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...

Predicting the CT Area minimum

Crysophere Today Area (CT Area) is the dataset produced by the Polar Research Group at the University of Illinois. I've stopped using it since last year, I now concentrate on NSIDC Extent and PIOMAS. But it has a peculiarity that makes it worth picking up again.

The bitter irony of Paul Homewood

Who's Paul Homewood? It doesn't really matter, he's just another tedious climate change denialist, but the irony of this amused me.

An Early Warning for Summer Sea Ice Crashes?

Just a quick post on on of the elements I've looked at while trying to improve prediction for the summer. This comes with a caution, because the method outlined only 'predicts' two recent sea ice summer loss events, the 2007 and 2012 crashes. Time will tell whether it is of any use in the future.

April 2015 Status. Part 2.

Part 2 of my summary of April sea ice state focusses on ice thickness as seen in PIOMAS. So for those who have been awaiting the more detailed thickness distribution plots by region here is the detail that may help form opinions as to prospects for the coming melt season.

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. ;)