Further to this post, we append new measurements for September of 2011 and 2012 to the state space for Arctic sea ice.
I apologize for the cartoonish extension, but I can't find my original data file and don't want to recreate it just now.
Since the system broke out of the area of stability in 2004, there has been a rapid decline in September ice extent (September is normally the minimum for Arctic sea ice extent)--to what some observers believe will be a new zone of stability at approximately zero.
I'm an optimistic kind of guy. It looks like we may be forming a new zone of stability right around the values of the last three years, but need to stay here for several more years to be sure. And it is of some import to note that Antarctic sea ice has been increasing over the same period, so it may be we may be observing some kind of multi-decadal oscillation in sea ice volumes between the two hemispheres. As I've said before, we need more data.
I apologize for the cartoonish extension, but I can't find my original data file and don't want to recreate it just now.
Since the system broke out of the area of stability in 2004, there has been a rapid decline in September ice extent (September is normally the minimum for Arctic sea ice extent)--to what some observers believe will be a new zone of stability at approximately zero.
I'm an optimistic kind of guy. It looks like we may be forming a new zone of stability right around the values of the last three years, but need to stay here for several more years to be sure. And it is of some import to note that Antarctic sea ice has been increasing over the same period, so it may be we may be observing some kind of multi-decadal oscillation in sea ice volumes between the two hemispheres. As I've said before, we need more data.
It looks like your axes are labelled backwards...
ReplyDeleteOne of my wishes is granted. There is a paper at http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/publications/mahoney/Mahoney_2008_JGR_20thC_RSI.pdf which extends the record back somewhat. There are caveats about the reliability of data as the Arctic was still poorly explored in the 1930s.
ReplyDelete