PIOMAS Verifies

First-year results are in for the recently launched CRYOSAT satellite that can measure sea ice volume, and contrary to what you might have once read, they verify the PIOMAS model results. The BBC:

Tuesday's release shows a complete seasonal cycle, from October 2010, when the Arctic Ocean was beginning to freeze up following the summer melt, right through to March 2011, when the sea ice was approaching peak thickness. Cryosat found the volume (area multiplied by thickness) of sea ice in the central Arctic in March 2011 to have been 14,500 cubic kilometres.

This figure is very similar to that suggested by PIOMAS (Panarctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System), an influential computer model that has been used to estimate Arctic sea ice volume, and which has been the basis for several predictions about when summer sea ice in the north might disappear completely.

Of course, it was always an insult to the PIOMAS scientists from bloggers who thought a few whipped-up blog posts were going to counter the careful work of professionals, who needless to say work very hard to analyze and improve their model's performance.