Sunday, June 21, 2009

Minimum Arctic sea ice extent betting pool

Update: 9 days to go

See this page for the current status of this contest.
Posting guesses under that entry will prevent the spam filter from holding your comments.

The previously announced Arctic sea ice extent minimum prediction pool is now open.

Guesses are to be in the form of extent and sigma (a mathematical measure of uncertainty), in thousands of km2 You may use decimal places if you insist.

Your guess will define a Gaussian curve.

The function with the highest value for x=minimum daily measured ice extent (from IARC-JAXA) wins.

Here’s an example graph, for those who are afraid of equations:
The input data are (in thousands of km2):
Colorextentsigma
Black5420300
Red410075
Orange480040
Green4600135
Purple4400100
Blue4500200



For the 2008 minimum extent of 4708 thousand km2, the winner would be green, not orange, due to green’s higher stated uncertainty.

Obviously, the best choice of sigma depends on the number of entrants, among other things. Since I have no way of predicting how many people will enter, there is a second chance rule:

Anyone who is mathematically eliminated at the 2 sigma level will be allowed to guess again. In the graph above, blue would qualify, as they are completely buried in the interval 4100-4900.

The closing date is August 1.

The winner gets to nominate a topic for this blog, which I will attempt to link to mineral sciences in as humorous a manner as possible. Here are some examples.

If you want to tell a bit more about yourself- profession, interest in climate, preferred line color for graph- that would be great. My secret agenda here is to see how the guess distribution varies between climatologists, non climatologist, friend who only want to win to force me to blog about an embarrassing episode in my past, etc. I doubt I'll get enough entries to be able to do that, but if y'all guess and invite some friends along, then we might get somewhere.

So place your bets folks; you have nothing to lose, and I have nothing to gain.

Update: Five weeks to go.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

5200 75
Non-climatologist
Gold

sylas said...

4555 60
Non-climatologist
Crimson

Ron Schott said...

4150 100
Petrologist, non-climatologist
Green

Callan Bentley said...

4800 75
Geologist, non-climatologist
Ebony

C W Magee said...

4675 +/- 65
Geochemist
purple

Fischer said...

4900 / 80
Chemist, Journalist
green

Nick Barnes said...

4700 200
Amateur ice-watcher for several years.

Jan Moren said...

3900 100

Neuroscientist and modeler.

cope said...

Wow, sparse curricula vitae. BA geology, 10 years well-site geologist (gas/oil, Rocky Mountain states), MA earth science, 20 years high school science teacher, fervent worrier about the state of the planet.

Prediction: 4250, +/- 100

Deano said...

4300 100

Blue

Ecologist

Chris S. said...

4400 +/- 100

Insect ecologist

Blue

jyyh said...

4000 350

non-climatologist, compensating for the weather effect...

Unknown said...

4600 100

Musician

Scarlet

C W Magee said...

Please post guesses on the update page here.

Otherwise, moderation and spamhunters may eat your comments.

Josh Brandon said...

4235 100

Environmental agitator
Fern Green