When will we see open ocean at the north pole?

[frankendoodle]

Leads are common: there are almost certainly leads every year in the vicinity of the Pole.  That's not the same as open water.

I was pointing more toward how early the event took place and by "open water" I did not mean open ocean. Poor choice of words on my part.

[Peter Ellis]

Dunno how unusual it is - had a quick trawl through the NPEO webcam videos.  2011 webcam 2 is the only one I can find an open lead on, and that opened on May 31.

[Meirion]

SEPTEMBER 21st 2013

From a popular point of view this is the only thread that counts - the exact area or volume of ice in the Arctic is unimportant.

Yes if it is a record low that will get some coverage but the headline grabbing story will be the day when a plane with a camera on it flies all the way from Norway or Russia to the North Pole over open water (even if the total amount of ice in the Arctic is slightly more than it was last year).

It looks to me as if the chances are that 2013 daily minimum will be higher than 2012 (weather permitting) but that there is a realistic chance that 2013 will be the year of open ocean at the North Pole. A satellite shot of a blue North Pole could be as transformative as the William Anders' Earthrise shots of our planet from lunar orbit in 1968. The daily NSIDC concentration maps have been changing colour very quickly over the last week. They still show solid ice on the Russian coast (but we know this always melts out) and then weak ice all the way from there to the Pole.  As a rank amateur I'm going to guess there's something like a one in three chance of a blue pole in mid to late September this year.

[werther]

Day 173 22 June 2013… After a cloudy period today’s MODIS gives us a first clear view at the N Pole Barentsz-side-quadrant. The usual stitching of the satellite swaths isn’t bad:



This is the first time in four years of lurking over the MODIS shots that I’m seeing the usual mesh-structure of more or less large, unified floes within leads filled with rubble fade. It takes the form we are seeing all over the Sib side now. Structure-less broken floes and rubble.
Soon visible on the Webcam?

[Jim Hunt]

I've been performing much the same exercise as Werther, trying to catch WorldView's view of the North Pole at a good moment as the assorted swaths overwrite each other. Here's yesterday and today's efforts:

[Pmt111500]

question, and a note - a ship's captain on the bridge sees about 35 km each way, so would a 70 km diameter open sea area suffice?

[anonymous]

Jim, it might help to use the keyboard controls at: arctic.io/observations/8/2013-06-20/7-N90-E0

Ctrl + left arrow to go back one day, ctrl + right arrow = next day

If the browser can use the cache it switches directly from one day to the next and save the time to produce an animated gif.

[Jim Hunt]

Hi arcticio,

I've been experimenting with your site as well. Did you know Steven Goddard linked to you yesterday?!

I don't know exactly how you assemble your mosaics, but yesterday at least WorldView's early attempt showed more through the clouds than I could discern on arctic.io. By the end of the day WorldView had covered the Pole in clouds too.

[anonymous]

Jim, yes, SG links a lot as long as he can see any floes, arctic.io is even listed as a WUWT reference page. I'm the enemy

Basically WorldView, the Arctic Mosaics and arctic.io all run same images with different update cycle. The architecture of WV is based on GIBS. Main differences are the GUI, arctic.io uses Google Maps, WV uses Openlayers. WV recently changed their projection and added the 721 bands for the Arctic (very useful). I'm in contact with the guys in charge for years and asked to reprocess all of the MODIS data, so we can finally see what happened 2007. Expect something next year.

I do not have the hardware resources to compete with NASA, but if you have an idea how the interface could provide more value I'm listening with ears wide open.

[danp]

I commented on the blog a while ago that the mosaicing pattern at the pole throws away a lot of data, since many swathes each day do cover the pole but the orange-peel mosaic tosses much of it.  Really the projections and mosaics used for all of the images served online are not at all geared for the Arctic, so I have attacked the reprocessing of the .hdf files myself.  It's been a major project to get things going and the amounts of data I have to download are enormous but I have produced a few images.  The potential benefits include:

* Multiple images per day for a particular small region, with the pole having just about the best coverage of anywhere. 
* Clear-sky images on a rolling time interval (e.g. daily) by choosing the most cloud-free swath.  NASA does produce some products like this but AFAICT doesn't make the daily versions available online, or at highest resolution.
* Novel spectral band combinations beyond 127, 143, 356. (there are plenty of additional bands far into the infrared, for example). 

