Rubikscube,
You cannot directly compare PIOMAS volume and any metric of area/extent to get an accurate thickness calclation, this is particularly the case in summer.
Crandles has linked to the source of my regional breakdowns which include thickness.
http://dosbat.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/regional-piomas-volume-data.htmlTake September 2014. PIOMAS volume for the ESS was 74.9km^3. Thickness was 0.34m, or 0.00034km. So the area was 0.22M km^2, that's a monthly average. Cryosphere Today (CT Area) suggests that area was rather lower than that. (between 0.1 and 0.2M km^2)
Looking at CT Area and PIOMAS shows that the two are not directly comparable.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=01&fy=2014&sm=09&sd=30&sy=2014My plot of PIOMAS thickness attached.
Note that when calculating thickness I follow the convention of Dr Zhang, that gridded thickness under 15cm is discounted. So that removes a lot of the thinnest ice in the attched plot. However the areas are not the same and the only way to calculate thickness is to use raw gridded data.
Crandles,
There is no error in 1990, in that year PIOMAS shows a largescale retreat from the Siberian coast causing volume to plummet, compare the volume in May (max volume) to other years.
Jai Mitchell,
But there is still a good relationship (R2 ~ 0.5) between either cumulative open water over the summer or end of summer open water (31 August) and the near surface temperature over the Arctic Ocean in October. In other words, the heat gained in the summer is being vented to the atmosphere. Radiation is actually a minor player, by far the greatest contributors are sensible and latent heat fluxes (Tietsche et al fig 3), furthermore your reference states that ice is a good emitter of IR. And as I argue in this blog post heat flux through the ice has increased suggesting a role in winter warming after ice has formed.
http://dosbat.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/winter-warming-and-sea-ice-thinning.htmlSo the impact on the conclusions of Tietsche et al are minimal.
PS Viddaloo - posted while I was writing the above. In the end the ice/ocean system will be the ultimate authority on what will happen, all we can do is try to educate our guesses.
The PC was fixed a day ago. As I was doing that, the TV's fault, which had for much of the summer corrected on application of a good slap, became permanent. So I had every module of the TV removed and spread across the floor last night, after which I reassembled.
Slapping appliances and getting them working has a jokey terminology in engineering, it's called
perussive maintenance. It almost always indicates poor internal connectors and the cure is a total dismantle and reassembly. There's a tip that might save you rather a lot of money in the future (but unplug the item first!).