July Sea Ice Outlook reports are now available

The July SEARCH Sea Ice Outlook reports are now available! The Pan-Arctic Summary, Full Pan-Arctic Outlook, and Regional Outlook are available at:
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2012/july

With 21 responses for the Pan-Arctic Outlook, the July Sea Ice Outlook projects a September 2012 arctic sea extent median value of 4.6 million square kilometers. The consensus is for continued low values of September sea ice extent. It is important to note for context that the estimates are well below the 1979­2007 September mean of 6.7 million square kilometers. The quartiles for July are 4.2 and 4.7 million square kilometers, a rather narrow range given that the uncertainty of individual estimates are on the order of 0.5 million square kilometers. This is also a narrower range than last year, which was 4.0 to 5.5. The July Outlook is generally similar to the June Outlook; the July median is higher by 0.2 million square kilometers than the June estimate, but the quartiles are similar.

Just after the June Outlook was completed (based on May data), arctic sea ice extent briefly set record daily rates of loss. In June we saw the second-most cumulative loss in the satellite record since 1979, behind the record minimum extent for June in 2010. We also saw cases of early melt in some regions. The culprit for the rapid sea ice loss in early June was again the presence of the Arctic Dipole (AD) pressure pattern, but the pattern shifted towards the end of the month and ice loss slowed.

In addition to the Pan-Arctic Outlooks, there were five contributions to the July Regional Outlook report. The regional outlooks shed light on the uncertainties
associated with the estimates in the Pan-Arctic Outlook by providing more detail at the regional scale, including the Northwest Passage and Hudson
Bay/Hudson Strait shipping routes, Beaufort/Chukchi Seas, the Canadian Archipelago/Nares Strait, and Barents/Greenland Seas.

The SEARCH Sea Ice Outlook produces monthly reports throughout the summer that synthesize projections of the expected sea ice minimum, at both pan-arctic
and regional  scales. For background on the Sea Ice Outlook, see the main Outlook website at:
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/index.php.