Arctic sea ice flatline

Usually September is the month that gets everyone checking out the arctic sea ice pictures daily, and this is just weather, but it’s interesting. 
Mark Serreze has a commentary at Roger Pielke’s site on the developments.

n_timeseries

Advertisement

6 responses to “Arctic sea ice flatline

  1. Looking at the IARC-JAXA Information System data for the last couple years, the flatlining might be unusual,but it has happened in the past.

    The graph you’ve posted appears to be a few days old, BTW. Based on the IARC-JAXA depiction dated 2008/12/22, there’s been an uptick.

    Enjoy your holidays.

    Regards

  2. Can’t resist the temptation to put this into standard denial’ish talking point terminology:
    This autumn’s “remarkable recovery” of arctic sea ice has been cancelled/eliminated the last couple of weeks…

  3. The timing of the sea ice flat line is dubious. It coincides exactly with NANSEN adjustment where a half-million square kilometers of ice were deleted. The rumor was that it had to do with some new version of software, but it is only rumor. At last check there is was no explanation on the NANSEN site, and only a vague e-mail from Stein Sandven at NANSEN to Anthony Watts which read:

    Dear Anthony,

    The ice area calculation has been too high since about 22 October, causing too steep slope of the 2008 curve. We corrected for this yesterday and recalculated the ice area for 2008. The slope of the 2008 curve should now be correct and can be compared with 2007 and the previous mean monthly ice area.

    Best regards
    Stein

    This happened on or about December 12.

    Response– The slope is more steeply upward again as of today, but it appears that time of little change was not an artifact. I’m sure NSIDC will have something soon on their site– chris

  4. As it turns out all sea ice data from NSIDC from June ’08 onward is suspect. That is when they switched over from the DMSP F13 satellite to the DMSP F15 satellite, and that sensor has turned out to be faulty. NSIDC has ceased daily reports of sea ice extent, and announced that their data has underestimated sea ice extent by 500,000 square kilometers.

    http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

  5. Follow-up:

    http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2009/022609.html

    Now, where’s that stimulus $ for more Earth observation satellites and science?

  6. Looks like your adopting a denialist tactic of picking and choosing data that supports your position.

    Response– Um…I was just noting an interesting flatline in the trend, I wasn’t making any point or argument here. In retrospect, there’s really nothing interesting about this– chris

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s