The amounts of data processing/storage are such that I'll have to focus on individual areas (and I don't have anywhere to host large amounts of public images).  I'll start posting some samples pretty soon, of the N. pole or McClure / Fram Strait depending on what looks interesting.  I'm interested in any feedback people have about what kinds of things I should try producing now that I have the potential to put any swath/band combination together into images or animations.  I am learning as I go so none of this will have an extremely fast turnaround for a while though

[TerryM]

Danp


Sounds like a fascinating project!The ice bridge & PII2012-A1 in Nares Strait could be interesting near term.


Terry

[Espen]

Danp,

And not forgetting Jøkelbugt and Dove North East Greenland?

[Neven]

That's very cool, danp. If it's too much work/data, I'd focus on the NP, as there is a chance that it might have lots of holes in and around it this year.

As for size, I'd go for the NSIDC Pole Hole (or check my North Hole post from 2010, right hand bar on the ASIB, under Best of Blog).

[Jim Hunt]

Hi Danp,

That does indeed sound very interesting! As you may have gathered, I'd been wondering if there's a way of getting a better bird's eye view of the North Pole this summer than the standard products provide.

Do you sort out the "least cloudy" swaths manually, or with some sort of automated assistance? In either case, would you be willing and able to share your methodology, perhaps over in the Developer's Corner?

[wanderer]

That's very cool, danp. If it's too much work/data, I'd focus on the NP, as there is a chance that it might have lots of holes in and around it this year.

As for size, I'd go for the NSIDC Pole Hole (or check my North Hole post from 2010, right hand bar on the ASIB, under Best of Blog).

Maybe your 2013 "North Hole" post will mean something totally different...
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticict_nowcast_anim30d.gif

[danp]

Thanks for the feedback everyone!  I'll probably put a lot of effort on the N Pole since that's such a frustrating spot for us and promises to be so interesting this year.  Because the processing has been full of so many pitfalls (particularly in getting geolocation correct) up to now I have mostly chosen other spots so I could use land features to double-check my orientation, but I'm pretty confident of that stuff at this point.

Hi Danp,

That does indeed sound very interesting! As you may have gathered, I'd been wondering if there's a way of getting a better bird's eye view of the North Pole this summer than the standard products provide.

Do you sort out the "least cloudy" swaths manually, or with some sort of automated assistance? In either case, would you be willing and able to share your methodology, perhaps over in the Developer's Corner?

It will be automated in the sense that I am using an algorithm to do so, either in GIMP or via scripting tools.  Part of the point is to composite all of the swaths, so I won't be manually stitching anything - whatever I'm doing will be choosing among swaths for every pixel or perhaps small region independently.  A very simple but pretty effective example for the visible-light images is just to pick the darkest pixel from among all available swaths.  GIMP lets you do this easily by adding layers with "darken only"

Now that I'm past most of the raw data-crunching hurdles I'll definitely start posting in the developer's corner - I figured most people would be less interested in the horrible guts of MODIS internal data formats, but now that I'm floundering around producing images there are a lot more generic issues to discuss.

-Dan

[Juan C. García]

Let's put aside the arbitrary figure of > 1 million km2 for a virtually ice free summer arctic and lets talk about open ocean at 90 degrees N.
Last September satellites showed large ice free areas around 87 degrees N in the Laptev Sea. that's approx. 200 miles from the North Pole. 
The question is when will we see open ocean at 90N and more importantly, from what direction and how?

Not sure about when, but as for direction, I reckon from the south  Sorry.

Maybe your 2013 "North Hole" post will mean something totally different...
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticict_nowcast_anim30d.gif

Wanderer:
Impressive images! They made me believe that the ice free will not come from the south: it will just appear at the North Pole! 

[Pmt111500]

Comparing the Bay of Bothnia (the only place I've seen with thick first year ice) late February - early March ice state to the current state of the Arctic 'frappucino ice' in the Eurasian side (just by the looks of it). Bay of Bothnia ice on the open sea cleared in early May this year. This would give the arctic mesh 55 to 75 days to totally melt. As it happens 75 days would put the date of north pole clearance to mid-September, so it might not happen at all this year. But I would not bet on it happening in July. Last week of August would be the earliest I'd bet but depending on weather might happen even a week before that.

(modified 26.06.2013) Ah, 'mesh' means the 'fishnet pattern' (in my vocabulary). all of this won't melt, I meant the structureless floes will go (as called by Werther), and the mesh reduces to structureless by the minimum. Then it's up to the weather whether NP clears or not.

[Espen]

A very clear Modis image from the North Pole:

Click on image to enlarge!

