most of the cars on this road will survive longer than the remaining arctic sea ice.

Wayne-- i remember that well. I was working outside at the time in eastern north america. i remember it being brutally cold that december. i also remember those days in that the temperatures near greenland were above freezing. with no sunlight. if we our viewpoint is right, and we can predict some of the effects of low ice area etc....that gives our point of view a huge advantage. because everyone says you can't predict the weather. esp if events that were pseudo random in the previous contemporary times now have a new normal. i wish i knew more about these topics.

i wonder if somehow a vector analysis of the CICE speed and drift could be done to confirm the Neven/Wayne et al hypothesis that quasi stationary lows are a statistically significant feature. for the record i absolutely buy the explanation provided, but on wunderground, i find Waynes observation that most weather minded people don't explore the causes of the blocking high to be present to be absolutely prescient. if a pattern clearly exists, it could offer a quantitative and predictive result. those are somewhat harder to discredit. im not very apt at being able to do these things, but its just my thoughts as a yeoman.

this storm might be the mother of all black swans. the sad thing is, it shouldn't have been unexpected. is it possible for the entire arctic basin to melt out this season? if such a large area of the thermocline was disturbed, how long could it take until the system restores itself?

i posted about this storm at wunderground a few days ago. for as excited as the folks at wunderground get at a 980 mb hurricane, they didn't comment very much on this storm. i can't say too many bad things about wunderground, its a great blog and how i got turned into this site back in Feb. i believe there was a post Nevin made about how the lack of sea ice in Kara/Barents was an ominous sign for the upcoming year. oh the things I have learned since then.

to the blog: I have been lurking here for about 5 months now, but since my university days i have always been interested in climate change, and believe we are witnessing some truly spectacular changes. changes which will imo change the globes climate. could a complete melt out change the hadley model? rambling aside, i am somewhat of a yeoman in the field. more to the point, this is not my field of expertise. does anyone have any insight/speculation as to why the arctic dipole forms?