"In Australia, it used to mean drought and heat, but the last 16 months there seem to have proved that old pattern may no longer be in effect." We won't really know until the next substantial El Nino. I, for one, am not looking forward to it. (I've currently got our house battened down in anticipation of 5 days straight of +40C temperatures. It's now noon and it's already >38 in the city centre. We won't have an overnight temperature below about 26C for the next four nights. If any of your southern Australian friends or relatives seem a bit grumpy during this week, you'll know why.)

The BOM describes it as "close to El Nino thresholds". http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/ENSO-summary.shtml

k eotw. That 'funny' red line on CT's tale of the tape graph? That's just the actual area graph showing up for the first time. No-one ever expected area to go below 3million for both lines to appear on the same display the way they do on the individual sea/basin/bay graphs. Just one more depressing little side-note to add to the collection.

He wasn't lying!! Everybody knows that the Germans, Brits, Norwegians, Canadians and Russians sent warships sailing throughout the Arctic constantly during WW2. History books don't lie. Oh, wait. They didn't.

Sorry - omitted SST from first sentence.

If you compare the temperature map with the anomaly map you'll see that the "always zero in the past" is probably the main reason for the anomaly. Note there's now a little area next to the N pole hole on the temp map that doesn't show up at all on the anomaly map. So, obviously, there's an area of open-ish water near the pole completely surrounded by ice. And that's not going to show up at all on the anomaly map unless it opens up far enough to absorb heat enough to raise its temp above zero.

Winter? With that belt of super warm water slicing across from Russia to Alaska it'll need more than a frosty morning to get things going.

"Such temperatures are unlikely in the Central Arctic." Surely the issue when it gets to that point will not just be air temperature, water temperature will be what delivers the knockout punch. The air needs only to be not so cold as to override the warmth from the water.

H3ll's teeth! Just did the usual CT comparisons. 14th June, 2010,11,12. http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=06&fd=14&fy=2010&sm=06&sd=14&sy=2012 and http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=06&fd=14&fy=2011&sm=06&sd=14&sy=2012 Does anyone have the numbers readily available for <60% concentration daily? This really looks like someone used _real_ butter icing on a cake under the studio lights. It's just thinning, slipping and sliding away.

"if the IPCC was as wrong about SLR as they were about loss of sea ice." The IPCC isn't 'wrong' about SLR. They openly stated they didn't have data or models adequate to do the job properly - so they excluded _any_ quantity for icesheet contribution. The next IPCC report will have some icesheet numbers in, probably with bigger than desirable error bars. But I doubt the numbers will be pretty.

John Christensen "...caused not by ice being transported there at a normal rate, but that this is currently happening at an unusually high rate?" Whether it's normal or higher movement is secondary. The problem is that there's no ice in those regions so the ice is spreading and becoming thinner in both the originating and the receiving areas. If the ice were moving and was met by "average" ice in those regions it would be thickening by piling up _and_ that resistance would also slow the movement marginally and thereby allow some thickening, or at least retention, in the feeder regions while the sun is still low and the air is still cold.

Phil263. Yes, it's interesting but I'm a bit reluctant to go any further than that. The thing that strikes me, and I am totally and entirely lacking the competence to look into it further myself, is the ocean heat transport anomalies. They seem to stay with the current 4 to 7 wm2 figures, and see what happens when their imposed perturbation of the Arctic system itself responds to it. They seem not to have used any modelling about expected changes in the oceans. So if the oceans feeding into the Arctic heat further? Which is what I at least am expecting, does their whole schema collapse or will someone else rework it on revised numbers? Or is my incompetence leading me astray here.

I don't know the details of how the various models do and don't include some features. But it struck me that they didn't explicitly mention warm ocean currents. So either I'm missing something because I don't know what is/n't included in the modelling, or they're excluding or overlooking what appears to me to be the big invisible effect on ice volume. The warmer oceans thinning, or at least inhibiting thickening, of the surface ice from below. Someone? Anyone?

