Friday, May 15, 2015

JAXA Hiatus

If you're following JAXA Arctic sea ice, they have announced an interruption for maintenance, until May 20. Pity, it is getting interesting, with 2015 now at record low levels for the day. Maybe it was going off the rails - we'll see.

NSIDC NH isn't looking so reliable either - they showed a massive re-freeze yesterday.

Update - JAXA has unhelpfully taken down all its data, and replaced it with the warning (in Japanese), which overwrote my local data. So no JAXA table data here till that is restored. Fortunately the plot is OK.
Update - Jaxa is back.

7 comments:

  1. Nick,

    I disagree with you: the NSIDC data strike me as pretty reliable. They are certainly noisier than JAXA, but, when smoothed over a few days the agreement with JAXA seems very good. I would guess that this is due to the different criteria for determining what constitutes "sea ice extent". As for the sudden rise that you observe in the NSIDC series, there has since been a precipitate fall, so overall a strong decline.

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    1. Well, Bill, I noted an odd freeze of 74,000 sq km. Next day came a melt of 200,000 sq km. I don't actually think this matters - they are just differences in an observable amount of ice, so the noise has to cancel out over time. And it may well be that JAXA does some discreet smoothing. But NSIDC is noisier.

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    2. IIRC, JAXA uses a two-day smooth.

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  2. Well, I'm continuing to stay pat with my call that this year is a good one for betting on a new minimum ice extent.

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    1. And the world is awash with quatloos that have nowhere to go :(

      Anyway, JAXA is back, and 2015 is out in front.

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    2. Nick Stokes: And the world is awash with quatloos that have nowhere to go :(


      Not good.

      I'm smelling more international currency manipulation here.

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    3. Given the lead 2015 has, if we get a significant Arctic cyclone this summer, we'll be in completely new territory when this is over.

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