We are closing on the Arctic sea ice minimum. Will it be another Serreze death spiral media opportunity? Or will it be ho-hum- nothing to see here, move along?
Once again I’m inviting readers to submit their best guess, best SWAG, or best dartboard result to the poll for the SEARCH Sea Ice Outlook. Deadline, is Monday August 12th, 3PM PDT or 6PM EDT.
Of recent interest has been the slowdown in ice loss, most prominently seen at DMI:
Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) – Centre for Ocean and Ice – Click the pic to view at source
I suggest that you should not be using the DMI graph to forecast, 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 the June 2013 forecast submission (which we participated in, but not the July contest due to scheduling issues around July 4th) reports looked like:
WUWT’s submission (average of the top five) was. 4.8 million square kilometers)
The archive of the 2013 contest is available here:
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2013/june
For a complete overview of Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice, see the WUWT Sea Ice Reference page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
Here is the forecast poll, deadline is 3PM Monday August 12th. Bear in mind that traditionally, forecasts in June and July have been too high. Last year’s minimum was 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles) at its lowest point on 16 September, and in June, WUWT readers forecast 4.9 million sq kilometers.
Note: The mean is the monthly average in million square kilometers for September, which is what the contest is looking for. It is not really as interesting as the absolute minimum, but that’s the number ARCUS is looking for.
Choose your value: (for the record, I am choosing 5.5 – Anthony)
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I hear it’s the second largest gain in ice on record. It might become the largest.
I believe in the hockey stick and it has turned so I am going for greater than 6.0 based on my best tree ring proxy I could invent … sorry study 🙂
Never very sure about how wuwt’s value is chosen as the result of this poll.
Is it the mean, mode or median?
Three techniques:
1) Look at the year that the iceloss chart most closely matches (2006?) and copy that.
2) Follow the mean curve shape from the place where we are now.
3) Realise that it will be affected by the weather and so will be inherently unpredictable thus just go down a round number from where we are now.
I chose option 3 – with very little confidence.
From philincalifornia on August 11, 2013 at 10:52 pm:
I checked his Instagram feed, he’s holding up one paw. That’s 4 claws plus 1 dewclaw.
Kenji predicts 4.5!
Henry Clark says: http://s23.postimg.org/qldgno07f/edited4.gif
The Met Office graph you found on webcitation.org there is a killer.
http://www.webcitation.org/6AKKakUIo
This so different from what CryoToday are putting out it looks like some serious revisionism is going on thought the CT graph does not even say whether it is plotting area or extent.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
Satellite data is great but it all relies on who and how they interpret the reflected microwave signal, and like all things this relies on models and interpretation of what is water, ice or a melt pool covering ice. As we’ve seen recently these “pools” can be lakes.
“Note: The mean is the monthly average in million square kilometers for September, which is what the contest is looking for. It is not really as interesting as the absolute minimum, but that’s the number ARCUS is looking for.”
Well it may not be as “interesting” but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than talking about the daily minimum. That is just the alarmists game. Look at one day’s data out of 365 and either scream disaster of keep quiet as required.
Greg Goodman:
.
Indeed.
So the Met Office, with all of their Computing power, Models, Scientists and Funding predict sea ice this year will be somewhere between 1.9 and 4.9. What a load of cobblers! That is worse than any prediction by anyone else. BUT they will be able to say that they were correct or almost correct whatever the actual sea ice extent will be! What an absolute waste of money.
since the ice is all rotten, i’m going with ) 0.0, because that’s what i read in the newspaper it was going to be.
confidence: 100%, because why would they lie to me?
(in reality, i’ll take a SWAG and say “2006, all over again” %-)
I predicted 7 months ago that it would not go outside the SD2 limit nearly right except for previous month. Go for 5.9 and forecast greatest NH gain extent in century that will go above average! (based on current continuously below average NH temperatures)
Form of the short term variations seem closest to 2010, so that’s my guide to any estimation that does not attempt to remove it.
Since there is a small but significant pseudo cyclic variation of about 14 days, it makes a lot of difference to the one day min. how this aligns with the annual min around the 21st of September.
