Major refresh to WUWT's Sea Ice Reference page

One of WUWT’s most read reference pages has been the Sea Ice reference page. For over a year, it could be described with one word, dreadful.

The many problems included:

• WordPress broke handling of non-SSL references to images to display. They seem to be downloading them into their own cache directory, but never update it. Many images in the Sea Ice page are updated every day. I, and I’m sure Anthony, expected that WP would realized that this is, shall we say, sub-optimal and that they would fix it soon. They didn’t.

  Yesterday I figured out that my web host vendor does have a SSL certificate customers can use if we use a URL that references their server’s hostname and I’ve set up a shell script to download the pertinent URLs and upload them to my web site. The Sea Ice page is now displaying my copies.

• One important source of information, www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil, no longer has a non-SSL http server so I figured it had moved elsewhere. I found that it merely changed to a SSL-based server, and all I needed to do was change several https to httpses. The SSL certificate has some problems, so don’t be surprised if you need to add an exception to your access controls.
• We were displaying a couple images accessed via ftp. The server no longer supports anonymous FTP, and accesses to the page resulted in two requests for login information. I found non-FTP paths for the images.
• A major source of good information in the past was The Cryosphere Today. I think the staff consists of two researchers and occasional undergrad work-study programmers. Their site says:
  

  Special Sensor Microwave Imager and Sounder (SSMIS) on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) F-17 satellite that provides passive microwave brightness temperatures (and derived Arctic and Antarctic sea ice products) has been providing spurious data since beginning of April. Working on resolving problem or replacing this data source.

  It should say April 2016. Worse, their scripts keep running taking the same stale data and creating new images for every day since then. All I could do is delete every image reference there, some which I had already been copying to my web site so I could use a URL without a timestamp. I guess I can stop that daily script!

While there’s a fair amount of work to do, e.g. look for replacements for some of the Cryosphere pages and reviewing all links to other sites, I declare the Sea Ice page back in service. Check it out, let me know what I’ve missed.

One thing I’d like to do before Arctic Ice Minimum is add a section or maybe a new reference page on the Canadian NorthWest Passage. That is extremely well covered at http://arcticnorthwestpassage.blogspot.com/?view=sidebar, but [Huh!? a tsunami hit Greenland? When? Oh today, no wonder I heard about first by checking that blog] I’d like to add a link to that blog and maybe include some ice cover images for the Canadian Archipelago.

Excuse me while go check out that tsunami. I wonder if it reached New Hampshire.