July sea ice outlook submitted to ARCUS

From Rob Dekker on July 10, 2012 at 1:57 pm:

You don’t “see” any difference because you are looking in the wrong places.
For starters, as I mentioned before, heat generated by snow albedo shows up as a land temperature anomaly, not over the oceans, and not over (sea) ice either.

Then if the heat is not going into the oceans, basically the “snow albedo effect” is transient. Sun comes up, land surface temperatures are somewhat higher, extra heat is shed to space at night. If the oceans don’t store it then the land will just lose it. Except for some higher daily maximums in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere land areas for part of the year, it has no real effect on the long term temperature trends, which are dictated by ocean heat content.
So the “snow albedo”-based “Arctic amplification” is ultimately ignorable.

Ice volume, kadaka.
By the way, I must say I am impressed with your “strong suites.” “How many people still play Bridge?”. About one hundred times as many people who would have ever used the word “Suite” the way you do in your invented idiom.
So, back to the albedo feedback-
All the global hottest 12 month periods you note are in the last 6 years (be careful, you’ll undermine the entire “warming stopped in 1998” meme that is so rampant in these parts- Lord Monckton will have you carried out of the club!). And from your link, it is evident that over that period, snow cover anomalies have been severe over that entire period. That looks to me like decreased snow-albedo is very possibly a strong positive feedback. If you think you have disproven snow albedo as a significant postive feedback because you can show annual global annual temperatures and years of greatest northern hemispheric snow cover anomalies don’t line up one-to-one ( I think that’s your argument) even when they are lining up in a much more general way, you and I don’t understand complex systems and statistics the same way.
Am I right in how I’m reading you? Is that actually your argument?

From Timothy Hanes on July 10, 2012 at 9:09 pm:

Ice volume, kadaka.

Nah, still doesn’t work. Way back when, PIOMAS used to be frequently cited as proof of Arctic sea ice volume loss, despite being just a model. After colliding with reality, its flaws and biases were revealed and a less-alarming version was released.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/28/piomas-arctic-sea-ice-volume-model-corrected-still-appears-suspect/
New PIOMAS:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/

Anomalies for each day are calculated relative to the average over the 1979 -2010 period for that day of the year to remove the annual cycle. The model mean annual cycle of sea ice volume over this period ranges from 28,700 km³ in April to 12,300 km³ in September. The blue line represents the trend calculated from January 1 1979 to the most recent date indicated on the figure. Monthly averaged ice volume for September 2011 was 4,200 km³. This value is 66% lower than the mean over this period, 75% lower than the maximum in 1979, and 2.0 standard deviations below the 1979-2011 trend. Ice volume for March 2012 was 20,800 km³ the same as last year but 35% lower than the maximum in 1979, 24% below the mean and 1.7 standard deviations from the trend. Shaded areas represent one and two standard deviations of the residuals of the anomaly from the trend. Updates will be generated at approximately one-month intervals. Although PIOMAS ice volume for September 2011 was 380 km³ lower than the previous record of 2010, this difference is within the estimated uncertainty of PIOMAS.

Got that? The lowest amount calculated, the September 2011 minimum, which is the same as September 2010 within the estimated uncertainty, is 75% lower than the maximum in 1979.
The only way you can figure Arctic sea ice is “down more the 3/4″ in volume, is by comparing the highest calculated amount to the lowest. And those numbers aren’t even in the same part of the annual melt cycle.
Note that PIOMAS is still a model, still has issues. And that despite still appearing to have a built-in alarming bias, it does not support your ‘less than 25% remaining’ assertion.
If you have better Arctic sea ice volume information, that shows a 75% or greater loss when comparing annual maximums to maximums or minimums to minimums, please present it.

