It has been awhile since I’ve done a sea-ice report. That said, not much of note has been going on in the sea-ice arena, we are in that time of year when all of the years converge into a tighter grouping. But as usual, the race to forecast the minimum is on again. Will be be another Serreze death spiral media opportunity? Or will it be ho-hum- nothing to see here, move along?
JAXA AMSR-E Sea Ice Extent -15% or greater – click to enlarge
Anyone can submit a forecast to ARCUS, all you need is a rationale and you have to put your name on it. Even “SWAG” qualifies as a rationale, though there are many who will use models and statistical techniques to try predicting the sea-ice minimum.
I’m going to give WUWT readers an opportunity to make a forecast for submission, based on voting. See the poll at the end. I’ll run this poll each month in the week before the deadline, and we’ll see how we do as the minimum approaches. The value used by ARCUS is the NSIDC value as they say here:
The sea ice monthly extent for September 2010 was 4.9 million square kilometers, based on National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) estimates.
So don’t be using the JAXA graph to forecast minimums, though it it useful for determining short term trends as it is more responsive than the NSDIC graph below, which is averaged.
Here is what past reports looked like:
Here’s the details on making a submission:
Call for 2011 Sea Ice Outlook Contributions – June Report (Based on May Data)
May 6, 2011
Call for 2011 Sea Ice Outlook Contributions June Report (Based on May Data) Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH)
Pan-Arctic Outlook submission deadline: Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Regional Outlook submission deadline: Friday, 27 May 2011
For further information, please go to: http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/index.php Or contact: Helen Wiggins, ARCUS Email: helen@arcus.org ——————–
The Sea Ice Outlook (SIO) organizers are soliciting pan-arctic and regional outlooks for the first report of the season, the June report (based on May data). We encourage past and new contributors to participate. The organizers have planned for several improvements this year, including increasing attention to error estimates, addition of sea ice thickness information where available, additional outreach efforts, and further development of the “Data Resources” webpage (http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/data.php – please send any relevant links for us to add). We also have provided a tentative schedule for the entire season, which is available at the bottom of this message.
**ALL Outlook submissions should be sent directly to Helen Wiggins, ARCUS, at: helen@arcus.org, with the following subject lines, as relevant:
** PAN-ARCTIC OUTLOOK – [YOUR LAST NAME] REGIONAL OUTLOOK – [YOUR LAST NAME] OUTLOOK FOR BOTH REGIONAL AND PAN-ARCTIC – [YOUR LAST NAME]
A Word document is preferred for ease of formatting to PDF files and extracting images for the website – we will not edit your individual submission and will not post your Word documents.
SUBMITTING A PAN-ARCTIC OUTLOOK
Pan-arctic Outlook contributions should include:
1. Extent Projection Provide a sea ice projection for the September monthly mean arctic sea ice extent (in million square kilometers).
2. Methods/Techniques Provide the type of estimate (heuristic, statistical, ice-ocean model ensemble runs, etc.).
3. Rationale Include a short paragraph on the physical rationale for the estimate.
4. Executive Summary Provide a short paragraph that summarizes your outlook contribution in two or three sentences.
5. Estimate of Forecast Skill (if available) If possible, please include any estimates of forecast skill, uncertainty, or error associated with your prediction. This year, we will add error estimates to the summary bar chart of outlook estimates, as appropriate. This year we would also like to include a brief discussion of ice thickness in the monthly reports, so please include any relevant information on ice thickness (or age), if available. Pan-Arctic
Outlook submission deadline: Tuesday, 31 May 2011. All Outlooks should be sent to: Helen Wiggins, ARCUS Email: helen@arcus.org
SUBMITTING A REGIONAL OUTLOOK
Regional Outlook contributions should include:
1. Region of Interest While more specific sub-regions may be identified, at a minimum, please specify which of the following the outlook applies to: Arctic Regions:
– Beaufort-Chukchi Seas
– East Siberian-Laptev Seas
– Kara-Barents-Greenland Seas
– Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Nares Strait
– Hudson Bay
– Sea of Okhotsk
– Bering Sea Shipping Routes:
– Northwest Passage
– Northeast Passage (Northern Sea Route)
– Arctic Bridge (Murmansk-Churchill)
2. Sea Ice Parameter Provide a regional pattern or a single value estimate of phonological stages (i.e., melt onset, freeze onset, break-up and freeze-up dates, length of open water season) or monthly ice concentration, ice area, and ice extent. Please indicate whether you expect ice conditions to be similar, lighter (i.e., lower ice concentrations, earlier melt onset, earlier break-up, later freeze-up), or heavier (i.e., greater ice concentrations, later melt onset, later break-up, earlier freeze-up) than those of summer 2010.
