Thursday, June 18, 2009

Minimum arctic sea ice extent betting pool- ground rules

Attention, anyone more interested in the current climate than that of the paleoproterozoic snowball Earth:
This year, I will be running a betting pool on the 2009 minimum extent of arctic sea ice.

Betting will open on the (arctic) summer solstice, and close at 00:00 of the first of August, UTC.

Betting will probably be of the form value, sigma, as used by Cosmic Variance for the US election last year, but with some added details to be announced on Sunday. Climate statistics nerds, who complain about the inappropriateness of Gaussian curves will have their spokes loosened.

This post is intended to set some ground rules, and ask for advice from those Earth scientists who work in years instead of gigayears. You see, I'm a bit rusty on everything that happened after shells.

So, minimum arctic sea ice extent.
That is extent, not area. Ask a climatologist if you want to know the difference.
I plan on using the lowest daily measurement from the IARC-JAXA satellite webpage (data file). As of yesterday, the extent was: 10,652,813 km2. If there is a better source, please let me know ASAP.

For simplicity, I'll just go with the lowest 'daily' number (probably from sometime in September).

As a prize, the winner gets to nominate the topic of a blog post here at the Lounge.

Any questions, suggestions, or tips?
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4 comments:

  1. C W Magee18 June, 2009 23:28

    Please, no bets yet! I'm still checking to see if there is a better metric to judge by, and I still have 3 days to switch satellites.

    Also, there will be statistical trickery TBA which will inform your intelligent choice of sigma.

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  2. Callan Bentley18 June, 2009 23:45

    I like IJIS/JAXA. Looking forward to placing my bet.

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  3. William M. Connolley18 June, 2009 23:52

    Alternative gambling is available.

    I got so few takers for

    http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2008/09/sea_ice_declaring_victory_and.php

    that I was obliged to go for 2-to-1:

    http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/03/sea_ice_briefly.php

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lockwood19 June, 2009 07:49

    Thanks for the IJIS/JAXA link; hadn't been to that site before. I get updates from the Arctic Sea Ice and Analysis site, which I quite like, but yours looks like it has more consistent (or at least easier to find) reporting of the hard data.

    ReplyDelete