I’m sorry, scratch ice and insert Northern hemisphere temps.
Again, really?
[Like that? It doesn’t seem to make any more (or less) sense). Robt]

From Timothy Hanes on July 12, 2012 at 3:21 pm:

Actually, kadaka, your wrong, it’s Sept 2011 to Sept 1979, minimum to minimum. It is poorly phrased, I’ll agree, but they mean the maximum minimum, that is Sept 1979.

My wrong? Surely it is your wrong, not mine. This was already covered on WUWT last month. I will thank you, as the juicy details about the “volume loss” claim are down in the comments and I hadn’t read them before.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/03/the-guardians-ridiculous-claim-of-75-arctic-ice-loss-in-30-years/
Anthony Watts and others have already handily shredded the “75% volume loss” claim.
Remember what PIOMAS is, a model. It was thoroughly verified, all of the Arctic doom-and-gloom crowd were absolutely convinced of its accuracy. Then its makers admitted it was flawed and released the next version. Now you’re pushing a September 2011 calculation done only three months after the Great Correction, comparing it with a “hindcast” recalculated 1979 minimum, and expecting people to, once again, get alarmed over the PIOMAS results? Feel free to claim PIOMAS is thoroughly verified and accurate and can be trusted, just like they did before the previous version was shown to be broken.
At a comment, source indicated, PIOMAS said 16,900km³ for the September 1979 minimum, 4,300km³ for 2011. By the NSIDC monthly data, in September the area (not extent) was 4.53*10^6km² in 1979, and 2.89*10^6km² in 2011.
16900km³ / 4.53*10^6km² * 1000m/km = 3.73m average thickness in 1979.
4300km³ / 2.89*10^6km² * 1000m/km = 1.49m average thickness in 2011.
Of course area (only ice) was selected over extent (ice + water) for a true volume calculation.
Searching for thickness records, I found: Kwok, R., and D. A. Rothrock (2009), Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESat records: 1958 – 2008, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L15501, doi:10.1029/2009GL039035. PDF available for free here.
It uses declassified US Navy submarine data from outside the “exclusive economic zones” of foreign countries. While the resulting area is only about 38% of the Arctic Ocean, generally it encompasses the area where you’d expect sea ice to remain at the end of the melt season, lacking the quick-melting shore areas, with the exceptions of ice around Greenland and Ellesmere Island being excluded and Alaska areas included. See figures 1a and 2a.
Three periods are examined, submarine data for 1958-76, 1993-7, and ICESat for 2003-7.
Table 1, “Mean Ice Thickness at the End of Melt Season…”, for All Regions, 1958-76 was 3.02m, 1993-7 was 1.62m, 2003-7 was 1.43m.
Back during the “glory days” of Arctic sea ice, for 1958-76, the “All Regions” mean minimum of 3.02m for the defined area is considerably less than the derived-from-PIOMAS 1979 average minimum of 3.73m for the entire sea ice area. From Table 1, the only examined regions at or above that amount were North Pole and Nansen Basin, 3.77 and 3.88m respectively. The Chukchi Cap and Beaufort Sea were barely above only half of that.
The time periods don’t match up exactly, neither do the areas. But going with the easily-accepted belief among the doomsayers that the Arctic sea ice must have an ongoing downward trend in the “modern anthropogenic warming era”, from at least around 1950, two possible conclusions arise. Either something freaky happened that resulted in dramatically thicker ice overall in 1979 than the mean amount for 1958-76, temporarily reversing the decline in a truly extraordinary fashion… Or PIOMAS is just wrong about the 1979 volume.
From Figure 2e you can see the ice concentration of the studied area from 1978-2000 at summer minimum. Nearly all of the studied area is above 90%. Since “of course” there is a long-term decline thus summer minimum concentration had to have been better for 1958-76, there is insufficient wiggle room for an “extent vs area” argument to explain the glaring difference.
If you have plausible alternative explanations, and/or thickness data that isn’t derived from the PIOMAS model, feel free to present it. As it stands, I cannot see how PIOMAS could possibly be correct with the “75% volume loss” that was pulled out from that computer model’s butt.