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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Not having ice at the North Pole is no big deal. It is a single physical point in the bowl. For those who think it is nuts to say such a thing as “there will be no ice at the North Pole in September” you should be aware of this: Be careful the pea under the three nuts. Slight of hand may be at play here, using words instead of nuts.
4.452M.
rogerknights says:
August 11, 2013 at 8:53 pm
It’s great to see the Met Office down at the left end of the graph, poised to make fools of themselves again
The UIK Met Off never did need any help to make themselves look stupid after all they have Slingo the imaginary Dr.
My guess is somewhere above the UK Met Off, which we know will always be wrong, and somewhere below Shaw*
I picked >6.0 last time, which is sure to be too high, but it seems poor sportsmanship to change my bet mid game. So when it hits the low at 5.1, I will have been off by 900,000 sq km’s.
richardscourtney says:
August 12, 2013 at 5:01 am
Please, will somebody tell me the value of any such guess and/or guesses. I don’t see it.
I think the point is Richard as a world we have spent Billions on climate change way more than say the LHC. How do you think the public would react if after spending that amount of money we announced we didn’t do our homework and background properly and the LHC can’t really see any particles very well but we are going to have a consensus view that the Higgs exists.
This is not dark matter or something really difficult to even get a measurement on it’s a simple slightly chaotic natural system and you have a really big picture target namely artic sea ice. In LHC terms it would be like saying the LHC couldn’t see a football sized object.
Now I even accept global warming but from my hard science background it blows me away you can spend this much money and still be no better than a layman guess which is sort of the point.
I have heard all the excuses but I am sorry they are just that excuses and we wouldn’t accept non results out of the LHC and we certainly shouldn’t accept less from climate science.
rogerknights says:
August 11, 2013 at 8:53 pm
It’s great to see the Met Office down at the left end of the graph, poised to make fools of themselves again.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
This is too easy: Just look at what the Met Office does and vote for the exact opposite.
Then you’ll be spot-on.
I am going with 3.975 with the minima being reached on Sept 16th
Gee! this is like betting on the Nenana River ice-out, which I believe set a 97-year-old record this past May 20.
LdB:
Sincere thanks for your reply to me at August 12, 2013 at 10:05 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/11/sea-ice-news-volume-4-3-2013-sea-ice-forecast-contest/#comment-1387705
It includes this
Thankyou. Yes, I can see that point. It does answer my question.
Richard
What a change from 11 hours ago. When I voted 5.5 that became #1 with 5.0 one vote behind. This was with about 360 votes placed. My thought was that the sea ice will drop close to 5.7 by Sept 1, then drop close to 5.3 before finishing the month at 5.6.
Steve from Rockwood says:
August 12, 2013 at 8:58 am
Bill, is the daily temperature and daily ice extent available to the public from the late 1950s onward?
————————————————————
I don’t put much faith in these older estimates. It seems reasonably clear that the historic sea ice extent was greatly over-estimated.
For example, in April of this year, Walt Meier (from the NSIDC and semi-regular responder/poster to the WUWT) reconstructed the September 1964 Arctic sea ice extent from old recovered Nimbus satellite pics.
The September 1964 sea ice extent was estimated at 6.9 million sq kms from the satellite pics (versus the previous estimates of 8.28 million). 6.9 million is not that much different than this year’s number around 5.0 million.
http://nsidc.org/monthlyhighlights/2013/04/glimpses-of-sea-ice-past/
Having said that, Walt’s most-up-to-date previous numbers (with Julienne Stroeve) are available here (make sure to note the acknowledgements at the end of the paper just before the references).
http://www.the-cryosphere.net/6/1359/2012/tc-6-1359-2012.pdf
Daily NSIDC numbers here.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/north/daily/data/
Going back to 1972 here.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/nsidc0192_seaice_trends_climo/esmr-smmr-ssmi-merged/
Sea ice area and seasonal extents back to 1870 here from the University of Illinois Bill Chapman.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/SEAICE/
A late collapse: 3.9 m. Will keep the alarmists squealing a bit longer.
Arctic temperatures above 80N below 0C 2 weeks early (Danish Met Office). There will be further erosion in the Chukchi and Beaufort as the easterlies disperse the lower concentration pack ice. There is a lot of 3/10s or less that will get dispersed. But the Western Arctic is going to get significantly colder beginning this weekend.