3. Outline of Methods/Techniques Provide the type of estimate (heuristic, statistical, ice-ocean model, traditional knowledge, etc.) with a brief description of the methodology and a short paragraph describing the physical rationale for the estimate.
4. Estimate of Forecast Skill If possible, please include any estimates of forecast skill, uncertainty, or error associated with your prediction.
5. Improving Outlook Detail and Accuracy (Optional) What information would be needed to improve the level of detail provided in your Regional Outlook or increase the accuracy/confidence in your prediction? Regional Outlook submission deadline: Friday, 27 May 2011. All Outlooks should be sent to: Helen Wiggins, ARCUS Email: helen@arcus.org
TENTATIVE 2011 SEA ICE OUTLOOK SCHEDULE JUNE REPORT (using May data). Deadline for contributions: Regional – 27 May; Pan-Arctic – 31 May. Publish reports online: 10 June.
JULY REPORT (using June data). Deadline for contributions: 31 June. Publish reports online: 15 July.
AUGUST REPORT (using July data). Deadline for contributions: 29 July. Publish reports online: 12 August.
SEPTEMBER REPORT (brief updates based on August data). Deadline for contributions: 30 August. Publish reports online: 14 September. MINIMUM ANNOUNCEMENT – Based on the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s (NSIDC) announcement for minimum.
POST-SEASON SYNOPSIS (exact dates dependent on when minimum is reached). Deadline for contributions: early October. Publish post-season synopsis: late October. For further information on the Sea Ice Outlook, please go to: http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/index.php. Or contact: Helen Wiggins, ARCUS Email: helen@arcus.org
=================================================================
WUWT poll for sea ice forecast:
Use the WUWT Sea Ice Page to get your bearings before voting.
Only one vote per person, and I have engaged the security features to prevent vote stuffing. Poll will close May 30th at midnight PST, and the results will be submitted to ARCUS on the day of the deadline:
Pan-Arctic Outlook submission deadline: Tuesday, 31 May 2011
BA says: May 19, 2011 at 9:09 pm
Which of these areas you mention normally still have much ice area in September?
Greenland Sea has some;
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.5.html
as does the Canadian Archipelago;
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.12.html
Laptev Sea;
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.9.html
and East Siberia Sea
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.9.html
The Kara Sea is interesting in how the anomaly shot up during last June:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.7.html
It’s good to have icebreakers around to help accelerate the breakup and melting processes. Per this Coast Guard Compass article;
http://coastguard.dodlive.mil/index.php/2009/06/coast-guard-and-the-arctic-part-2/
“Coast Guard Cutter Healy is the largest of the heavy ice breakers in the Coast Guard. Her ice breaking capabilities are 4.5 ft @ur momisugly 3 knots continuous and 8 ft of ice when backing and ramming. Backing and ramming is pretty much what it sounds like and I don’t mean how you parallel parked a car when you were a teenager.”
“Key sea and air lanes need to remain open as a matter of international legal right and not depend on the approval from nations along the routes, so that vessels like Healy can get where they need to go and get there quickly.”
If you look at the icebreaker Healy’s Cruise Track for 2007;
http://www.icefloe.net/docs/HLY-07track.pdf
it is easy to see how effective a single Icebreaker can be at breaking up the ice.
And in terms of shipping in the “Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment 2009 Report. Arctic Council, April 2009, second printing”;
http://www.pame.is/images/stories/PDF_Files/AMSA_2009_Report_2nd_print.pdf
on Page 84 “Map 5.6 demonstrates the surge in vessel activity in the summer season, when all of the community re-supply takes place and most bulk commodities are shipped out and supplies brought in for commercial operations. Summer is also the season when all of the passenger and cruise vessels travel to the region.”
Seems as if the guy named Pokrovsky has a nasty habit of being always right.
5.2 – 5.3 is my guess, based upon eyeballing the convergence of Ley lines over the Heights of High Wycombe in juxtaposition with leaves of the tree next door shading the sun’s life giving rays from my keyboard at this precise moment in time. In other words, how many times can you cross the same river?
