Thanks for the write up on Bering, Neven. Looking at the forecast for Nome for April, it would seem that very rarely is Nome expected to crack the melting point of fresh water. Thus, it would seem that the ice built up in and around the Norton sound will have to have the SST do the melting instead of the ambient air temp. Question that might be ideally suited for FishoutofWater would be how does the record low ice extent for the Bering play into forecasting for cities such as Nome? One would expect that since large ice sheets in the Bering would normally cause temps to remain low in the Alaskan coastal cities this time of year that this bias may be included into the models. Since the ice sheet is much smaller than normal would the modeling for 4 weeks out be significantly adversely affected? Meanwhile, while the Bering is an appropriate focal point, the action is about to heat up in the Okhotsk. Significant ice extent drops (more than 300k km squared) are about to commence in the next 3 weeks given the forecast, the current ice extent and the historical norm for this time of year.

Thanks for the dialogue all but I do have a question regarding what NSIDC came out with yesterday. In their January update they said that "Sea ice in the Arctic and the Antarctic set record low extents every day in December". https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ However, they note further below that December 2010 had a lower average extent than December 2016 despite December 2016 setting the record low every single day. They go on to explain that the reason is how their algorithm adjusts for quickly advancing or retreating ice. However, I find that answer perplexing and I was hoping that the brain trust here could it explain it to me in a way that makes more sense. Any takers?

Back to the sea ice... It would seem that in the last 4 weeks we have had quite significant sea ice extent growth in the Arctic and we have almost caught up with 2012 levels. However, according to my amateurish analysis I believe that the sea ice growth rate is going to be significantly lower in the upcoming weeks. Based on NSIDC, the likely sources for ice growth is in the Bering, Chukchi, Kara and Barents. However, the SST anomalies would seem to preclude much of a possibility of rapid sea ice growth. In addition, when comparing NSIDC outputs vs a "visual" inspection of the sea ice through arctic.io it would seem that ice is fairly sparse in the Bering and Kara Seas and minimally climbs over the 15% threshold. So while NSIDC shows much of the Bering or Kara covered, it is quite thin and sparse. So the growth in those areas are already accounted for in NSIDC figures. For those reasons, I would expect the slope of the ice extent plot to decrease in the near future. Thoughts? Contrary pieces of evidence?

Hey AnotherJourney, You wrote: "Denialists were right, for all intensive purposes, in mocking the IPCC REPORTS-" I know if I were in your shoes I would want somebody to correct me if I were using a common phrase incorrectly. Anyway, the phrase is actually for all intents and purposes. Cheers!

Hey Rob, The reason that I thought we would see some 200+k freeze days was that eyeballing JAXA it appears that we just passed 6M km2 and we are likely to follow the same slope as 2012, 2011 and 2007 which means we are going to be hitting 8M km2 in early November. So roughly 2M km2 in roughly 10 days gives me the impression that there will be some 200_ kms2 days in the near future. The other thing I would say is that in my limited time trying to understand arctic sea ice, I have observed some reversion to the mean over time. A decent example of that was that September saw a quick refreeze and the crowd over at WUWT went crazy. While it wasn't public I did expect to see a slow down after that and lo and behold we saw a slow down in the refreezing (and silence from WUWT). Since we slowed down quite a bit for a time there I would expect us to have a pretty decent spurt in the next few weeks. Anyway, I'm an amateur and a relative newbie and so I readily admit I could be wrong but that is what I see upcoming. Oh, and viddaloo, I'm definitely on the side that believes in science and so I tend not to put my fellow accepters in the alarmist camp. Not a particular fan of using the yearly average ice extent graphs but it is a good data point. I just think emphasizing it isn't my cup of tea. But thanks for all your input here as well.

Hey Rob, you said: "It really does not want to freeze up there in the high North, does it ?" Well, yes, it's been an interesting year but it is likely that in the next 10 days or so we will see 200+ km2 per day of ice growth as we go from 6 to 8 million km2 of extent. Of course, the result of this "slow" refreeze will be that viddaloo's graph will continue the plunge and won't start flattening out for nearly 4 more weeks. Anyway, I'll go back to lurking but I do appreciate all the commenters here as you have taught me a lot.

Check out the pretty intense ice loss where the Beaufort meets the CAA. A few days ago there was fairly solid ice coverage then a day of clouds and then the next day (July 3) satellite picture at arctic.io explorer shows an amazing wide swath of open water. I would expect a further serious loss of ice in the coming week as temperatures are expected to soar in the near future in this region.

Test, test, test. Please disregard if this actually posts. Lurker here and I've had a problem posting here previously and so just testing to see if I can post here. Appreciate the knowledge base here and while I don't have much to contribute would love to ask questions to be able to better my understanding because I believe this to be fairly important and more people should understand what is going on in the arctic. (Really awesome run on sentence there but I'm good with that)