Now this is interesting and directly relates to the original post. So 2012 was the lowest Arctic Ice extent on record, but 2013 actually recovered quite a bit and was only the 4th or 5th lowest. But as we have all recognized and said many times in this thread, volume is a far more helpful and useful number. The trouble is that volume of ice is still a fairly hard piece of data to come by.
So what I prefer to do is to watch the areas of multi-year sea ice. Those years have been slowly growing over the past few years, 2012 notwithstanding. So I have been wondering if one of these years we would see a good leap forward in sea ice extent as a natural consequence of multi-year sea ice growing and therefore thicker ice being more plentiful.
Now, it is WAY to early to say, but it is interesting that the model runs currently being utilized are suggesting that this year will be one of the largest sea ice extent years in the past 10 years. I am FAR more impressed with actual data, but when the same people who have been predicting an ice free arctic are now predicting a relatively high year of sea ice, that gets my attention.
If their prediction turned out to be correct, then 2014 would be above the average sea ice extent of the baseline 2000-2010 and would be halfway to the 1990's average sea ice minimum for September. Once again, this is ONLY a model and I want to see the data, but it is at least interesting.