Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Record low sea ice minimum in Antarctica

I've been tracking the Antarctic Sea Ice. It has been very low since about October, and a new record looked likely. Today I saw in our local paper that the minimum has been announced. And indeed, it was lowest by a considerable margin. The Moyhu radial plot showed it thus:



The NSIDC numbers do show that there is still melting, but if so, it won't last much longer. The Arctic seems to be at record low levels again also, which may be significant for this year's minimum.



6 comments:

  1. Related - BOM's new outlook has the probability of a 2017 El Niño at 50%.

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    Replies
    1. And yet we have no consensus physical model for ENSO, so whatever some agency says is just a SWAG.

      Not that we aren't trying hard to figure this out. What happens if we take a plausible model and backcast it to as early as 1650, comparing to ENSO coral proxy data:
      https://forum.azimuthproject.org/discussion/comment/15743/#Comment_15743

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    2. And MEI is slowly but surely on the Niño road:

      https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/table.html

      Delete
  2. According to the Charctic interactive sea ice graph, Antarctic sea ice has been record low since Feb 13, below the the previous record from 1997, and is still declining.
    Over at Karsten Haustein's the antarctic 7 day forecast is slightly warmer than the 7 day hindcast (anomaly-wise).

    Also, the global value for Feb is in at KH, up 0.10 C from Jan.

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    Replies
    1. Up 0.10C. Here (NCEP/NCAR) with one day to go, it is up 0.09C.

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  3. Yes Olof, and the extent statistics I processed in january out of colorado.edu isn't better:

    http://fs5.directupload.net/images/170209/pd3y4ua8.jpg

    Skeptics proudly tell you "When Arctic is up, Antarctic is down and vice versa".

    Hmmmh.


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