It looks like the Maslowski Countdown has ended early and there will be no “ice free Arctic” as predicted this year.
From NSIDC, which has a 5 day average in the plot. It looks like the minimum extent is ~5.0-5.1 million sq kilometers. NSIDC has yet to make an announcement on the turning point as of this writing. Note the minimum is within the standard deviation bounds (grey shading) that NSIDC provides.
Note also that it is still possible to see a drop again, as this has happened in years past, but given the colder temperatures this year, a reversal appears unlikely.
![N_stddev_timeseries[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/n_stddev_timeseries1.png?quality=75)
The JAXA plot concurs:
![AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent_L[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/amsre_sea_ice_extent_l1.png?quality=75)
The JAXA data says:
09-10 5084063 09-11 5029688 09-12 5000313 09-13 5031094 09-14 5055625 09-15 5063438
The NANSEN plot concurs as well:
More at the WUWT Sea Ice page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
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Winds are trying to push ice out into Fram again. However, the massive ice jam along the whole northern Greenland shore and nearby islands may prevent it.
I think I’d wait until the official counting is done. After all, millions of public funds and a Nobel prize are riding on an ice-free Arctic. 🙂
Excellent guestimate for those predicting around 5
Just another thought. Does it really matter to the warmists if the prediction is wrong? They make the doomsday prediction, get all the press, we get to wring our hands at impending disaster and then they move on to the next bit of doomsday. No one seems to remember whether their prediction was right or wrong. Their real failure is making he prediction close enough that someone might remember it.
Is this year’s low within the old standard deviations before they did the downward adjustment earlier in the summer to include the averages up to 2010?
Bob, it’s like a 20% chance of rain…
…don’t mean squat….either way they are right
Just noting that the average climatology in the next few days has the sea ice extent dropping. It is normally not enough to bump the minimums off their position but September 16 to 18 have declining numbers in most years. Just the way it happens. Don’t panic if the next few days are lower.
Change in sea ice extent from the NSIDC and Jaxa on average in the climatology and then over the last year 2013.
http://s15.postimg.org/9qsnd5nrv/NH_SIE_Daily_Change_Sept15_2013.png
Great to see the rebound, but it took record/near record low temperatures to help it, and it was still a gigantic melt,,,and the melting season isn’t over yet. That ice is very thin. So I wouldn’t get too excited about this, as nice as it is to see. I recall us getting all excited about the Arctic “recovering” in 2009 after the 2007 melt, and look what happened last summer.
pinetree3 says:
September 16, 2013 at 7:05 pm
That ice is very thin.
How thin is it?
So pinetree (assuming you are a scientist and know what you are speaking of), what thickness do you consider “not very thin” since you seem to have a definition for “very thin”?
Oh no, the increase in the yearly minimum arctic sea ice is UNPRECEDENTED (in recorded modern history)!
AGW gone wild! Reduce your carbon footprint and repent you sinners!
/sarc
I’ll wait till we have 5 years of growing ice minimums before celebrating that the Arctic is rebounding. One good year may just be an outlier.
James at 48 says: September 16, 2013 at 5:36 pm
Winds are trying to push ice out into Fram again. However, the massive ice jam along the whole northern Greenland shore and nearby islands may prevent it.
Maybe an icebreaker can try to breakup that ice jam, e.g. the Swedish icebreaker Oden returned from the Fram Strait on September 1st, after two weeks of important research including:
One wonders why, if we are so worried about the loss of Arctic Sea Ice, we are helping it along by breaking it up in the Fram Strait, while recording it in 360 and recording the sounds it makes…
Oden also participated Ajurak Icebreaker trials in the Fram Strait in September 2009, i.e.:
“Icebreaker and ice-management trials on behalf of ExxonMobil in connection with the Ajurak project. In this research expedition during September 2009 Icebreaker Oden (TransAtlantic management) and Icebreaker Fennica was performing various tests for ExxonMobil.” http://www.rabt.se/Offshoreicebreaking/Reference-list/
I believe the -PDO firmly established itself this year. That means the AMO will be trending down from here on out. This will allow more and more sea ice to remain in the Arctic. It may take 5 years to see it, but eventually the ice will get thicker and the claims of disappearing ice will fade away.
“”””””…….John F. Hultquist says:
September 16, 2013 at 4:46 pm
george e. smith says:
September 16, 2013 at 3:29 pm
“So 2010 was almost three years ago, . . . ”
International agreement since the 1930s have used the 30 year average for weather data with the last year of that ending in zero, thus 2010 qualifies. They can and will do other things sometimes but on this they are following standard procedure……..”””””””
So in 2039 we will still be comparing that year’s ice with the 1981 to 2010 average ??
Simply wunnerful. !
So how about they wait tll 2040, before reporting on anything that happens between 2010 and 2039 ??
