sign of a reversal of the old trend.
As the combination of Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice extent seems to have remained relatively constant over the last thirty years, perhaps, one day, the lexicon of meteorology will contain a term like ‘Trans-Arctic Oscillation’ to describe the shared activity of the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
More from: Tom P on August 10, 2010 at 9:41 am
Minimum extents per IARC-JAXA:
2003 September 18: 6,032,031 km^2
2006 September 14: 5,781,719 km^2
And to toss it out there,
2004 September 11: 5,784,688 km^2
2005 September 22: 5,315,156 km^2
2002 September 09: 5,646,875 km^2 <- short year, start of record
Those are the highest minimums, and 2010 sure looks like it'll be near or in that group. Also looks like it'll be more than a month until we know.
Whoa, what’d you pull that graph out of? Not to comment much on your graph doctoring skills, but Steve’s down for 5.5×10^6 km^2, with yours it looks closer to 5.7. Also at 200% zoom your graph is “dirty,” I can see the pasted-in section and by the way the y-axis lines don’t match up I can see some scaling was done.
Back at the
ArcticSea Ice News #17 Steve said:At this point, barring anything miraculously terrible, it will be the highest since 2006 and will beat 2005 as well.
With the new prediction, it sure looks like he’s admitted he overestimated the melt, or to put it properly he overestimated the amount of extent loss. But he’ll likely be off in the -0.2 to 0.0 million km^2 range. Going by the amounts the professionals blow it in the SEARCH Sea Ice Outlooks, that’s actually quite good. Besides, since he overestimated then there is more ice extent than he thought there’d be. What’s wrong with there being more ice than expected?
Spector said:
“Recently there has been a strong positive signal that may be the first sign of a reversal of the old trend.”
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Define “strong positive signal” please. We’ve not seen a positive Arctic Sea ice anomaly since 2004, so how can there be a sign of reversal in a multi-decadal downtrend in Arctic sea ice without even having a positive Arctic sea ice anomaly?
stevengoddard,
From someone whose prediction for the sea ice extent minimum is higher (admittedly, in some cases only very slightly) than the minimum that will result if the remaining melt from this date to the minimum is the same as in any year since 2002 inclusive (based on JAXA extent data), that’s a lot of premature triumphalism. I think you were on safer ground in July when were saying it was all about the winds. If, as you’ve written, 2007 was mostly about compaction of the ice pack rather than melt, can you really rule out that the weather will shift to favour compaction again between now and the end of the melt season? If so, on what basis? I wasn’t aware long range weather forecasting was quite that good yet.
From: AndyW on August 10, 2010 at 12:23 pm
For one thing that graph is “Northern Hemisphere” not “Arctic” sea ice…
Looks like everything was going fine and level, then things started going haywire in 1952. You got an explanation for that?
Scott: On the whole I applaud your reply. More than 30 years’ worth of reliable data would be nice – It was interesting to see the section in IPCC AR4 cited by tonyb earlier –
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter4.pdf
Page 352, Fig 4.10 shows data back to 1860 but I presume the data is much less reliable the further back you go. I wouldn’t rely too much on the ‘uptick’ from the dramatically low ice extent of 2007 as a hint of good news to come, but only time will tell, eh?
R. Gates says:
August 10, 2010 at 2:40 pm
I suggest plotting x^2 from -10 to 4, or plot sin(x) from pi/10 to 2*pi. The linear trend is still downward for those plots and the last sections of their plots show negative anomalies, yet clearly they show a strong positive signal at the end of their plots. Do the final upticks reverse the sign on the linear trends? No (and the sinusoidal one will never go positive). Of course, Spector never said it did, he said “may be the first sign of reversal of the old trend”.
-Scott
RE: AndyW says:
August 10, 2010 at 12:23 pm
Amino Acids in Meteorites said:
August 10, 2010 at 7:24 am
” The earth had cooled from ~1945 to ~1976 and that created a larger ice mass at the Arctic that lasted into the 80′s.”
But that doesn’t tally with what Crysosphere are suggesting on the graphs
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
Fom 1945 to 1976 there is no increase at all. Indeed the drop off seems to have started before the 1980′s and the satellite record.
Or is that graph just completely wrong?
_______________
We went through this at Climateaudit a couple of years ago. The originators of that graph had a statement cautioning the use of the graph as a lot was interpolating and estimation. Bottom line – do not use. Someone else posted other info (do not recall now, but some may have been from Russia) which had a lot more variability and was more consistent with previous warm periods.
RE: R. Gates: (August 10, 2010 at 2:40 pm) “Define ‘strong positive signal’ please. We’ve not seen a positive Arctic Sea ice anomaly since 2004, so how can there be a sign of reversal in a multi-decadal downtrend in Arctic sea ice without even having a positive Arctic sea ice anomaly?”
