A look at the IJIS arctic sea ice extent page

Just for fun, take a look at these typos

* Thanks to the cooperative relationship between NASA and JAXA, we are applying the AMSR-E sea ice concentration algorism developed by Dr. Comiso in NASA/GSFC.
...
* The numbers of sea ice extent in this site are estimates calculated by certain algorism.

By the way, I've been occasionally downloading sea ice extent data from that page (here, CSV file). Earlier today, the provided number for 8/10/08 was 6335938 square kilometers; later today, I noticed that the provided 8/10/08 number had increased by nearly 8,000 square kilometers to 6343906 square kilometers. I wonder what happened?

I put up the two versions of the .csv file on my screen and took the following screen shot--the discrepancy is on line 2263 (click to enlarge):



Sometimes I wonder how reliable this sea ice extent data is. Note the big drop between Aug 5th and 6th, with the last three digits not changing; then note that the number barely changed at all between the 7th and the 8th.

This report also makes me wonder:

In January my jet flew 400 nm south of Greenland on a clear, sunny morning. There was solid sea-ice in all directions, as far as the eye could see, and visibility was excellent. When we landed, I downloaded the official sea-ice map from the satellite for that day. No sea-ice was shown on that map anywhere south of Greenland.