On Aug 14, 10:55 am, Alastair <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Using that spreadsheet, in the first 13 days of August this year the
> average ice loss has been 83,000 sq km per day compared with the same
> 13 days last year when it was 77,000 sq km.  On 13 Aug last year the
> total area was 5.3M sq km. Yesterday it was 6.1M sq km.  So this years
> melt is now faster by 6,000 sq km per day, but has to catch up by
> 800,000 sq km which would take it 130 days at the current rate of
> progress.  W.'s bet money seems safe :-)
>
> Cheers, Alastair.

6 days later the gap should be down circa 36000 sq km but has actually
fallen to under 600000 sq km - down 204000 sq km. At that rate it
would only take 19 days and there are more than 19 days of the melt
season left.

However, I still think W.'s bet money is pretty safe :-)
I don't think that extrapolation makes much sense:
6 days is way too short - almost certainly weather noise.
Even if you insist on using that 6 days of data it makes more sense to
say max fall from 18 Aug to minimum in last 5 years is 0.9m sq km from
2007. At 72% faster in last 6 days, this still isn't sufficiently
large a fall.

Area anomaly graphs make an area record look more reachable - even
likely.

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