I overlaid unsmoothed DMI on “one day behind and smoothed” NSIDC. You can see that NSIDC is about to turn up and possibly hit the “normal” line.
No doubt they will rush to press to tell the world about this!
Death Spiral Collapses – Goddard/Watts Not So Breathtakingly Ignorant After All – By Mark Serreze
Now that would be fun. But spring ice cover isn’t much correlated to September minimum ice cover, is it? So we don’t really know what this year’s minimum will look like.
But if there is anything to the idea of sea ice albedo feedback, of course current ice cover is much more important – we’re now 64 days from northern solstice, while last year’s sea ice minimum happened 81 days after northern solstice, i.e. at a time with much shorter days and lower sun than now! The next approximately 4 months are the 4 months with the most sun in the Arctic – so those are the months that count the most wrt. ice albedo. The low ice cover in September – early November probably constitutes a negative feedback, because the ocean will lose more heat to the air when it’s not covered by protective ice.
The slow start to the melt season will most certainly affect the summer minimum, particularly in the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas.
We have to wait to see what PIOMAS says the ice levels should be. Then maybe there will be a headline that the MSM will run with!
Remember, there is a built in bias error to the graph because the “average” uses only the 1979 to 2000 data. An honest average of the data set would include all the data, 1979 to 2011, and the “average” level would be somewhat lower than the heavy gray line plotted here.
It looks like the short term change in total solar irradiance has it going down from what it has been over the last few days as the ice nears the average line. The “daily sunspot number” is up from that of the last few days. High sunspot number correlates long term with higher TSI but short term with lower TSI. I expect this will make the ice line cross the average line at an accelerating rate! There is also a little bit less reflected light from the moon as it is new on the 21st.
… are you seriously claiming that moonlight contributes to Arctic ice melt?
The sun is about 400,000 times brighter than the full moon. I don’t think 3mW/m² is gonna do much to the ice.