Arctic sea ice melt appears to have turned the corner for 2009

Arctic sea ice melt appears to have turned the corner for 2009

http://wattsupwiththat.com/

It appears Arctic sea ice has bottomed out and is now on the growth rebound. The NANSEN Arctic ROOS website shows that in terms of area, see ice appears to have turned the corner as of Sept 13th data. While that is just one data point, it turned the corner about this time last year, and the year before.

NANSEN Sea Ice Area - click for larger image

More data and graphs from NANSEN Arctic ROOS are available here.

Many WUWT readers have been watching JAXA's sea ice extent graph closely, so have I. Typically JAXA updates the graph twice a day; once around the start of their business day (in Japan), and then a second update that contains the corrected data (after going through processing and QC) a few hours later. Tonight (9/14) about 11:30PM PST JAXA updated their Sept 14th AMSRE data with this new number:

5,269,531 km²

That is a gain of almost 20,000 km² from the Sept 13th value of  5, 249, 844 km² which may very well turn out to be the minimum extent for 2009.  Here is the Sept 14th chart and the data from JAXA:

JAXA AMSRE Arctic Sea Ice Extent Sept 14, 2009 - click for larger image

Source: IARC-JAXA Sea Ice page

Here is the tabular Arctic Sea Ice Extent data for September 2009 with the minimum highlighted in blue. A CSV data file for Excel is available here.

for 2008 the value reached minimum on September 9th, rebounded slightly, shrank again, and then turned the corner and started rebound again on September 17th.

Of course it is entirely possible nature has other plans, but the appearance of a change in direction is there and the time is about right historically. If this holds it will put 2009 542,031 km² above 2008's Sept 9th low extent, making it the third lowest extent in the AMSRE data set and the second year of increasing ice extent since the historic low in 2007 of  4,267,656 km²

The signs are right, and Nature will let us know in the next few days if we have indeed turned the corner and will be headed upwards.

UPDATE: Commenter Dave points out that the DMI extent graph, shown below, does a better job of illustrating the uptick.

click for a larger image Source: Danish Meteorological Institute