Visit every day and rarely comment. I find it bothersome when we begin to question the methods and accuracy of measurement when the melt season does not go as expected.
...I'll take that as a "no" from you then
FYI I don't have, and haven't had, any expectations for this season or any other. I don't post often but when I do, it's usually to caution that the only thing we should
ever expect in this game is the unexpected.
I don't see it as unscientific to question whether a particular interpretation of a particular measurement is valid in the context of a particular set of heretofore unusual circumstances. Quite the contrary - what I'm trying to do is find and test a plausible explanation for an observation that I don't understand. What else would you have me do?
I can think of any number of things that might cause trouble for an algorithm which interprets at most five or six numbers as 40,000 square feet of "ice" or "water", or as something in-between, when confronted with a set of surface conditions different from any that were prevalent, or even likely, when the method was originally validated.
...For example the action of waves changing the incident angle of the low sun against flat, but thin and broken-up ice, across a large area, might change its average reflectivity and cause the proportion of ice vs. water in each pixel to be miscalculated.
...Or very low concentration ice which is being moved around very quickly at the periphery might be counted more than once, or might count as a pixel of area when it is actually 25% open water.
Does a 100x100 array containing a 50/50 mix of ice and open water count the same if all of the ice is in a single 5000 pixel floe vs if it is in 20,000 five-thousand sq. foot chunks? Is the answer to that question still the same if there is a constant 20-knot wind causing 30 mm surface wavelets across the open water spaces in the one case, vs. a four-foot swell in the other? - I don't know. Do you?
I'm not saying that the numbers are wrong. What I
am saying that it's worth investigating the possibility that they might present a misleading picture given the right combination of circumstances.