Arctic Sea Ice

2012 Maximum Area Pool

EDIT Neven: There's a poll in the right hand bar running until February 8th for predicting the Cryosphere Today maximum sea ice area number. See details below. Don't be afraid to share your prediction in the comments. :-)

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Post by guest author crandles:

It doesn't look like the area maximum will be under 13 million km^2 based on past 10 years all increasing by at least 0.6m km^2 and sometimes over 1m km^2 from this time of year. We are currently at 12.414m km^2.

Also, you could argue that the recent trend has been unusually in that amount is less now than 15 days so perhaps a spike upwards is imminent.

On the other hand, area is high outside Bering strait and by Baffin Bay so maybe these won't increase area much further. Where the area is low, Barents and Kara seas, the water is warm and set to stay that way at least this week with strong winds blowing from Atlantic. Then maybe the sun is getting high enough for Southern Barents to receive more solar energy than usual because of low ice and therefore albedo.

This might suggest the increase in area could continue to be slow a little longer.

Or you might completely disagree with above assessment.

So how about a pool of guesses on the area maximumper Cryosphere today? Not much time left so I suggest guesses should be submitted before end of January.

Neven commented:

On the other hand: that huge high over Northern Siberia means clear skies and thus a lot of radiation escaping to space.

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EDIT Neven: 

To add to the fun I have opened a poll and added it to the right hand bar. You can vote on what you think the SIA maximum will be until February 8th.

Here are the Cryosphere Today SIA maximums in the period 2005-2011 with the date of maximum (from this daily updated data file):

• 2005: 13.46 million km2 (March 6th)
• 2006: 13.36 million km2 (March 11th)
• 2007: 13.32 million km2 (February 26th)
• 2008: 13.89 million km2 (March 11th)
• 2009: 13.85 million km2 (March 2nd)
• 2010: 13.81 million km2 (March 7th)
• 2011: 13.14 million km2 (March 8th)

Final poll results

The last poll from the widget in the right hand bar closed a week ago. I want to share the results with you before the final SEARCH Sea Ice Outlook comes out. Mind you, I preferred the Arctic Sea Ice blog's poll to be about IJIS daily minimum extent. The SEARCH SIO predictions are for NSIDC September average extent.

Here are the results:

The average this time around is 4.299 million square km.

These were the results for the previous polls:

Poll 1 (304 votes)

4.203 million square km

- (436 votes; closed July 15th)

4.205 million square km

Poll 2 (237 votes; closed August 20th)

4.280 million square km

Poll 3 (135 votes; closed September 1st)

4.299 million square km

Here's my complex method for processing the poll results:

I've calculated the number by multiplying the percentage number with the average of an option. For instance 'between 4.5 and 5 million' = 4.75, and for 'less than 3.5 million km2' I've used 3.25 million km2. I've added up all multiplications and divided the result by 100.

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Again, this blog community's final prediction is 4.299 million square km.

IJIS SIE is currently at 4.561 million square km (September 7th 2011).

Poll Results 2

Here's an update on the poll widget in the right side bar. A few weeks back I started a new poll to see whether expectations had shifted since the first poll. I have put up a third and final poll for these last few weeks that ends September 1st (so don't wait too long).

This is the result of the second poll:

According to my calculations the average is 4.28 million km2, which is slightly up from the 4.20 million km2 from the last poll. This is probably too low, considering the recent slowdown in extent decrease. But it's still possible.

What isn't possible, is that the minimum extent will be over 5.5 million km2, as IJIS extent currently stands at 5.34 million km2. So some people were wrong, three to be precise. One of them was from downtown Los Angeles, the other one lives real close to Deception Bay, and the third one lives close to Stepaside, which I find pretty funny:

I'm just teasing a bit. There's nothing wrong with being wrong. In fact it's very healthy. I'm wrong at least once a day, or so my wife tells me.

To balance things out a bit I'm showing an area with a high concentration of people who think/thought the IJIS minimum extent will go below 3.5 million km2. Isn't that area part of what they call Tornado Alley? Are people seeing some kind of correlation between sea ice extent and tornado activity?