"We got up to 44.7C. Fried the leaves on the rhubarb plants I have growing into crumbling pieces" Instant rhubarb crumble. Yet more evidence that global warming is beneficial.

The WUWT post seems remarkable to me. It includes: 1) A tacit admission that the 'snow is a thing of the past' article is cherry picked ("this most often quoted prediction about snow") 2) A graph which shows the dramatic reduction in snow cover during spring and summer 3) The perfectly reasonable explanation for the one bit of evidence that might superficially seem to contradict the observed warming Of course the comments section reliably ignores all this. So have we reached the point where Anthony Watts could post literally anything, perhaps copy and paste something from James Hansen, and still it would reinforce his audience's preconceptions?

I've updated my 3D graph showing change in IJIS extent since 2002. This doesn't show as much information as SekeRob's compound bar charts, but I think the visual impact is quite striking. Using major units of 750 000km^2 rather than 1 million or 0.5 million seems to produce the best balance. I tried playing around with the formatting to see if it looked any clearer: version 1; version 2 (black is obviously much cooler). Not sure they add much. I also made a version showing the 1979 to 2012 area data.

... and an even stripier version! (OK, enough now....)

Hi Bfraser - constructive criticism is more than welcome, and I agree they are not easy to visualise. Thinking of the colours as showing horizontal planes helps, I don't think there's any way of superimposing these planes though. The full-year graph works better I think when rotated.

Same graph from a different perspective and another graph showing the whole year.

I seem to remember seeing something like this before, but can't find a current one so I've been playing around with graphs of my own and have made a 3D graph showing similar info to Seke Rob's JAXA step-graph, but only since 2003 and only for first 180 odd days of the year: Sea ice Extent 3D graph

Strange. I wonder if there's a new algorithm which combines two days of data in the final data point - maybe this gives some indication of what tomorrow's value will be? Also I seem to remember IJIS updating early morning European time last year, now a much more civilised mid-morning. Have they moved?

I saw this earlier today and thought everyone had been playing without me. Looks like for a change I was one of the first to know, not the last. What a way to start again as well - nearly a double century break.

I see there is still if anything a slight negative correlation between sea ice area at the end of April and the eventual minimum in the summer over the last decade. By the end of May there is a marginally positive correlation, but nothing significant. It's not until the end of June that there starts to be any sort of significant correlation I think. Is there a different single measure to look at for the moment that would give a better indication of the final outcome?

(BTW the data is also linked from graph page) Doh! Was that there before? I'm guessing so. I probably could have worked the other bits out myself too. Well, at least I now know where to get my daily ice-fix again.

crandles, thanks for the data link - the graphs I could find ;-) What's the difference between the third and fourth column? I thought at first they were area and extent but sometimes one is greater and at other times the other. Is that possible? Arcticicelost, thanks for the pointer - I had wondered what had happened.

I've not being paying much attention recently but as the melt season gets underway in earnest can I just ask which data set, in the lamented abscence of IJIS, we should be referring to and where a quick link to it is? Thanks.

Thanks for all the advice. I've got this far so might as well see if I can share what I've done....

Kevin, thanks for pointing to photobucket - well I say thanks... but it's not your fault that any of this online sharing stuff loses all utility under my fingertips. Fortunately my dodgy connection gave me an excuse to stop trying to make sense of it, I may try again later. As an aside, can anyone tell me the easiest way to save an Excel graph as an image on the new Excel? Chris, I certainly agree with you that Once detrended the correlation between max and min is negligible but I was quite surprised at how little correlation there was beyond the trend.

OK, I've done some almost certainly horrible, amateurish and entirely invalid detrending of the maxima and minima from 1972 and created scatter diagrams in Excel to show any correlation. Removing a linear trend I get an R squared value of 0.1365, removing a quadratic trend I get R squared of 0.011. (Without any detrending I get R squared as 0.6519.) Do these values seem reasonable and do they show anything interesting? Seems to me there is very little correlation between the size of a maximum and the subsequent minimum. Did everyone already know that?

It was the IJIS data I used for the last 8 years, it's more the having it available online side of things I was looking for. However if I do try and do some real work for myself could anyone more statistically savy than me (i.e. most of you, I suspect) enlighten me about any issues with finding correlation in detrended values? Even without removing the trend there is no correlation between maxima and minima in the last 8 years. Presumably for longer periods the trend in the data would dominate though, so removing the trend would make sense, wouldn't it?

The 'dramtic' recovery in Arctic sea ice seems to be getting a lot of traction at the moment. I've just done a brief scatter diagram for myself of maxima and subsequent minima over the last 8 years, which shows almost no correlation. Does anyone know of a more comprehensive scatter diagram online anywhere that I can point people to?

I've been checking the PSC Arctic Sea Ice Volume Anomaly every few days but it hasn't been updated for a month and a half now. I know they are not the most reliable at updating but does this seem unusual? It gives a whole new meaning to the word "continuously". http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/IceVolume.php Do we know what's happening with volume at the moment?

Thanks Neven. Would the transport of ice through the Fram Strait not be likely to increase the extent at this time of year as it's unlikely to melt, I assume, but the open water behind it will freeze? So extent might look quite healthy, until....

Neven, I'm a bit out of touch here - please could you briefly explain what impact the AD is likely to have during the winter months? I'm sure this has already been discussed in depth but, well... I'm lazy.

Using the average melt up to the minimum (in brackets after the difference from 2010, near the top of the post) is not so useful as previous months - 2008 in particular, if melt on 9th had been about 10000 less or melt on 17th 10000 more the average would have been about 18000 rather than 38000. Makes the current melt look even more exceptional.