By Joe Bastardi and Anthony Watts (based on an email exchange)

This is interesting. NOAA is forecasting the months of August, September, and October of 2014 to have above normal Arctic Sea ice extent. As readers know, late September is typically the time of the Arctic Sea Ice minimum, and this year the NOAA forecast has it slightly above normal. Here is the NOAA forecast graph:

UPDATE: I no more than finished this post and NOAA had a new updated forecast for May 23rd, added below. (h/t Ric Werme)

For the last three May 12th forecasts, this year’s forecast for summer is the highest of them.

Source: http://origin.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/people/wwang/cfsv2fcst/imagesInd3/sieMon.gif

Notice how much higher this is than last years forecast at this time:

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/people/wwang/cfsv2_fcst_history/201305/imagesInd3/sieMon.gif

And also higher than in 2012:

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/people/wwang/cfsv2_fcst_history/201205/imagesInd3/sieMon.gif

The CFSV2 forecasting model was not on line before that, but if we then go to the Northern hemisphere sea ice plot from Cryosphere today we can see how significant this would be if summer came out with a positive anomaly.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png

It appears that all summers since about 1996 have not had any positive anomalies. (see magnified view below)

At the very least if we get it positive and the melt season is the lowest since the AMO went warm it will be something that goes right at the heart of the arguments that recent Arctic sea ice deviations are entirely human caused.

In addition, given the Southern Hemisphere continues with well above normal sea ice, if it continues, it gives us a shot at a record breaking global sea ice in the satellite era.

On the other hand, it is a model forecast, and may not come to be. It will be interesting to watch though.

As always, check the WUWT Sea Ice Page for the latest information.

Here is the background on CFS:

The CFS version 2 was developed at the Environmental Modeling Center at NCEP. It is a fully coupled model representing the interaction between the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land and seaice. It became operational at NCEP in March 2011.

Please reference the following article when using the CFS Reanalysis (CFSR) data.

Saha, Suranjana, and Coauthors, 2010: The NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 91, 1015.1057. doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS3001.1

Please reference the following article when using the CFS version 2 Reforecast model or data

Saha, Suranjana and Coauthors, 2014: The NCEP Climate Forecast System Version 2 Journal of Climate J. Climate, 27, 2185–2208. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00823.1

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