In related news, here's an NSDIC press release about a new paper from Julienne Stroeve, Larry Hamilton et. al.
Seasonal Arctic summer ice extent still hard to forecastShort term predictions are achievable, but challenges remain in predicting anomalous years, and there is a need for better data for initialization of forecast models,” Stroeve said. “Of course there is always the issue that we cannot predict the weather, and summer weather patterns remain important."
There's a link to a paywall free copy of
the paper, which says (amongst other things) that:
In some years, the Sea Ice Outlook (SIO) ensembles accurately predict the September mean extent, while in other years the observed extent falls outside the range of any prediction. This is true regardless of the general method used for prediction, and whether or not we exclude contributions classified as general public. The predictions tend to be poor when the sea ice departs from the long-term trend. Indeed, the mean squared error (MSE) of SIO predictions is only slightly better than a series of linear-trend predictions, each calculated from data up to but not including the target year.
