On several previous occasions “Snow White” and I have documented Ron Clutz’s misuse of MASIE Arctic sea ice extent data on his “Science Matters” blog. We agree with Ron that science matters, so on several occasions we have attempted to direct his attention to my interview with NASA/NSIDC scientist Walt Meier. Walt’s words of wisdom included:

Year-to-year comparisons and trend estimates will be more accurate in the passive microwave data than in MASIE.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that Ron has not learned anything from our repeated efforts. In his article entitled “2024 Arctic Ice Beats 2007 by Half a Wadham” earlier today Ron proudly displays this graph:

You will note that Ron does not provide details of his data source. However I have recently noted a sudden lack of SSMIS passive microwave data emanating from NOAA. The OSI SAF reported it this way on September 12th:

Dear OSI SAF Sea Ice Concentration User,

Due to missing input data, we have not been able to generate L2 products, corresponding to F-16 / F-17 / F-18 since Sep 11 19:36 UTC.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

The NSIDC’s sea ice home page puts it this way today:

Now day 260 of 2024 is September 16th, so it seems safe to assume that Ron is erroneously using his favourite MASIE metric for year to year comparisons yet again. In his article Ron states that:

SII was reporting deficits as high as 0.5M km2 (half a Wadham) compared to  MASIE early in September.  For some reason, that dataset has not been updated for the last five days.

It appears as though Ron has also not yet learned how to find NSIDC’s sea ice home page on the world wide interweb!

I added this hopefully helpful comment below Ron’s article. For some strange reason it is yet to emerge from Ron’s moderation queue:

Watch this space!