NSIDC 2014 Arctic SIE September minimum: June poll

[GabrielRobeys]

Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on mankind, and I too believe that cigarettes manufactured by e cigarettes manufacturer are not addictive.

That said, the minimum will be 3.7 this year and 0.6 next year.

Well I don't agree with you about cigarettes..Smoking must be banned as it is good for nothing..

[Peter Ellis]

In the recent historical record, 2013 seems closest to 2009, ergo my "naive" expectation is that 2014 will be similar to 2010.  There's a lot more thicker ice this year than recently, most of which has been exported into the Beaufort and will act as a "buffer" for the main pack. Yes, synoptics may well be favourable for melt - as they were in 2010. In that case I'd expect to see the same kind of volume crash and loss/thinning of MYI that happened in 2010, but that won't show up in the area/extent data until 2015 or 2016.

TLDR version: 2010 replay, final figures between 4.75 and 5.

As a follow-up comment - look at the re-freeze curves for 2009/10 and 2013/14.  They're practically identical up to the end of February.  2010 put on more in March and April than 2014 did, but that's thin fringey stuff that's now mostly gone, and so we're back to similar levels of overall coverage.  Proportion and location of MYI is quite similar from 2010 to 2014 (if anything there's more in 2014).  2010 had hideous synoptics for early melt and still didn't show a catastrophic area loss - all the extra heat went into burning back the volume of MYI in the Beaufort.  Look for the same this year.

Quoting these because I think I wasn't far off.  The weather was overall somewhat more favourable for melt than 2013, but not as much as many people expected.  My take-home lesson is that high pressure is not sufficient for melt, you need the strong adjacent lows around the basin to set up meridonal wind flow across the ice.

As I predicted, the MYI in the Beaufort and ESS held out well and kept extent high, but has got quite badly hammered in the process.  Watch for a substantial drop next year, to ~2007/2011 levels, but no new record yet unless it's perfect melt weather with a strong dipole set up early bringing warm winds off the land.  Next record could be 2016 or 2017 depending how things go next year.

[deep octopus]

Did a quick analysis looking back to 2000. From August 25th of each year (from 2000 to 2013) through the rest of the year, the average melting paths for each of those years indicate that a minimum of about 5.04 million km² will be achieved this year. Take out the lowest melt (2006) and the highest melt (2010) for this same period, recalculate the melt average, and the results do not change in any meaningful way (still rounded to 5.04 million km², actually.)

On this basis, between 2009 and 2013, the "rankings" would be a wash; the three years would basically tie.

I also think it's pretty reasonable to expect next year to be a meaningful downward step, in the 2007/2011 range. 2013 was cool; 2014 was fairly cool, albeit warmer than 2013, yet had incredibly lazy wind action. I think 2015 could break the stagnation.

[Anne]

It's hard to escape the suspicion that the June predictions tell us more about psychology than ice. Not that I can produce any evidence beyond the results of the poll and the reasons given.