Midsummer madness

By stoat on August 31, 2009.

No, not arbcomm, though they seem to be fairly wacky. This summer has been very disconnected, but I'm finally back, so expect more unbridled tat. I was going to take a peek at the sea ice situation, on the off-chance that no-one else had, but googled it first and ended up with Greenpeace's sea ice 'mistake' delights climate change sceptics. Strange stuff. People forgetting to say "sea" in front of "ice" is hardly new or interesting, though, except in August when nothing happens. mt has the tedious detail so you don't have to bother.

But there is plenty more weird stuff. The Mighty James Annan smacks down some oddness from RP Jr, in between whats looks like rather luxurious mountain climbing. Wimp.

Eli lets the side down by actually talking about real science but we'll let him off with a caution this time.

As to the sea ice, where I came in, it isn't looking very exciting this year. I may win my bet with The Penguin yet.

Tags
climate fun
sea ice

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Hmm. Remember that it's the NSIDC average for the month that counts. Their August 30th tally look like about 5.45 million km^2, and our over/under figure is 5.38. Shaping up to be closer than I was looking for, as September seems to average about or only somewhat less than the September 1 extent.

Robert,

The NSIDC sea ice extent as of today seems very near 5.40M km² (albeit hard to read on the graph, where are the digital data, are they the same as for the JAXA site?), and the decrease rate is dramatically slowing. Therefore it's difficult to guess the mean value for September. OTOH, the Cryosphere Today website seems to show a potential for further decrease especially in the Northeast (around Laptev and Esat Siberian Sea). So I think that the near future (further decrease or not) depends heavily on the weather evolution in that region.

BTW the Northeast passage is clearly open, while the Northwest passage appears to be open according to CT and closed according to NSIDC.

Just for fun, and waiting for the NSIDC analysis...

Averaging IJIS data for August I get 6.15m km^2 whereas NSIDC has put 6.26m Km^2. So it appears that they are close but not the same. If NSIDC remains .1m below IJIS then stoat does indeed have a reasonable chance. On IJIS figures I had only one year in last 6 failed to decline enough from start of September for stoat to win.

Whichever side it falls, it looks sufficiently between stoat and Grumbine's estimates that there is no way that it could be considered decisive.