The signal I was referring to the net increase at a rate of 149,390 sq-km per year over the last three years as opposed net decrease rates of 152,040, 27,500, 67,050, and 34,460 sq-km per year in the other segments of an optimized, five-segment, poly-line approximation. As the Arctic has not even repaired the loss created in the previous line segment, there would be no positive anomalies in this data.
Richard M says:
“I do believe just about everyone here already understands that Arctic sea ice has declined in the last 30 years. If that was your point then you have provided nothing that wasn’t already known. In addition, just about everyone here also knows the biggest part of that drop was due to the winds in 2007.”
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Hmm…we’ve got the famous “winds in 2007” now going back in time and causing the slow decline in Arctic Sea Ice extent that was seen for decades before that? Really? Wow, those really were some powerful winds that can blow backward in time…
Spector says:
August 10, 2010 at 6:07 pm
RE: R. Gates: (August 10, 2010 at 2:40 pm) “Define ‘strong positive signal’ please. We’ve not seen a positive Arctic Sea ice anomaly since 2004, so how can there be a sign of reversal in a multi-decadal downtrend in Arctic sea ice without even having a positive Arctic sea ice anomaly?”
The signal I was referring to the net increase at a rate of 149,390 sq-km per year over the last three years as opposed net decrease rates of 152,040, 27,500, 67,050, and 34,460 sq-km per year in the other segments of an optimized, five-segment, poly-line approximation. As the Arctic has not even repaired the loss created in the previous line segment, there would be no positive anomalies in this data.
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So your idea of a signal is sort of like a “recovery spiral” upward, never quite getting back to the longer term average, but making a sort of spiral-like good faith attempt? I am glad you don’t manage my finances…
Scott says:
August 10, 2010 at 4:28 pm
R. Gates says:
August 10, 2010 at 2:40 pm
We’ve not seen a positive Arctic Sea ice anomaly since 2004, so how can there be a sign of reversal in a multi-decadal downtrend in Arctic sea ice without even having a positive Arctic sea ice anomaly?
I suggest plotting x^2 from -10 to 4, or plot sin(x) from pi/10 to 2*pi. The linear trend is still downward for those plots and the last sections of their plots show negative anomalies, yet clearly they show a strong positive signal at the end of their plots. Do the final upticks reverse the sign on the linear trends? No (and the sinusoidal one will never go positive). Of course, Spector never said it did, he said “may be the first sign of reversal of the old trend”.
-Scott
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Both you and Spector make a valid point about the past two years. The minimum extent increased a bit each year– that much is obvious. But the question is quite open as to whether we are going in a spiral up, or a spiral down, for the nature of the “spiral” is just that, an oscillation. The whole point being, and the reason that I study the Arctic sea ice so closely is that over the longer term (more than 1,2. or even 10 years) GCM’s predict it will decline to an ice free summer Arctic. There will be natural oscillations (spiral type behavior) that will cause it not be a straight drop…a solar minimum here, a La Nina there, changes in in the PDO, etc. These natural fluctuations will cause the spiral behavior…but the longer term trend will be down, according to GCM’s.
Now then, I have posited a very specific hypothesis…that the past two years of 2008 & 2009 saw a modest recover (very very modest) in the minimum for two primary reasons (and no doubt a whole host of other reasons as well). These primary reasons are:
1) The long and deep solar minimum that we’ve just passed through in 2008-2009
2) The La Nina of 2008 with continued cooler near La Nina SST’s into early 2009.
If my hypothesis is correct, then as we approach the next solar max in 2013, we ought to see an continuation of the accelerated drop in Arctic Sea ice, that will coincide with the accelerated drop that preceded 2007, and really began around 2000. (see http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png) 2007 was simply the most extreme drop during that period. Should we get an El Nino during this uptrend in the solar cycle (as we did during the uptrend in solar cycle 23 in 1998), then this could even add to the rate of decline.
Finally, there are some who think I ignore longer term cycles such as the PDO or longer term solar cycles (especially issues such as magnetic field strength of sun spots), which some say might be appearing to be the AGW signal. The potential for these longer term ocean or solar cycles to be mistaken for AGW is real enough (at least to me) that it is one reason that I am only 75% convinced that AGW is happening. But regardless, two or three years of only a very weak uptick in Arctic sea ice is far to short a time (both scientifically and mathmatically) to call any sort of a recovery to a much longer term trend, and I suggest that this “recovery” is only the natural variabilty (caused by short term solar and ocean cycles) riding on top of a longer term downward…dare I say it…spiral.