Final number: 4.5
A log of hand-wringing and angst at the Arctic Sea Ice Forum. Sort of comical.
I’m going with 2010.(4.0) The ice extent and 80 degree latitude temperatures this year are very similar.
http://mainstreamlastfirst.com/
He He
From Greg Goodman on August 12, 2013 at 3:29 am:
This is why I wonder if you have an innate inability to properly reason, as you are asking me to explain WHY the Met Office screwed up on the erroneous graph they deleted.
I do not handle ISO 9000 compliance for the Met Office, nor do I have any thing otherwise to do with their Quality Control efforts to prevent such mistakes, save for rare public complaints about their free products. I have even less insight into the Met Office inner workings than many of the regulars here. Why would I know why they screwed up that graph, and why should I care?
2007-2010 continual rise?
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/from:1978.99/to:2006.99/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/from:1978.99/to:2006.99/trend/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/from:2006.99/to:2010.99/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/from:2006.99/to:2010.99/trend
Working with whole years, from start of 2007 to end of 2010 the Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent dropped at nearly EIGHT TIMES the rate as start of 1979 to end of 2006. Where’s the continual rise?
But you’re using anomalies, for which the monthly real amount is subtracted from the average climatology period amount for that month. Cryosphere Today uses NSIDC data (among other sources), NSIDC has changed to 1981 to 2010 inclusive (30 years) as their new baseline (the climatology). So I’ll grab the needed NSIDC raw data from WoodForTrees and shove it into the wonderful and free OpenOffice, er, LibreOffice, for processing into anomalies.
1979-2006 (inc), loss of 46,300 km²/yr.
2007-2010 (inc), gain of 15,000 km²/yr.
For a period too short to be meaningful, only four years, the trend was a rate of gain of ONE THIRD the previous rate of loss, per NSIDC data. But only by using anomalies, with an obvious cherrypicking of starting with the ultra-low 2007.
EXCEPT, you specified a “continual rise in ice coverage from 2007 to 2010” on the deleted graph.
Going by the red smoothed line, the “continual rise” is from the bottoming-out in September 2007 until perhaps February 2010. Outside that range there is dropping.
Thus the entire range of your concern, your ‘proof’ of shenanigans in the ice record, is less than 2 1/2 years.
And although it may be hard to tell on that Cryosphere Today chart as it lacks a similar smoothed line, when zoomed in and eyeballing that range, it very much is showing a rise, and definitely not “something almost flat.”
So, AGAIN, you’re asking for something mystifying that’s ultimately unanswerable, as it’s based on something that just ain’t real.
LOL! With your permission I will be using that term a lot in my ICT related work when clients boast about how powerful their computers are.
-2 standard deviations… so about 4.9.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2389895/Climate-change-shortcut-Chinese-cargo-ship-attempts-sail-China-Europe-Northeast-Passage.html
How can we follow the progress of this voyage? Will it make it? Any bets on this as well as on the sea ice extent?
a conservative 5.3 from me. talking about bets,i recently offered to bet my house against the house of a warmist that the ice extent does not drop below 1 million square kilometres in the next 10 years,the thread on the forum the offer was made on has now gone quiet 🙂
I’ve gone with 5.8 because I don’t think there will be a significant melt or flushing for the rest of this season. Possibly optimistic.
I went with Kenji’s prediction, since he looks smarter than the average Arctic sea ice expert.
Who the heck is that “Shaw” who absurdly guessed the minimum would be 6 million?
He just might be right, considering refreezing is already starting in places as obvious as the “North Pole Camera.” http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/08/06/north-pole-camera-one-pictures-polar-bear-tracks/
Who is that guy? I researched the guy. He’s nothing but a goat farmer. If that absurd dude beats Climate Scientists, the situation will be embarrassing to all involved.
Does anybody or any organisation map the temperature and direction of waters entering the Arctic via the Bering Strait etc?
As the temperatures in the Arctic seem to have been cooler than many previous years, one would expect the ice melt to be less, IF it is the air temperature mainly responsible for causing the melt.
However if the melt is affected also by the seawater around it, (like ice in a gin and tonic!), then the sea temperature should have a significant bearing on the ice melt.