The melt season has finished and so it's time to start looking towards the spring maximum (if we make it past 21/12/12!).
The maximum sea ice extent has typically diminished at a much slower rate than the minimum, with a difference of only around 1.9 million km2 between the lowest and highest maximum (11.3%), compared to 4.2 million km2 for the minimum (55.2%).
The highest maximum extent value recorded was in 1979 at 16,564,600km2, while the lowest was 2011 at 14,689,100km2.
Here's a graph of the annual sea ice extent 1 day maximum based on the NSIDC data
The last 10 years
2003 15.5868
2004 15.2555
2005 14.9462
2006 14.7330
2007 14.7896
2008 15.3052
2009 15.1628
2010 15.2845
2011 14.6891
2012 15.2909
We'll use the NSIDC data to base the minimum on. I don't think this will be submitted to anything, and the voting is set to private, just in case that matters to anyone.