The Beaufort Sea Ice Lead of February 2013

There's a long lead in the sea ice in the Beaufort Sea at present, it's drawing some attention. So is this an unusual occurrence and is it telling us anything about the state of the sea ice?

Publicly available past archives of sea ice from infra-red (IR) satellites covering this region don't seem to be available. But I've recently commented of ASCAT the successor to QuikScat, so this morning I made a final effort to see if the archives of QuikScat are still available somewhere. After an immense amount of pissing around I finally found them, said pissing around reminds me of how Arthur Dent found the planning notice for the demolition of his house.

PROSSER: But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months!
ARTHUR: Yes, well, as soon as I heard, I went straight round to see them. You hadn’t gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody.
PROSSER: The plans were on display—
ARTHUR: On display? I had to go down to the cellar to find them!
PROSSER: That’s the display department!
ARTHUR: With a flashlight.
PROSSER: The lights had probably gone out.
ARTHUR: So had the stairs.
PROSSER: But you found the notice, didn’t you?
ARTHUR: Yes, I did. It was "on display" in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying, "Beware of the Leopard."

ASCAT, PIOMAS and the DAM

I've previously posted about the current state of the ice in January 2013. As I've just reminded myself of the ASCAT system that has replaced QuikScat, I thought I'd reproduce images from PIOMAS gridded data and the drift age model (DAM) together with ASCAT satellite images.

It's February 22...

...and as that's a Friday, so it's time to give the answers and explain myself.

In my previous (rather frivolous) post I posted four images of a certain region and asked which was from 2013. Here are the answers and an explanation of what I'm getting at.

It's February 20th...

...it must be sea ice puzzle time. ;)

Cryo-Sat 2 and PIOMAS.

I recently posted with a link to Neven's Sea Ice Blog, the title of that post was 'PIOMAS Vindicated!' That post, and its title, was written before I had sight of the Laxon 2013 paper "Cryo-Sat 2 estimates of Arctic sea ice thickness and volume". Having now read that paper my opinion hasn't changed. But in a recent email exchange someone has called into question my claim that PIOMAS is vindicated. So I thought I needed to explain my view.

And Now For Something Completely Different.

Asteroid DA-14 is giving us a close pass today, within the Moon's orbit and closer than geosynchronous satellites, more here. And early this morning in the Urals a meteorite exploded, shattering windows and injuring around 300 people. So far it seems no deaths reported and the reports indicate injuries are light - phew! Aside from the injuries, the major concern I have are the cold weather and loads of people with smashed windows.

PIOMAS Vindicated!

The new paper from the Cryosat II team is being reported across the web. Rather than launch into another one of my long posts, I'll link to Neven who's done the honours here. That thread will be worth following, at least one person commenting there seems to have the actual paper, which I'm trying to get hold of (for free) before I buy it.