Saturday, May 26, 2012

Arctic Sea Ice - JAXA is back!



JAXA Arctic Sea Ice Extent is back, with a new satellite and a new style. In previous years I have kept a table and plots of the latest figures here. The page is supposed to be updated automatically daily at about 2pm Japan time. In the past JAXA updating has been irregular, and I've resorted to manual updating, which can be irregular at this end. We'll see how it goes this year.

I haven't yet adopted JAXA's new style, with just the current, past extreme years, and some decade averages. I'm still using the old style with the last ten years plotted and tabulated individually. This may change.

My impression so far is that the new data is jumpier than the old. 2012 is a mid-range year so far, but there was a huge melt yesterday. The previous day gained ice, so it may be just noisier.

The link to the data page is top right under pages, and also resources.

3 comments:

  1. Nick, the last data point is useless, as it is heavily revised upwards the next day. At least, it has been that way since the data came back online.

    More good news: AMSR-2 has been launched successfully.

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    Replies
    1. Neven
      Yes, I see this value has come back from 165,000 to 67,000 (rounded). I hope they can get that more stable, otherwise it might be best to just lag a day behind in reporting.

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    2. That is great news, Neven.

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