This month's report includes details on the causes of the 2012 minimum, the
use of sea ice volume versus extent, sea ice in climate models, and late spring 2013 conditions.
Again one must look at mirror causations, the biggest one is the shrinking Cryosphere, This heat wave is the
reflection of sea ice volume disappearance.
The Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) project provides estimates
of sea ice volume since 1979, shown in the figure below.
There has been a lot of discussion over the past few years on the use
of sea ice volume as a better index than sea ice extent for use in Outlooks.
Until then, we have some new observational data of Canadian sea ice thickness and this remarkable
figure of sea ice volume since 1979 from Neven's Arctic Sea Ice Blog, based on data from the University of Washington's Polar Science Center [click to enlarge]:
N from the summer of 2014 and the amount
of sea ice volume (PIOMAS) in the end of the winter (28 February 2015).