I don’t mind them using 30 years for their average; any made up number is as good as any other made up number; but the 30 year period should be the 30 years immediately previous to the one year your are comparing to the past average; not to an average that can be separated in time by 29 years from the subject year
According to the NIC the 8-10th arctic ice tally is 4, 943, 662 which is about 200,000 sq km more than on Sept 11th so it looks certain that low point has gone. So we won’t be swimming to North Pole after all then. Doom mongers can always hope for next year, but I think they will have a long wait.
Well, I went with e+π myself, so I’m a bit high, but not that bad!
Antarctic sea ice extent is at a record high – noted above by writer sunshinehours – at 19,500,000 sq km’s.
Add 1,561,000 sq km’s of permanent sea ice shelves.
Add 14,000,000 sq km’s of land area.
Gee. The edge of the Antarctic sea ice is up past 60 degrees south latitude!
On Hansen’s NASA-GISS-favored Mercator exaggeration projection maps, that is equivalent to the total southern sea and land ice now covering everything between the north pole and the bottom tip of Greenland through half of Canada, all of Alaska, cutting off Kamchatka, passing a bit north of Manchuria and Mongolia but covering all of Siberia and half of Russia, cutting the Ural Mountains, and Scandinavia and ending up well south of Iceland, right?
But they claim – based on no drill bore evidence but lots of models, that the Antarctic ice shelves are melting from underneath – where nobody can measure the loss.
From george e. smith on September 16, 2013 at 9:06 pm:
Nah, 2001 to 2030 average. The record lows of the first half will provide excellent justification for the scaremongering of the coming planetary glaciation.
As the behind-the-scenes machinations of the UN with Agenda 21 and the Club of Rome and others to reduce global population to that which can fit in the ice-free tropical land regions, will have failed utterly, and despite numerous UN treaty attempts the unruly peasants there will be too well-armed (including digital weaponry) to be “removed” without direct repercussions, alternatives will be found. As additional atmospheric CO₂ beyond 400 ppmv was proven completely ineffective at providing additional warming twenty years earlier, money went elsewhere.
Thus the great push will be for space colonies for the 0.01%, fully automated living with your own mini-legion of self-maintaining self-replicating robotic servants. All that’s needed is sunlight and some raw materials. Thankfully by then we’ll have batteries good enough to make solar viable on the Moon, if you’re one of those lower 0.01%-ers trapped so close to the frozen squalid cesspool. If you can afford Mars up to preferably armed and armored family-sized independent ships, get the nuclear upgrade.
My investment advice? Asteroid belt mining. From the rock wranglers to processors to ship builders to the dock-to-dock ice salesmen, it’ll be a growth industry, suitable for supporting many family businesses, perhaps another 0.09%.
It’ll sure beat selling yourself and your progeny into permanent servitude in the deep under-ground under-glacier communal bunker cities and “waiting out the ice” if you can’t afford tropical land or space on a floating barge city. Trust me on that.
RACookPE1978 says:
September 16, 2013 at 2:39 pm
If it the “gain” in heat energy comparing an “open Arctic ocean albedo” compared to an ice-covered Arctic albedo, then should they not be concerned far more about the GAIN in Antarctic sea ice at all times of the year, at latitudes far closer to the Equator where solar energy is actually reflected from the ice at all times?
————————
The sea ice in Antarctica just took another upward leap today. The last several days it had looked like it was not going to reach another record peak, following last years record peak. Then today it shows a spike that may take the sea ice to an all new high…http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/#
And we have another 10 days or so for it to increase even further….. Assuming the ice follows its ‘average’ progress down south.
Somewhat related to melting or not melting ice I was watching Daily Planet on the Discovery Channel in Canada Monday night. It has just been recently announced that Mt. McKinley the highest mountain in North America, due to more accurate measurements maybe slightly shorter than originally measured. Well Dan Riskin a co-host on the show stated climate change might be one of the reasons it is shorter. No mention made if snow cover comes into play here, just climate change. Dan Riskin is a firm believer in AGW. He has a PHD in zoology, his specialty, the study of bats.
Chicken! I said, and say, 5.2.
Huh, the NSIDC site is finally back online and running.
This is interesting, about their new shiny Green Data Center:
100% humidity with continuous rain, you don’t get evaporation, thus the evaporative coolers aren’t very effective.
The outer air is too wet for cooling when raining, you’d need dehumidification equipment.
In case of a power outage with overcast raining skies, the solar array does squat. Where’s the backup diesel generators?
Did the NSIDC put all their eggs in one Green basket, ignoring the many lessons on backup sites, ignoring time-honored engineering principles of using proven last-backup equipment, that fell apart after a few days of mere rain? Did they put all their trust in the magic of sunny cloudless days?
RACookPE1978 says:
September 16, 2013 at 2:39 pm
Should we begin predicting when Cape Horn will be blocked by Antarctic Sea Ice in April and May,
I like winding people up! I will start the ball rolling on my Facebook page right away.
Drake’s passage and Magellan St. may be easier to argue. That would cut off the link between Pacific and Atlantic and block the circumpolar current.
Lots of scope for OMG climate distruption there.