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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It’s 2013 and last night for the first time in living memory my rum and Coke went ice free. Probably swirled it too much creating cyclonic conditions. But it was scary to see alarmist predictions come true, nonetheless.
Given the ranges some of the predictions give themselves, you would think this would tell them that they don’t have any real understanding/predictive ability of the process/event.
Given that, and based on my recognized lack of any knowledge of the process, I’ll predict between 4 million and 6 million.
Maybe 5.1 msk, I had thought 4.1 earlier in the year but it is improving.
Note it has been a difficult year for ice formation with very thin ice at the start of the year that was going to melt rapidly, then the ice was all cracked up everywhere for 2 months by -A team et al and just as it survived this it was hit by incredible arctic hurricanes that had never happened before in the Arctic. Not to mention the fact that the measurements are now not reliable due to the overcast, cloudy arctic weather this year.. ………
I voted 4.3, but that was before I learned how Kenji had voted….
Consensus (and myself) picked 4.2
I guess there’s no need to measure it now!
/sarc off
RACookPE1978 says:
August 12, 2013 at 5:19 am
I will gently remind everybody that:
1,000,000 sq km of sea ice corresponds to entire area between the north pole an 85 north latitude.
And a gentle reminder to you that 1,000,000 sq km of sea ice extent could be as little as 150,000 sq km of ice.
A semicircular ice pattern would be more likely between 30ºE and 150ºW and 75ºN on the Beaufort side and 80ºN on the Atlantlic side.
I think I have already made my SWAG; but again 4.2 – 4.8 million km2
4.8
Over 5.0
From Ian W on August 12, 2013 at 2:44 am:
Your 1:22AM post had the D word, den****, which automatically flagged it for special review.
Rather than a WAG here is a SWAG: Being an old old retired EE I entertain myself by collecting assorted data daily and one of those spread sheets contains 12 years of JAXA NH ice extent data. The JAXA data seems to conform well to NSDIC chart. So I have averaged the daily change in 11 years of ice cover for each day of the year. Then I sum these daily averages for each day from 12 Aug thru 31 Aug then add it to 11 Aug extent of 6.27 Million sq Km; 31 Aug extent will then be 5.36 million sq Km.
Then sum the daily change for the month of Sept and find it equal to a plus 312k sq Km. Sept has about 18 days of increasing daily Avg coverage rather than decreasing coverage. Then divide 312k by 30 and add this number to 5.36 for each day of Sept. Each day of Sept should increase by about 10K to 5.675 sq Km by 30 Sept. Now avg the daily coverage for Sept.
And the Number is 5.52 Sq Km!
Looking back, I see that I voted 4.2 -4.3 in June. The way I came up with it was that my first guess was 5.0, however I took to heart the warning that WUWTs guesses had been high, so I averaged that with last years’ low. I’m sticking with 4.3, even though that’s looking a bit on the low side now.
Patrick, you should think about using the same approach the climate scientists use and offer a prediction of “between 3.173 million and 7.019 million.”
short storm right now is going to expose more water to wind and freezing air temps…
small jog down…followed by a huge jump up in area
Above, kadaka responded to
Ian W on August 12, 2013 at 2:44 am:
I wish I knew why my comments are put in the ‘penalty box’
First, it is not actually a “penalty box” – consider a change in viewpoint.
A few days or weeks back, our host – name can’t be written here but it begins with an A – explained the need for certain things to be moderated or flagged. One, of course is something addressed directly to the host. A mod or the host has to decide if a response is required. However, I recently wrote this (with the name spelled out):
Good job on this one, A . . ..
It was sent to moderation. Lesson, relax.
Guys, there is just no point guessing.