[johnm33]

What are the chances of the low on the Kara side pole opening up the center again drawing in even hotter Atlantic waters than the PAC earlier in the season? Conditions appear ripe.

[MOwens]

the ice on the right half of the image is ....FUBAR (50%+? chance). And it's raining in that cyclone, as the webcams show. Rain could stick around for a few days. And, as the webcam #2 shows, the rain is melting the ice surface quickly.

[jdallen]

That rain is carrying energy to replace was is lost in insolation... And isn't affected by albedo. And there is still solar energy reaching the ice, now capped by clouds.  Can't win, can't break even, can't get out of the game....

[ritter]

That rain is carrying energy to replace was is lost in insolation... And isn't affected by albedo. And there is still solar energy reaching the ice, now capped by clouds.  Can't win, can't break even, can't get out of the game....

You got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
Know when to run....

[Juan C. García]

Let's put aside the arbitrary figure of > 1 million km2 for a virtually ice free summer arctic and lets talk about open ocean at 90 degrees N.
Last September satellites showed large ice free areas around 87 degrees N in the Laptev Sea. that's approx. 200 miles from the North Pole. 
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2data/asi_daygrid_swath/n6250/2012/sep//asi-AMSR2-n6250-20120915-v5_visual.png
The question is when will we see open ocean at 90N and more importantly, from what direction and how?

It seems that at 2013 we have some polynyas around the North Pole, that just appear after the action of Arctic cyclone.

(Login to view the image)

[Juan C. García]

On August 10, again, open water near the North Pole.
Even that 2013 SIA and SIE are above 2012, doesn´t seem a sign of ice weakness that we have open water so close to the North Pole?

(Log in to see the image)

[BornFromTheVoid]

Could we possibly go ice free around the Pole this September? I wouldn't completely discount it...

On the cherts posted by Juan C. Garcia, we currently have open ocean up to about 83N to the north of Franz Joseph Land. The ice from here, right up to and around the Pole is of unusually low concentration, which opens it up to increased wind driven movement. So with sustained southerly wind over the area, could we could potentially see compaction, movement away from Svalbard and melt from the inflow of warm air and water from the anomalously warm Barents Sea.
And sustained southerlies are a scenario that the ECM model has been honing in on over the last few days.

Over the next 5 days, we'll see occasional southerlies and some storm damage to the ice as the low pressure gradually weakens and stalls north of Svalbard toward the 90N. From day 5 on, things get interesting, with a -ve dipole forecast, giving moderate southerly winds.


The southerly flow continues at day 7


And even the 8-10 day mean height comparison charts suggest ridging to Kara/Laptev/Barents area and a deep trough over the CAA and Greenland, would would maintain a southerly flow from the Atlantic toward the N. Pole.



At that kind of range, forecasts become somewhat unreliable, but it might be something to keep an eye on if we begin to maintain a southerly flow in this region...

[F.Tnioli]

Not sure about when, but as for direction, I reckon from the south  Sorry.

Disputable.

Geographic pole (the averaged spot around which Earth's rotation axis fluctuates) does not match magnetic pole. Assuming we talk ice-free geographic pole, and then assuming magnetic compass is used to see where "north" is, the issue becomes slightly more complicated. %)

[slow wing]

Maybe even this month. The ice near the Pole is taking a pounding from strong winds for now and probably at least for the next few days, as I posted on another thread.

[danp]

Still pretty cloudy over the pole but there was some clearing this weekend so we can see the broken-up ice around the pole.  Definitely some occasional swimming possible with holes as big as a few km opening between floes immediately around the pole:

36-hour animation, processed from MODIS/TERRA swaths days 222-223, 500m resolution.  Orientation is Greenland-down, and N pole is marked with a circle.

[Vergent]

Dan,

Nice! Its starting to look slushy up there.

Vergent

[Juan C. García]

Hi Danp (and everybody else):

I am not good searching for images at MODIS/TERRA, but looking at today’s Bremen AMSR2 image, seems that the polynias that are close to the North Pole are getting wider.
(Log in to see the image).

[danp]

Thanks for the heads-up Juan! 

By the way, those animations come about from downloading really huge amounts of data in .hdf format ... when I'm up-to-date on my downloads, I can just spit them out with a single script (and then a little manual removing of cloudy frames), but it requires devoting enough bandwidth for a while to suck down the swath data.  I'll go ahead and look again when I've gotten my data up to date.

