songster

It's easy to "see" cycles that aren't really there, particularly when averaging across windows. A single year's "spike" will get smeared out over 5 years of the trailing average. That then looks like a half-cycle of length 5 (i.e. a 10-year periodicity). Have you tried (eg) a Fourier analysis on the original data to see whether there really is a periodic signal? You could also try correlating (detrended) residuals with ENSO in case it's simply related to that.

I think they're saying that global warming only counts if it happens in July/August and thus causes a new yearly record. Warmer winter/spring/autumn is a mirage.

*shrug* I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, but it seems it's lost on some folk.

It happens with every single microwave sensor, haven't you seen it before? Rough water, and mixed land/water pixels, can show up as spurious ice. Generally it's too small a percentage difference to matter, and it gets cleaned out of the near-real-time data before the final data are released some months later. They're quite open about this, so you have no justification to cast veiled aspersions, no matter how "humorously".

No idea. However, clicking through on their website to get the image for sea ice concentration shows me this: http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/Arctic-ice-concentration-maps-from-SSMI-and-AMSRE There's a large amount of spurious signal at ~20% concentration near the top centre of the map, around the Russia/Japan border. That's not real ice. Same goes for all the pixels around Newfoundland. If those are getting counted, it would explain why this source is showing a higher signal than the other sources. As to why there's this false signal, I guess it's possible that their particular algorithm gets confused under some weather conditions. It certainly seems to give much noisier results than others - just look at their 2008 trace.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/antarctic.sea.ice.interactive.html Spot the record. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html Likewise.

Someone doesn't understand exponential curves. If you don't know why I said that, it's probably you.

Re the above: I sent an email to the query address on the model front page. No reply as yet, but they must have prodded something as the temperatures and anomalies now show saner values. http://polar.ncep.no...t/rtg_high_res/ http://polar.ncep.no...t_NPS_ophi0.png http://polar.ncep.no...y_NPS_ophi0.png A salutary reminder that much of what people like us obsess over on blogs is simply a set of auto-updated web-pages with little manual oversight, which form a very small part of the work being done by the actual scientists involved. Obviously something was wrong here, but not something important enough to come to notice earlier.

Yes, but if the 500k decrease doesn't prove anything, neither does the preceding increase and record, surely? What matters is the long-term trend: <i>slightly</i> up, but mainly during the winter, with near-complete seasonal melt-out.

GW: That's an error in the model - has to be. It doesn't even show up in all the models: compare these two: http://ocean.dmi.dk/...te/index.uk.php http://polar.ncep.no...y_NPS_ophi0.png Edit: The Coriolis explanation is from a random commenter on Neven's blog and is absolute drivel. Betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of both Coriolis forces and indeed thermodynamics.

Yes. Steven Goddard (no "warmist" he) recently posted this graph.http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/correlation-between-arctic-and-antarctic-sea-ice-anomalies/ Unfortunately he's an idiot, and doesn't actually know what an r^2 value of 0.05 actually means (i.e. it proves there's no correlation whatsoever), hence the misleading headline.

I think my high-end prediction falls off the rails this week. > 3.45-3.8 in week 3 (avg 3.6) 15th: 3.393 16th: 3.369 Still well above the worst case, thank Om. Now looking at at overall daily min of 3.3ish, and a monthly average of 3.5ish, I guess.

Well, we'll see how things pan out in the second half of the month after the minimum (surely *has* to reach a minimum soon). Right now it's between my best and worst cases, which is gratifying. Still going down though.

Yes, this forum's profanity filter mangles any mention of laminate floori (B astardi), even in URLs. Edit "laminate floor" to be the word for the child of unmarried parents, and it'll fix it.

... or at least some grammar. My eyes!

It hasn't. You're linking to the outputs of a model of sea surface temperature. The rest of us are looking at actual measurements of ice concentration.

2012, 09, 01, 3.60776 2012, 09, 02, 3.58558 2012, 09, 03, 3.54015 2012, 09, 04, 3.56411 2012, 09, 05, 3.50857 2012, 09, 06, 3.48834 2012, 09, 07, 3.57635 Average for week 1 = 3.55928 Small uptick on the last day (noise or re-freeze?), but overall I'm calling that as a successful prediction. Of course, some may say that predicting if half-way through the week is cheating. To them I say PFFFFFF....

Actually, the last I saw was that he's being even more actively misleading than that - linking to a model of Arctic sea surface temperatures and pretending it was a measurement of ice coverage.

Careful! Temperature is not climbing: it's falling slower than it should.

Dead wrong though, he's not got a clue about Arctic processes. Rotate the landmasses, and you no longer have a continent at the South pole or an enclosed basin in the North - both are fully open to ocean currents. That won't let you build stable ice caps, in fact I'm not even sure you'll have seasonal ice. You'll end up with a climate much more like the Jurassic or Triassic, with open water at the poles and a much weaker temperature gradient from equator to poles.

Not a chance in hell. We're starting at 3.61, and the first week will average something like 3.55: to offset that you need a week which <i>averages</i> 4.45, meaning it'll be over 4.5 by the end of the week. I think there's only one year in the entire satellite record with that large an uptick, and it was some time back in the 80s. The average increase over the month is around 0.5-0.6 (recently much lower, we haven't put on more than 0.2 over the month since 2004. Even with an unusually rapid uptick (as fast as any year this century), we're looking at something like this: 3.6-3.5 in week 1 (avg 3.55) 3.5-3.45 in week 2 (avg 3.5) 3.45-3.8 in week 3 (avg 3.6) 3.8-4.4 in week 4 (avg 4.1) That gives an average of 3.7 for the month. Personally I've moved my vote down to 3.6 and suspect I'm still being too optimistic. Edit: Worst case? Monthly average 3.225 3.6 - 3.3 in week 1 (avg 3.45) 3.3 - 3.1 in week 2 (avg 3.2) 3.1 - 3.0 in week 3 (avg 3.05) 3.0 - 3.4 in week 4 (avg 3.2) And I'm not even sure that's a worst case - on average we've been losing 60k/day over the last 5 days. Keep that up for another four, and my first week will be on the spot. Hold even half that rate for the second week and we're there.... This. Is. Bad.

Actually, looking back at the photos, I'm no longer convinced it's re-freezing. I think it may just be recent snowfall floating on the water. If I recall rightly, as the snow melts, the (fresh) water from that forms a very thin skim over the surface which freezes temporarily as it comes into contact with saline water below zero degrees. However, as the salt mixes in, it soon disperses again.

I don't think they're taking much interest in the ice tbh. If you check the mission plan, this is a geological mission aimed at mapping the underwater topography, and dredging samples from the sea bed. There will be ancillary ice observations, and possibly some buoy deployments (but there are no planned on-ice operations). http://www.icefloe.n...p?recordID=1381 P.S. I think I can see grease ice in the 08:00 UTC photo, and they're back in nilas at 09:00.

Voted 3.9 on the basis of the nilas forming around the Healy. The specific figure is chosen as a wild-ass guess that we'll get something like 3.8, 3.7, 3.9, 4.3 as an early refreeze starts, giving a monthly average of 3.9 and a daily low of a little under 3.7 This may well be over-cautious, since we're voting on the NSIDC extent, which I don't think will detect the nilas until it's thickened a bit more. There's also room for more losses on the Atlantic side even as the newly-forming ice moves back towards the Bering strait.

We know why atmospheric CO2 is going up, it's because of fossil fuel use. That part at least should be non-negotiable. What mechanism do they propose to explain how temperature change one year can cause us to burn more coal and oil the next year?