If we want to see the interannual progression we really need to use at least a 20 day low pass filter. Running averages don’t count since they introduce spurious errors and don’t smooth properly.
Henry Clark says:
August 11, 2013 at 7:32 pm
The magnitude of oscillation between winter and summer has increased in recent years (near the turning point in multi-decadal cyclic trends), despite 2011-2012 having more arctic ice extent than some years in the early 1990s. So focus on what the minimum would be, at the single month of minimum, is unfortunately unintentionally doing just what the alarmists want by being highly misleading.
=====
As Henry Says, this is playing to the ‘natural climate change deniers’. Arctic ice extent really doesn’t matter. In any case, the ice area being quoted as “extremely small” or “vanishing” is around the area of all the major states in the US combined . This is a diversion in the same way that the betting between groups on the number of named fish storms there will be in the Atlantic is a diversion. The climate is a chaotic system with multiple oscillations. In the exceedingly brief period that mankind has been able to quantify the overt effects of these oscillations some of them appear to repeat, but we have no idea which Poincare Section or which part of a Poincare Section we are looking at or how many attractors there are for the systems to orbit and what will influence a change in attractor.
The fact that international meteorological institutions and academia can be drawn into this kind of ‘pretense’ speculative behavior is professionally disappointing and displays a staggering ignorance of even recent recorded history, to the extent that their behavior looks to be calculated to be deliberately misleading.
It’s looking like a 2010 kinda year to me. I went for 4.0.
4.2
Looking at the Arctic Temperature I think its going follow a similar track to 2006. I went for 5.5
The Met Office have used their Super-multi-Trilobyte computer and come up with last year’s extent for this years prediction. It’s a bit like forecasting the weather by looking out of the window and comparing it with yesterday. Brilliant :thumbsdown:
The facts mean nothing , all that matters is ‘its worse than we throught ‘
From Greg Goodman on August 12, 2013 at 12:21 am:
In Henry Clark’s linked graphical Ode to Svensmark, it suggests of dark revisionism by warmists resulting in the WebCite-linked graph being deleted from here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/charts/NHEM_extanom.png
It showed “Northern Hemisphere Sea-Ice Extent Anomaly (10⁶ km²) for 1973-6/2012”.
But a few clicks and some URL-shortening later, you find the plausible reason here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/
The graph was in error as it showed a continuous record, when the discontinuity was acknowledged. The Met Office deleted the erroneous graph.
Henry Clark’s source whispers con-spir-a-cy, and Greg Goodman was impressed by the evidence.
O-kay…
What happened to that storm which was supposed to destroy the ice? Some people sure got real quiet about that real fast.
Perhaps of interest to some here the Guardians ‘consensus’ blog has a new post today by Abraham on Arctic ice. He takes a less optimistic view.
When I looked the post had 8 comments of which 4 were deleted!
Ian W says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
August 12, 2013 at 1:22 am
I wish I knew why my comments are put in the ‘penalty box’
WUWT readers are always very optimistic with these forecasts 🙂 I’ll stick with my 4.3 which would not be a disappointment and anything above will be a bonus to waft in the alarmists faces. ( added to the Antarctic increases also )
Of course there could always be a late storm that breaks up the leading edges of the ice. Much of the ice remains of course but as it’s no longer connected to the main body of ice it seems certain observers are quite happy to consider it disappeared.
Does anyone know of an index that tracks the amount of soot (or the emmissivity or albedo) on the arctic ice? I wonder if the link between soot and ice melt is considered anymore, or if people just assume CO2 effects are melting the Arctic.
Sea ice is in balance and doing quite nicely in the southern polar region.
One thing, historically the sea ice of the Arctic has been lower than the 1979 – 2012 running average, why do the pedlars of world catastrophe scenarios get so hot under the collar about it? Could it be, merely man made alarmist bunkum…………
Now lets see here, remember what they said about the icy peaks of the Himalayas? All gone by 2035………………..Ganges runs dry – whatever.
You couldn’t make it up but they [IPCC/WWF/New Scientist] do.
Arctic basin, its all in the oceanic currents. Man made CO2: is nothing to do with it.