The 2008 weblog awards winner for Best Science Blog
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
NSIDC: satellite sea ice sensor has “catastrophic failure” - data faulty for the last 45 or more days (”Although we believe that data prior to early January are reliable, we will conduct a full quality check in the coming days. ...it became clear that there was a significant problem - sea-ice-covered regions were showing up as open ocean. ...”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/18/nsidc-satellite-sea-ice-sensor-has-catastrophic-failure-data-faulty-for-the-last-45-days/#comments
Click for larger image [at above link]
Today NSIDC announced they had discovered the reason why. The sensor on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellite they use had degraded and now apparently failed to the point of being unusable. Compounding the bad news they discovered it had been in slow decline for almost two months, which caused a bias in the arctic sea ice data that underestimated the total sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers. This will likely affect the January NSIDC sea ice totals. .... [snip]
John Egan (22:29:11) asks :
Will NSIDC issue a correction to the media?
“Arctic sea ice coverage was at its sixth lowest January extent since satellite records began in 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Average ice extent during January was 5.43 million square miles.”
This was released in a number of news outlets -
http://www.examiner.com/x-219-Denver-Weather-Examiner~y2009m2d18-January-was-seventh-warmest-for-globe
And was also part of the larger NOAA January report -
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090218_globalstats.html
NSIDC: satellite sea ice sensor has “catastrophic failure” - data faulty for the last 45 or more days... it became clear that there was a significant problem - sea-ice-covered regions were showing up as open ocean. ...”
Holy cow! The Greenies have been wetting their pants over low sea ice levels for the past few months. Now it turns out to be faulty data. It probably wont shut them up though.