Some beliefs are easily maintained. If you check out the progress of old ice on these two items http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2011/07/new-paper-from-maslanik-et-al.html , http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111012/full/478172a/box/4.html you'll see what I mean. I only had to squint a lot while standing on my head looking through the bottom of a beer bottle and I could see the prediction is spot on. Simple really.

On the edges, that is. I read it as being all of the late growth in extent. I suppose that is pretty well the edges, but a couple of areas filled in a bit more that look to be pretty vulnerable if he's right about all of it.

Despite keeping a regular eye on it, I didn't save any screenshots of SST anomalies from weeks ago. But if you go to the usual http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/satellite/index.uk.php you can have a look at anomalies on the 30 days ago selection, then 20 days. Then let the animation run from 30 days back, you can see just how much warmish water was running around. (And out of the corner of your eye you'll notice that around the south of Greenland and across Nares to Hudson Straits there's some deep, deep bluey purple below average anomalies.)

philiponfire, I'd say that despite their similarities, their geographical differences trump those topographical similarities. If you keep an eye on the SST anomalies, it has looked suspiciously as though the Gulf Stream has delivered a whole heap of warm water to that western area of the Arctic. I presume it's the Gulf Stream or some associated ocean feature, because all through the last few weeks, the anomalies have been super high around Kara and normal or below around the Hudson Strait. I suppose the geographical difference should come into play there also. Hudson Bay has the Strait on one side and the Archipelago above. It'd take a seriously hardworking warm water current from any direction to get past (through, under, whatever) all that midwinter ice and still be able to weaken or melt significant areas of the Bay itself.

traditional diet? I recall watching a doco about Iceland. They have a whale hunting concession. And they make a big deal of eating the meat. But ...... They've had to limit the intake, especially for children and women. The load of toxic metals is too much for healthy development of foetuses and young children.

That 1979 versus 2012 display just reminds us how things really have changed. Forget Svalbard and NZ for a moment, have a look at the Baltic and Okhotsk.

Werther, that's breathtaking. I want it made into a jigsaw.

Thanks for this, Neven. I've been looking, mystified, at the SST anomaly maps for the last couple of weeks. You'd almost think someone had put up some kind of dam wall across the strait and bottled up warmer water east of Novaya Zemlya. The resulting SIA anomalies for the Kara Sea are downright strange!!?! http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.7.html (I do wish these regional graphs routinely showed 2 years the way the NH total SIA graph does.) How any 'freeze-up' could compete with increasing insolation here to come up with a 'trend' lasting more than a few days I can't imagine.

I'm a bit pessimistic. I'm also happy to be wronger than Daniel. With the added bonus of a husband leaning over my shoulder (knowing less than nothing about the topic) who's had a good look at Sekerob's multi-coloured masterpiece on the LongTerm Graphs page. We won't go into the tortured logic here. Maximum somewhere between days 65-68. And low into the bargain.

Thanks Neven. Though you should exercise your psychic powers more vigorously. I spent a fair bit of time yesterday looking through a heap of these maps and graphs. If I'd 'received the message' that you were doing the job for me, I could have saved a bit of time.

Hope all you guys have a good chrissie. And more than a day or two's break. I realise that our traditions are different from yours. I'm off out to buy the sun-ripened apricots, cherries and grapes for the Xmas table. 35C tomorrow, 30 expected for the day. (But we'll still have turkey with bread sauce and fifty kinds of roasted veg before my mum pours far-too-much brandy over the pudding before threatening the ceiling when it's lit. And it's not us oldies who stick to this despite the Oz summer. It's the 30-40 year old generation that insists on the we've-always-done-it-this-way approach.) If I use my Arctic umbrella it'll be to keep the sun off, not the rain. Ta ra!

The one and only good point I can see in all this is that the data is out - now. Which means more work and analysis can be done for inclusion, highlighting, underlining, bright red outlining and all caps presentation in the next IPCC report. It won't be an item that various countries can argue, fuss and obscure around timescales - it's now. So the message should be pretty unequivocal.