There's still ice there cuz it hasn't all melted.
Here's the inside scoop on a new paper.
Julienne Stroeve and I have a paper recently accepted for Polar Geography, which could hit the street later this fall. The paper, with catchy title "400 Predictions," includes a comparison between median SIPN Sea Ice Outlook predictions over 2008-2015, and three naive models: linear extrapolation, quadratic extrapolation, and "persistence" (guessing that this year will be same as last). The median SIO predictions outperform all three naive methods, although sometimes not by huge amounts.
This and other analyses in the new paper confirm what we concluded a few years before: "Sea prediction has easy and difficult years." For an un-paywalled & public-friendly version of the argument, including unique additional data from a contest to win ice cream, see:
academia.edu
An abstract for our more formal Geophysical Research Letters paper is here:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
What all three papers report is that years where September ice extent is near its long-term downward trend (climate), many different prediction methods look good. Years with abrupt excursions above or below that trend (weather), most prediction methods look bad.
And, looking good (or bad) in one particular year does not necessarily forecast how well your method will perform in the next.
Posted by: L. Hamilton | September 01, 2016 at 16:07
Our forthcoming paper concludes:
Thinning ice that is sensitive to summer weather, complicating prediction, reflects our transitional era between a past Arctic cool enough to retain much thick, resistant multiyear ice; and a warmed future Arctic where little ice remains at summer’s end.
The 2016 season, which was not part of our analysis, seems to show that dramatically.
neven1.typepad.com |
