PIOMAS May Volume Loss

Now that the PIOMAS main series of total volume is out I can look at what that shows about the May volume loss. This being the first part of the overall spring volume loss.

May 2016 Status

The data is now in, so here's a look at May and prospects for the coming summer.

PIOMAS April 2016

Thanks, as always, to Dr Zhang and the PIOMAS team at the Polar Science Center for making gridded PIOMAS products available to amateurs such as myself. It's early May and April PIOMAS data is out. April is the peak of volume and ice state in April is one of the primary initial conditions that sets the scene for the coming melt season.

PIOMAS 29 February

PIOMAS data is now out. So here is a summary of the data based on the gridded data provided by the PIOMAS team. Once again thanks is due to the PIOMAS team for making this data available and up to date.

PIOMAS on 31 January

As promised in the comments of my previous post, I am going to break down the difference between January 2015 and January 2016 in terms of region and thickness.

How is the Volume Pulse going?

Earlier this month I didn't have the time to look at January's PIOMAS data, and still don't really aim to cover PIOMAS in detail until April's data is out in early May. At that stage I will make my prediction for this year's SIPN. However I have been looking at how the volume pulse is going and thought I'd do a quick update on it.

June 2015 Status

June data is now fully available, so here is my commentary on the current sea ice state and the month just passed. Sorry but this is a long post...

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 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...

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.

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.