Mid June 2015

June seems to represent a crucial period of pre-conditioning for the summer melt season, with large June sea ice losses in years of large summer losses, such as 2007, 2011 and 2012. The purpose of this blog post is to consider what is happening in June this year, and the prospects for the rest of June and the summer.

May 2015 Status: PIOMAS

This will be a rather short post, I will have much more to say about the June PIOMAS data. But for now, partly due to work, here's some late comments on PIOMAS May data.

May 2015 Status: Four Dipoles

Not all of the NCEP/NCAR data is available, and PIOMAS is yet to be released, but with the data available there is still a lot to cover about sea ice state in May 2015.

2015 September NSIDC Extent Prediction

This is the prediction I will be submitting for the June Sea Ice Prediction Network 2015 predictions. I wasn't aware of the mid May call for early season predictions, as I use April data I could have put this in for that round.

The Slow Transition

Ten months ago I posted about my change of mind, from thinking that a fast crash was a very real possibility to expecting a slow transition of the Arctic sea ice to a seasonally ice free state. I have now finished the series of posts detailing my argument. I should start by clarifying; by a slow transition I do not expect the summer sea ice to last into the 2050s, I suspect that around 2030 we will see the first summer with an extent of less than 1 million km^2.

The Slow Transition: The Central Arctic

For the Arctic Ocean to become seasonally sea ice free the Central Arctic region must become sea ice free. What is happening in PIOMAS in the Central Arctic, and what is likely to happen in future?

The Slow Transition: The BCE Region

The BCE region is the region covered by the Beaufort Sea, Chukchi Sea, and the East Siberian Sea. For there to be a virtually ice free Arctic any September soon, the BCE region must melt out early in the season. This post is the penultimate post in my argument that we face a slow transition of the Arctic sea ice, after which I will wrap up the argument with a summary, before moving on to watch this season.

Coincidentally, as others including Neven have noted, Beaufort is very interesting right now, this winter's export of multi year ice makes me suspect it will stall, but an early start in Beaufort is promising for a more exciting season than the last two years. Here's hoping...