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Lord Soth

It is interesting that the NSIDC mention that the melt may slow due to encountering second, third and older ice, which I have mention in previous posts.

I disagree about weather conditions will determine if we will mirror 2007 with a record ice melt or return to the 2006 curve. There was a lot more thicker ice in 2006, so I believe that we will see 2007 overtake 2010 for a few weeks, but 2010 taking the lead again in August.

Now the daily ice loss on a daily basis has been very interesting. One day we get a hair breath from a 100,000 sq km loss, the next day we get 34,000 sq km loss. There has been a large amount of variability in daily ice loss since the 30th, too much for normal variation.

Theories on why we are getting such wild fluctuations are welcome.

Gneiss

"Theories on why we are getting such wild fluctuations are welcome."

Could they be an artifact of cloud cover? Or a real effect from winds? Just guessing.

Does anyone here know what's up with PIOMAS -- is it broken? The website started out with frequent updates, but now they are rare (last one June 18).

Neven

Theories on why we are getting such wild fluctuations are welcome.

Melt ponds? CT has been showing some of those yellow-orange swathes again in the past few days.

One other (small) thing is that the ice bridge in Melville Sound is slowly falling apart, but this counter-intuitively seems to lead to sea ice area gain in the Canadian Archipelago.

Neven

Gneiss, I don't know of this has something to do with it but over on WUWT I read this by Charles Wilson:

But since May there hasn’t been any new Laser Data – - – from the central Basin.
IceBridge Airplanes aren’t flying over the Sea Ice anymore.
SO – - Piomas is like a cripple — albeit there are more ship measurements now, but they are FAR FROM THE CENTER.

Gas Glo

Gniss, I assume you read the text which says they changed the frequency of updates from a few days to "generated at approximately two-weekly intervals". Yes it is more than two weeks since 18th June, but not greatly more.

Thomas Woodruff

FWIW,

I think the low rate of ice retreat lately is due to the weakening of the Beaufort Gyre (BG). If one believes the CT front page map, we can see that concentration is decreasing along the Transpolar Drift. As the BG reverses we will see lots of previously consolidated areas (incl. the East Siberia Sea) become less so. This acts to increase extent. However loosening up this consolidated pack ice may very well lead to much faster melting later in the season.

Account Deleted

The latest Aqua image shows new cracks in the block of ice blocking the NWP passage - both in the McClure strait (where it has been breaking up all week) and at the top where it enters the Melville sound. http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r04c02.2010188.aqua.500m

The Terra images aren't very clear.

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