This graph is total nonsense without further explanation or better legends. It might make sense to its creator, but it is hard to imagine anyone else getting any benefit whatsoever from it.

1. It talks about "monthly averages" in the caption, but there's nothing about months in the graph.
   1. The x-axis is time, in years, which implicitly includes months as a sub-period.

Not when they are scrunched together so much.

1. It looks funny, like it is a series of blue ovals inside black ovals. Spread out more in the horizontal direction, it might be comprehensible.
   1. Its effectively two sine waves, 6 months out of phase

It's supposed to be that; the problem is, that isn't what it looks like.

1. Nothing identifies what is northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere.
   1. Its a very minor intelligence/comprehension test. Especially after the most recent edit, its very easy to work it out (or at least I thought it was; tell me if I'm wrong). But you could add the colours in the figure caption, if you like.

It's something missing.

It is unreasonable to expect readers to go look up the history and pick out a couple of cryptic edit comments and expect them to draw conclusions on that basis. What I might understand or not understand isn't particularly relevant.

(William M. Connolley 18:23, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)) Sorry. I really didn't realise it was this difficult. You don't need to look up the edit history, just read the text that says that the NH cycle has a smaller amplitude. OK, so I'll add it.

1. The scientific notation legend is will put non-technical people off. Just use square megameters, with numbers 5, 10, 15, and 20. Or even millions of square kilometers, with the same numbers.
   1. Well, sorry. If I ever re-drawn it I will. But it doesn't seem worth re-drawing it just for this.

I certainly didn't think this a fatal flaw either; but it obviously needs redoing, so this should be fixed as well.

1. Just what in the world are you trying to show with it? Maybe explaining that will make it make sense. Gene Nygaard 21:22, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
   1. Lots of obvious things: that the interannual variation of the max/min is much smaller than the seasonal variation, for example (William M. Connolley 21:52, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)).

Maybe some other type of graph would be more useful?

Or maybe one similar to this over a much shorter time period, so that the wave nature shows through, to show what you were trying to show here, and a second one showing just monthly maxima over time?

In other words, play around with it and see what you can do. You are the one with the data. I don't know exactly what it should be; I just know it should be something different from what it is. This is something only a mother could love. Or "father" in this case. Gene Nygaard 22:29, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• I also had pointed out the NH/SH ambiguity in Image talk:Sea-ice.area.nh.sh.png. Black is apparently SH, and area is in m². Making graph wider would allow seeing the sine waves as such rather than as ellipsoids. Narrower pen would also help. (SEWilco 04:25, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC))

The citations to Serreze and Stroeve are not defined. Pdn 04:16, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]