In previous posts on the Arctic sea-ice minimum, I graphed projections of extent and volume for several individual years in order to compare it with 2012. Although this is interesting on its own, it would have been nice to see how the 2012 projection (that fatally went below zero) morphed into the s-shape that it got in recent years.
I can graph the projection of individual years and I played around with animated gifs in the past, so I thought it should be possible to make an animated image of that evolution.
The initial result was rather choppy because I only have 12 data points to work with, but experimenting with intermediary values got rid of most of the choppiness.
My first idea was to use these intermediary values to fade in the projections. The result looked okay, but it was rather confusing, especially in the beginning of the animation. Back to the drawing board.
Just plotting the intermediary values and fading in the minimum values gave a more smooth result. It is still not that fluent as I want it to be, but that would take some additional effort that I don’t want to put into it because it is already fit for its intended purpose.
This is the evolution of the minimum volume projections from 2012 until 2023:
The same for the extent:
I find it fascination to watch the evolution of the “Yikes! It is spiraling to death” projection at the beginning to the “Hey, that looks more like a S-shape” at the end.
These projections of course don’t prove anything, their value is entertainment rather than prediction. It is entirely possible that volume and extent go back downwards. Or stay the same. Or keep getting up. Only time will tell…
via Trust, yet verify
April 30, 2024 at 03:36PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 