Hey @NSIDC Appears to be like like we have got a sea ice sensor fault – once more – Watts Up With That?

12 years ago I pointed this out to NSIDC in this post: Mistakes in publicly presented data – worth blogging about?

Because they told me it’s not worth blogging about, this comment was made by Dr. Walt Meier, the chief researcher of NSIDC, published on WUWT:

Anthony,

We are investigating. For now we have removed the data from the time series chart.

You need to remember that this is near real-time data and there can be data failure and corrupted data due to satellite issues. While processing is automatic, quality control is partly manual. Hence, errors do occur from time to time and one should not draw dramatic conclusions from the most recent data.

I’m not sure why you think things like this are worth blogging about. Data is not perfect, especially near real-time data. This is not news.

Walt Meier

Research scientist

NSIDC

In the previous thread, I raised the question of why the sea ice extent jumped sharply down in the graph on NSIDC’s Artic Sea Ice News page. The picture below was what caused more than a million square kilometers of Arctic sea ice to disappear. Notice the blue line.

Click for a larger picture

Well it turned out to be worth blogging about and it was news because the satellite sensor failed as we later published:

NSIDC: The satellite sea ice sensor has had a “catastrophic failure” – data that has been in error for the past 45 days or more

It sure looks to me like it happened again.

h / t to Joe Bastardi for this screencap

NSIDC now says:

NSIDC continues to investigate errors in our sea ice processing and we are updating the software to correct the errors. Daily Sea Ice Index / Arctic Sea Ice News and analytics after February 19th are inaccurate. We will publish new data as soon as the software upgrades are implemented.

The old picture from February 23 on the website shows only one break-in.

However, the interactive diagram shows a significant loss of data:

I wonder how long it will be before they give in and say the satellite sensor has failed instead of raving about “processing errors”.

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