Last year I eyeballed 5.04 – which wasn’t bad. This year I’m eyeballing 4.94
Mystic Met’s Vicky Pope says:-
“Thanks to our new £31,000,000 Supercomputer (soon to be upgraded for an extra £10,000,000) there is no doubt of the outcome.
We confidently predict that there is a 30% probability of the result being 5.5 (+/- 0.5)M sq.km, a 30% probability of it being 4.5 (+/- 0.5) M sq.km and a 40% probability of it being 3.5 (+/- 0.5) M sq.km.
There, we think that’s got it sorted.
Hey, Anthony, you designed your poll all wrong! There isn’t a button to check for the right answer!”
Signed, Vicky Pope (13¾)
[snip]
Going to be a difficult one this year. Lot of wind driven ice accumulation early last winter. What effect will that have on the overall ice melt? I note that the ice at Barrow has just started melting. Don’t know what relevance this has, but hey, ho! I voted 5.4.
http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_sealevel
Almost exactly six months ago there was an earlier thread here about this very subject …
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/23/joe-bastardis-2011-arctic-sea-ice-prediction/
Joe Bastardi went early in for 5.5 Mkm^2. For what it matters, I will go with him.
It’s funny to see some of the climate trolls finally mustering up enough courage to take a stab at it now, six months later. In that thread we find R. Gates bloviating profusely and criticizing JB but failing to make a single prediction. Did I miss it?
And I see in a comment above that someone says that Tamino Foster Grant finally climbed out on a limb with a prediction now, six months later. Way to go G-Man.
Perhaps some of their groupies might also report on any daring predictions from Hansen, Mann, Serreze, Walt Meier, and Julienne Strove. I’m sure it would qualify as a taxpayer funded activity, so what’s stopping them? I mean, spend the money while you still can.
P.S. did I mention yet that Joe Bastardi made a prediction six months ago?
Who said there is goning to be a minimum this year – don’t you all know that the world is ending tomorrow?
I lost interest in arctic sea-ice when I analysed the data last year. That annual signal that cropped up in 2007 onwards, it’s rigged, someone was twiddling the contrast or something simular.
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y197/meemoe_uk/cryoOct2010blue.jpg
blue is pre 2007
white is 2007 onwards.
Why bother trying to guess which way they’ll twiddle the contrast next?
My dog says 5.5+ so that’s how I voted. She’s a Labrador so should know, she’s good at finding shot birds.
All this grant money going into guessing games. The ice cover will be what it will be and will lie between the max. and min. levels on your first graph. Not rocket science and everyone reading WUWT will say the same.
It will be the same as it was in 1974. 7.4 million km2 is the best value I can find so far.
Has Prince Charles voted yet? With his deadline for an ice free arctic fast approaching, I think we should be told.
And can we have a run down on the 100 months to save the planet? How is that going?
Are global temperatures and sea levels rising commensurate with the outgassing of the recent batch of trolls we seem to have acquired?
1. Wait until it declines to 10e6sqkm.
2. Track the rate of decline until almost 8e6sqkm.
3. Make a prediction of the minimum based upon the rate of decline from 1 to 2.
4. Bask in the adoration of WWWT readers.
I guessed 5.1 last year, which was nearer than most. I posted my guess at The Blackboard, which was the site (I think it was) that allowed people to post their estimates. I was amazed at how closely many of the bets tracked the bettor’s predilections (warmist vs. scorcher-scoffer). In particular, nearly all the prominent warmist predictions were below 5.0, some considerably below.
This year I’m guessing 5.1 to 5.2, based on the “naive” forecasting technique that guesses that the next event will not be far from the preceding event.
If anyone wants to “make it interesting,” they can bet real money on this year’s minimum ice extent (will it be greater or lesser than 2007’s?) below. (Current odds give the extent only a 34% chance of exceeding 2007–IOW, the odds are predicting a record low.):
https://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=744206
@Terra Incognita, May 19, 2011 at 9:32 pm
In the interests of being accurate about Al Gore’s failed predictions, I was referring to his speech at a German museum in December 2008 (video no longer on Youtube per link in the following article), not his 2009 speech at Copenhagen, where he referenced Maslowski:
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/12/start-countdown-polar-icecaps-gone-in.html
Hey, if come 2013, it’s still 5 years out, you and he can share the same failed prediction !!
Free beer tomorrow.
< 4.0, 3.1 to be exact.
