April 2015 Status. Part 1.

This post is the first of two blog posts examining ice state as of April 2015. April extent is very low but this has little impact on the coming season. A greater factor is thickness and the thickness distribution of the ice, and the best available tool for that is the PIOMAS sea ice reanalysis system. Due to the length of this post I will address thickness breakdown of PIOMAS data using both grid box effective thickness and the sub grid thickness distribution in a post in the next few days.

Is Arctic Sea Ice Like a Cup or a Ball?

As posted at Neven's blog, Wagner and Eisenman have recently published a paper building on an active area of research into whether the loss of sea ice will be linear or non linear. Thanks to Neven for bringing my attention to this paper and to HotWhopper for the link to a pre-print of Wagner & Eisenman. Although HotWhopper almost negates the provision of the actual paper by giving a guided tour of some comments at Dumbass Central. ;)

Atlantic Sector Extent, Late April 2015

Extent has been definitely falling, this is accompanied by rather intersting conditions in the Atlantic sector of the pack. What is going on there? I hazard a guess concerning the very low extent in Barents.

What is PIOMAS gice?

 In this post I'm going to explain a PIOMAS metric that I will be using from now on. I will also give a first look at this metric. The gridded data for the 'sub-grid thickness distribution' is contained in gice files, and I've finally started to use them.

Summer Sea Ice in the Laptev Sea

I've recently been looking at the PIOMAS Gice data, about which I will explain briefly here and in more depth later this month. Of the areas I have been looking at one that has struck me is the Laptev Sea, the other is Baffin Bay, on which I will blog in due course. But for now, Laptev:

March 2015 Status

Data is now in for March 2015, the early maximum is confirmed, temperatures over autumn/winter continue the pattern of recent years, and the volume increase in PIOMAS remains. This year takes volume back to 2010 levels, but the impact of 2007 remains clear. My entry for the 2015 Sea Ice Prediction Network (SIPN) is given at the end of this post.

Large extent of older sea ice in the Beaufort Sea

I have processed images from the Drift Age Model of Fowler/Maslanik/Tschudi to draw attention to the extent of old ice in Beaufort. 2014, like 2013, enters the melt season looking more like a pre-2007 year in the highlighted region.