Poll now closed. Results below will be submitted to ARCUS on Sept 1st.
Once again, 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’m late getting this online this month as other things took precedence.
For reference, here’s last months forecast poll and the final submission with all other forecasts from other groups. The final forecast poll you can participate in follows.
The value used by ARCUS in the forecast 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.
Right now the NSIDC value is about 5 million square kilometers.
[ UPDATE: NSIDC’s Julienne Strove from NSIDC writes in comments:
“Note, the NSIDC value today is 4.66 million sq-km.”
Of course NSDIC doesn’t publish the daily values like JAXA does, so we all have to guess since we aren’t privy to that information.
The 5 day average graph is all the public gets. And of course, any estimate is hampered not only by the average, but also by those coarseness of the Y axis. I’ve asked before for NSIDC to publish the daily value and the response has been that they have more important issues to attend to. However, clearly the ARCUS forecast group is watching this number and it is important to the final forecast done by over a dozen groups now. So you think it would be valuable to post the daily data. -Anthony]
Here’s the latest JAXA graph:
JAXA AMSR-E Sea Ice Extent -15% or greater – click to enlarge
Here’s the poll for the ARCUS August outlook, it will run until Sept 1st at midnight PST.
(NOTE/UPDATE: This poll was originally exactly like all the others done over the last several months, but one snarky commenter (the first one) complained that I was a “manipulator” because it didn’t have more lower values. Of course he never bother to ask why or look at the history of the other polls.
I had considered initially adding those lower values for this poll, but then figured I’d be derided for changing the poll and not being consistent with the other polls. In retrospect, I’ll be criticized no matter what I do, so within 20 minutes of it going online, I decided to extend this poll with 0.1 million km increments down to 4.0 million kilometers. I’ve also removed the options for voting 5.5 to 6.0 (which existed in prior polls) since they are outside the current bounds of possibility based on previous September history. – Anthony
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I agree barry. It’s not easy to choose a bracket scheme for a poll which will not be considered biased by anyone.
Still, I have some suggestions for Anthony for if WUWT will participate in the 2012 ARCUS poll :
(1) Put last year’s sea ice extent smack in the middle of the poll brackets. This assumes a neutral position for WUWT, as opposed to a bias one way or the other. After all, past NH ice variability year-to-year has been half a million km^2 up or down, so without additional knowledge, noone could really tell which way next year’s extent will go. Long term trend is down, but that’s already considering ‘prior knowledge’. So keep it neutral (by putting past year’s extent in the middle of the poll brackets) and people will vote using their own knowledge.
(2) For the final choice of WUWT, choose the median of choices rather than the bracket with the most votes.
When WUWT posted it’s first ARCUS poll this year
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/27/august-arcus-forecast-poll-what-will-the-september-nsidc-arctic-minimum-extent-be/
The median fell in the 5.1-5.2 bracket, which I think was a better assessment of the opinion of WUWT voters than the “greater than 5.5” bracket which won with 86 votes, especially since the “5.0-5.1” bracket (reasonable estimate at that time) had 72 votes only second to the “greater than 5.5” bracket that won.
Anthony, disregard this message if you feel it’s useless. But considering the fact that serious Arctic sea ice blogs (like Neven’s) show polls that remain consistent (no change in brackets) and have been much more accurate than WUWT polls, I hope that you would inform your audience better on what’s actually happening in the Arctic, and arrange your polls in an unbiased way.
Besides, long term trend Artcic sea ice extent is consistent with an accellerated downward trend, as a recent analysis by Lucia at the BlackBoard shows quite convincingly :
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/connelly-dekker-bet-actually-robs-got-a-very-good-chance-of-not-losing/
It turns out that there is a higher chance of 2016 extent being smaller than 3.1 million km^2 than there is of it being larger than 4.8 million km^2. That is another indication that our Arctic may be declining much faster than IPCC models (and WUWT readers) anticipate.
This blog out of the main places for Sea Ice talk seems to ignore all of the real time data that showed 2011 would end up like this. What is even more ridiculous us how horrible winds have been for flushing. While this has been a DPA year based on surface pressure, very little ice has been flushed out the North Atlantic, Barrents, and Fram.
The opposite has taken place for the most part and the models still show warm water/air being pumped into the arctic through the Barrents which is still torching as well as the rest of the arctic waters. The bottom melt is now where near over. What is worse is the coldest 850s will sit right on top of the ice pack now. Which is still under going bottom melt until October this year because of the torching SSTs, some places on the edge like the Beaufort, ESB, Barrents will have bottom melt till November and December in places on the far edges, that is insane.
We might see a slow methodical melt with larger days here and there the rest of the month. Just eyeballing the Euro/GFS we can easily lose another 250,000km2 the next 7 days. If so we will sit right at the record on Bremen and NSIDC while around 4,400,000km2 on Jaxa.
Given the torching SSTs, it won’t be suprising seeing the edges of the ice melt out.
I havent seen one link on these comments to modis. anyways…
http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r03c03.2011246.terra
http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r03c04.2011246.terra
The ice is in shambles. I don’t think it has sunk in to many who just can’t see pass there heart and where they wish it was on how it really is. There are to many people out there preying on there bias to give them the real story, very sad.
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/newdata.htm
There is a thin pancake ice sheet out there. Lets hope we can get some of that volume back soon, or well I think we know whats coming.
as of September 6th:
Sea Ice Extent:
Jaxa: The latest value : 4,576,094 km2
Bremen: is 4,340,000km2(60,000k) above 2007.
NSIDC: 4,450,000km2.
Sea Ice Area:
CT is still right at 3,000,000km2(80,000km2 above 2007 for record low)
Jaxa is 50,000km2 currently below 2007 at this time and nearly at 2007’s record low set in 2 weeks.
Sea Ice Volume: Piomas has already passed 2010 as the new record low.
Weather models are showing a more favorable wind pattern then we have seen most of the summer with also record warm temp anomalies on the EURO and GEM for days 4-10 taking over.