Little point in getting area from PIOMAS because PIOMAS assimilate sea ice concentration you may as well use a real satellite product. EDIT - I have done it for the open water formation efficiency work I did a while back - but it was all needed in terms of PIOMAS. Combining PIOMAS and extent/area has some weird effects.
Thanks Chris. In fact I realised that my comment about drift was ambiguous. I was not referring to ice drift but to the top post about date of max. ie drift in dates not in the ice itself.
While I realise that PIOMAS takes real data input, my thinking was this :
check how well PIOMAS finalises area with relation to min/max dates: run the same processing I did on area/extent on PIOMAS output and compare.
If results are close, it would suggest we are comparing apples to apples. Then proceed to look at PIOMAS volume min/max dates by similar methods.
See whether PIOMAS derived melting/freezing seasons tells us anything new or different from ice area/extent estimations of melting season.
My guess is that it will show notable differences, so when we see them we can start assessing what they may tell us about the processes driving ice.
Your comment about funny things happening may mean the two are not compatible. so that will rather kill the idea but it would be worth checking to see.