I hope the Arctic summer will not be like 2007, because that might wipe out the sea ice entirely in this stage.
Terra Incognita says: May 19, 2011 at 11:51 pm
JTF; I looked at the PDF. The linear extent of the icebreaker’s travel is irrelevant since the width of the ice breaker is miniscule. The diagram may give a different impression but that’s because the thickness of the lines have to be drawn much thicker than the actual width of the path cut by the icebreaker.
Thanks, that’s really insightful, as I am sure that many readers were thinking that icebreakers are several kilometers wide…
What do you think happens to the broken up ice when the wind is blowing away from the icepack?
It has been well documented that “Much of the record breaking loss of ice in the Arctic ocean in recent years is down to the region’s swirling winds and is not a direct result of global warming, a new study reveals.” including in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/22/wind-sea-ice-loss-arctic
This 2011 paper submitted to The Cryosphere L. H. Smedsrud, et al.;
http://www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/5/1311/2011/tcd-5-1311-2011-print.pdf
used “geostrophic winds derived from reanalysis data to calculate the Fram Strait ice area export back to 1957, finding that the sea ice area export recently is about 25 % larger than during the 1960’s.”
By the way, if there were no global warming heating up the oceans and atmosphere, those tracks would freeze over quickly.
There has been an increase in measured Ocean Heat Content;
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content55-07.png
however most of this increase occurred before “Argo deployments began in 2000 and by November 2007 the array is 100% complete.”;
http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/
and thus should be viewed with a high degree of skepticism.
If CO2 were driving increased Ocean Heat Content, then why would heat content plateau while anthropogenic production of CO2 was increasing rapidly?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxine_Emissions_from_Consumption_in_China.png
About the ice breakers – Has anyone considered the effect of disturbing the halocline with the prop wash from those ships. The temperature at which sea water freezes is dependent on the saline content and the surface water with less salt tends to not mix with heaver, saltier water below. Unless you run an giant egg beater through there.
Terra Incognita says:
May 19, 2011 at 6:39 pm
R. Gates:
May 19, 2011 at 4:17 pm
“Currently looking like 4.4 million sq. km. + or – 200K sq. km.
I agree. I stated 5.0 m last year and it turned out to be a conservative estimate.
Yes Virginia; I don’t know about Santa Clause, but there is an “Arctic Ice Cap death spiral”.
——-
It will spiral down to an ice free summer sometime in the next few decades, probably by 2030, despite the expectations by some that somehow it is going to mount a recovery based on some combination of natural ocean cycles. The longer term trend in arctic sea ice is following the longer-term trend indicated in every GCM when factoring in the effects of a 40% rise in CO2 since the 1750’s.
The results of this poll are interesting.
Mostly they conform to the usual tendency of people to answer in the middle of such a range – see the peak at 5.0-5.1 million km2 and the drop-off to either side of that. This means that the answer to the poll was to an extent created by the ranges Mr Watts put on the poll beforehand.
The next interesting feature is the skew towards the high values of sea-ice. This is unsurprising given the predominantly cynical viewpoints expressed in the comments section here. It’s worth noting that more than 1/3 of those who have voted [as of now] think that the September extent will be above 5.4 million km2. The sea-ice has been below that value every year since the record low of 2007, so this would be quite a turnaround.
For what it’s worth I think there has to be a reasonable chance of a new record this year. Looking at the data from NSIDC ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Sep/N_09_area.txt one can see that there have been 7 years which have been lower than all previous years [starting from 1980]. That’s an average of about once every 4 years. It’s now been four years since the last record. I’d say it was about 50:50 that there’d be a new record, so accordingly I’ve voted for the less than 4.0 million km2 option.
I’m gonna go with 4.3 — 0.6 less than last year and roughly comparable to 2007.
I think there is a 50/50 chance of either a heavy flow out throught the Fram straight like 2007, or the Beaufort gyre spinning the ice out to the Beaufort sea where it melts like last year.
So I am going with 4.0 +/- 0.1
and the closest I can vote is less than4.0
Good luck to all
Actually, I’ve since seen tamino’s forecast from last October, which is a fair bit more robust than my method, and does show that 2007 was something of a freak outlier. His forecast of 4.63 +/- 0.9 million km^2 looks pretty good and his trend line suggests that it will be next year when a new record will be a 50:50 chance.
i’ll go with 5.5km2. +/- 750,000km2