Watts Up With That?

9-7-2009

EXCERPT:

Steve McIntyre on Climate Audit brings our attention to an interesting sea ice extent forecasting “contest” conducted by the Study of Environmental ARctic CHange (SEARCH). With the end of the Arctic melt season likely just a few days away, it appears that the experts have a lack of forecasting skill for the subject they are experts in.

SEARCH writes:

We received 13 responses for the September Outlook based on July data (Figure 1). Estimates for September sea ice extent are in a narrow range (4.2 to 5.0 million square kilometers), as were the Outlooks based on May and June data. As the submitted uncertainty standard deviations are about 0.4 million square kilometers, most of these Outlook expected value estimates overlap. All sea ice extent estimates for September 2009 are much lower than the past climatological extent of 6.7 million square kilometers.

Here’s the SEARCH graph (Figure1 PDF available here) showing forecasts from several well known Arctic experts and organizations. I’ve added the most recent available data, the September 6th ice extent from IARC-JAXA of 5,345,156 square kilometers in magenta for a current reference.

LINK

CLIMATE AUDIT

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