Look how this guy fared (and he says he is studying for a PhD in ‘Abrupt Climate Change’)!
http://www.sierraclub.ca/en/AdultDiscussionPlease
Nowhere to hide now, chum… 🙂
Over on the Arctic Sea Ice blog Neven states that ‘I don’t know what is going on over at Cryosphere Today, but the melting has come to a complete standstill. In the past 10 days the ice pack has not lost, but gained 20K km2! That’s so crazy for this phase of the melting season that I barely have words for it. It’s unique as far as the record goes………….Like I’ve been saying for weeks now a new record is a very difficult proposition. But even ending below 2007, 2010 and 2011 will be quite a feat, and that’s something I didn’t expect. At least not like this. I’ve seen slowdowns before, but this is out of this world.’
Given that Neven is a dyed in the wool believer in what is sometimes known as ‘consensus’ I’m inclined to think there is something odd going on and guess somewhere around 5.5 or even greater.
Bill Illis says:
August 12, 2013 at 6:15 am
———————————————
Bill, is the daily temperature and daily ice extent available to the public from the late 1950s onward? I’ve always suspected the correlation between the two was low but never had access to the data other than to view the graphs.
@Bill – should have clarified “digital data” and not just the graphs.
Arfur Bryant says:
August 12, 2013 at 8:56 am
From Paul Beckwith, quoted in your link:
“For the record—I do not think that any sea ice will survive this summer. An event unprecedented in human history is today, this very moment, transpiring in the Arctic Ocean.”
It might be well for PhD students in “abrupt climate change” first to study “human history” before issuing pronouncements upon the subject.
A sea-ice free Arctic Ocean has happened many times before in human history, including as recently as about 5000 years ago, if not since then. It was more common than not for summers during the long Holocene Climatic Optimum, from c. 8000 BP. When & if it ever happens again, it will hardly be unprecedented.
4.4
Apologies that this is a bit off topic but I’ve done a little bit of private analysis of the AO since 1851. This graph shows the accumulated -ve or +ve value of the AO. If it is -ve I use -1 and +ve then 1 otherwise 0. Then I accumulate the -ve and +ve values to see how it trends, 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 1 = 3, 3 – 1 = 2 etc to see if it is predominately -ve or +ve. The more it is -ve the graph goes -ve same for +ve. http://tinypic.com/r/9tfgir/5
According to accepted AGW lore man made global warming started about 1940 but as you can see in the graph the tendency for predominately -ve AO started around 1900. Add a little latency to whatever was causing this and you an even earlier data. Now this cannot be man made according to accepted theories.
Looking at the 11 year running mean for sunspot numbers here http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/lrsp-2013-1Color.pdf it could be that the two graphs are inversions of each other. But then again I may have found nothing. Any comments?
Phil. says:
August 12, 2013 at 7:14 am (replying to)
RACookPE1978 says:
August 12, 2013 at 5:19 am
Hmmn. So, let us agree then that the use of “sea ice area” then precludes any arbitrary assumption of a sudden loss from 1,000,000 to 150,000 of potential reflective area? Sea ice area, is after all, what is displayed for the Antarctic Sea Ice +
Odd thing that: My globe shows nothing but water from Greenland’s north tip (Oodaaq Island) at 83-40 to the pole. Do you wish to claim that the (admittedly small but present) SW offset of the polar ice cap makes a significant difference to the 24 hour total of absorbed energy of solar energy at 85 north in September? (What is further south on one side of the polar cap will get slightly more energy for a few hours of the day, but the other edge will be even further north than “average” and so receive even less.)
I forgot to say that -ve AO means the Arctic weather pushes further south leaving the Arctic to warm and melt.
One thing that should definitely be emphasized more by climate realists is that the ice this year, strong as it is, is also in a position perfect for building and preserving multi year ice. Although 2008 was hyped as a recovery year, a lot of the surviving ice was on the atlantic side and therefore got flushed relatively quickly out the fram. The same can be said about 2010 and 2011, and to a lesser extent 2009. This year is unique in that a large portion of the ice will be caught and sustained by the Beaufort gyre and therefore retained for years to come.