Saturday, March 06, 2010

The hopelessly half-assed northern maximum sea ice extent betting pool

Due to my three big summer projects, I wasn’t able to put up a proper maximum sea ice betting pool like I did for the Northern summer. But using the theory that late is better than never, here you go. Rules are the same as the last contest. Enter a value and sigma, to define a Gaussian curve. Person with the highest value at the final ice extent (from JAXA's AMSR-E webpage) wins.

Contest is open immediately, and closes the first time I get to blog after the second child is born, OR the first day the JAXA record drops for a second consecutive day. Whichever comes sooner. Note that sea ice could max out anytime between now and the end of March. Ditto with the baby coming.

Hopefully the skillful forecasters will outperform the half-assed guessers, compared with the three-month-out summer forecast of last year.

Running with the theme, the prize is that the winner gets to pick a topic, about which I will write a half-assed post.

8 comments:

jgfellow said...

I'm game. Extent: 5,100; Sigma 200.

Cheers!

C W Magee said...

Um, we're betting on the maximum extent here, and it is currently at 14,350.938 thousand square km, so 5000 might be a little low.

C W Magee said...

You win.

jgfellow said...

How embarassing. I must confess that I am an actuary, not a geologist. I may not know my maximum extents, but God bless those Black Swans, several sigmas off the mu...

jgfellow said...

(clarification -- embarrassing to win with such a wealth of ignorance as I managed to display...)

C W Magee said...

In Australia, the expression is "doing a Bradbury".

crandles said...

14,375 sigma 10

oops missed the deadline :o)

But about time someone called the maximum.

crandles said...

or not