So, with the Arctic 15% and 30% extents and areas being close to "normal," being the 30 year mean, but thickness being so extremely low, isn't this a precursor to a potentially enormous melt season? At first glance, it might look like a "rebound" year for volume, like 2008, but I don't think that makes much sense. Based on the data, it seems the volume has degraded so much that heat loss through the ice is allowing re-freezing to occur along the outer edges during March and April, but since this is pathetically thin ice with a very high surface to volume ratio, it should melt extremely fast. Am I missing anything else?

Incredible. I've never seen satellite pictures of this quality. I was not aware the satellites had that good of resolution. This is amazing. You can even see dune-like structures on top of the larger ice sheets.

Has anyone else noticed that the images for daily arctic sea ice maps for 2012 are not on exactly the same scale as previous years? http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh If you look very closely at 12, 3, 9, 6 and use a paper or something as a gauge, you see the Earth takes up more of the box, even though the box is the same size. Is the satellite being de-orbitted or something? How might this effect calculations of Sea Ice Area, since this should change the real area corresponding to each pixel of the photos? This is a bit annoying and frustrating, because it makes it difficult to "read" the changes by eye-balling it. I noticed this a few weeks ago, but didn't complain to anyone. Hasn't anyone else noticed this? I mean, changing the scale from one year to another is sort of not good idea for interpretation of data...

I don't know if you guys know about this yet, but here's a link to physorg about the record breaking hot 12 month period in the U.S., and the record breaking March in the U.S. http://phys.org/news/2012-04-record-breaking-hot-year.html As usual, somebody still finds an excuse to deny this. I used to be a skeptic, this has gotten out of hand, especially after the past 3 years.

Always bothered me that Piomas didn't seem to correlate very well to changes in area. However, assuming the models have remained the same throughout the all the data, then it should still be very good for identifying trends, it just may be over estimating or under estimating the exact values at some parts of the year. I noticed on the volume / area chart that just eye-balling it, would take another 7 years for the annual maximum average thickness to get below the 2005 minimum average thickness. This would be a complete bifurcation in 14 years. This corresponds nicely to the Barrow, Alaska CO2 curve, which has a complete bifurcation, i.e. annual minimum exceeding the old annual maximum, every 12 to 14 years. so while it's not literally correct, assuming PIOMAS is at least properly identifying the annual trend, it makes perfect sense given other GW related data.