Technically one could get the analogous pictures from the jpgs at
http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/realtime.cgi

but I am not generally patient enough to search through these.  And then aligning the different images would be an unpleasant task, and you'd have more artifacts, etc.

-Dan

[gideonlow]

Yesterday's satellite image of the NP captured a pretty cloud-free view.  Larger polynias in the attached image reach 100 Sq. Km+ in size and are less than ~150 km from the pole itself.  If you were in the middle of one of these on a clear day without inversions causing a mirage effect (I.E. lensing the distant ice "shores" to make them appear close), you'd see nothing but open ocean in all directions due the curvature of the earth.  Perhaps there are smaller floes too small to see at this resolution, but still, wow.

(Of course, you have to be logged-in to see the attached image . . .)

[Jim Hunt]

Yesterday's satellite image of the NP captured a pretty cloud-free view.

And much the same still applies this morning, although the pole itself is still tantalisingly obscured. We might have to tighten up our definition of exactly what constitutes "open ocean at the north pole"! An ice free route to the North Atlantic, or merely no ice visible from 90 degrees north?

[PeterCranie]

First post from a long time lurker on the main site so apologies for being a little off topic. These images have the potential to be very powerful shared via social media and beyond in alerting those not yet fully aware of the consequences of climate change. What are the copyright / etiquette rules on sharing these?

I'm actively involved in green politics in the UK and it is difficult to swallow that the vast majority of voters are simply ignorant of what is going on. Thanks and credit to all contributors here and on Neven's blog.

[danp]

Here's an animation covering the pole itself (marked w/ a circle) over the last 36 hours.  As you can see there's a stubborn ice floe I'm calling "Santa's last stand" that's stayed put over the pole during that time, even while polynyas open around and the neighboring ice has been mobile.



-Dan

[gideonlow]

First post from a long time lurker on the main site so apologies for being a little off topic. These images have the potential to be very powerful shared via social media and beyond in alerting those not yet fully aware of the consequences of climate change. What are the copyright / etiquette rules on sharing these?

I'm actively involved in green politics in the UK and it is difficult to swallow that the vast majority of voters are simply ignorant of what is going on. Thanks and credit to all contributors here and on Neven's blog.

Here is the verbiage from the NASA Worldview website:

"
Imagery Use
NASA supports an open data policy and we encourage publication of imagery from Worldview; when doing so, please cite it as "NASA Worldview" and also consider including a permalink (such as this one) to allow others to explore the imagery.
"

The Nasa Worldview site from which the image is copied is here: http://earthdata.nasa.gov/labs/worldview

More information here: http://earthdata.nasa.gov/about-eosdis

[danp]

Usually I don't process down to 250m resolution; it's only channels 1 & 2 that have that resolution, so the other bands are upsampled to match in the composite images, and the pictures are big enough even at 500m resolution.  But for fun, here's the 250m ch. 1 grayscale crop from day 227 (yesterday), 1930 UT, which had the clearest image:

[jbg]

First post from a long time lurker on the main site so apologies for being a little off topic. These images have the potential to be very powerful shared via social media and beyond in alerting those not yet fully aware of the consequences of climate change. What are the copyright / etiquette rules on sharing these?

Very misleading as well. There has always been open water leads up there. In fact the early expeditions couldn't make it because of that factor. Winds move the ice around, and briefly open leads form.

I'm actively involved in green politics in the UK and it is difficult to swallow that the vast majority of voters are simply ignorant of what is going on. Thanks and credit to all contributors here and on Neven's blog.

Actually most are quite right to focus on their next paycheck rather than some hypothetical far-off hazard. Remember back in the 1970's there was supposedly anthropogenic cooling.

[gideonlow]

PC -- I leave it to others more knowledgeable than myself to comment on how common these specific conditions are at 90 degrees North . . . But, I don't think we're looking at anything resembling "briefly open leads" in these images. 

Beyond that, DNFTT!

[Xyrus]

...Remember back in the 1970's there was supposedly anthropogenic cooling.

Only if you happen to think Newsweek or Time magazine are paragons of peer-reviewed scientific journals.

This is a favorite talking point for deniers and has been debunked numerous times. Even a cursory review of climate science research during the '70's in regards to anthropogenic forcings shows that almost every paper showed a warming world.

"Global cooling" was sensationalist nonsense trumped up by the media. A couple of papers were written (primarily by the same author) that discussed cooling, and even he admitted in the papers themselves that such a scenario was unlikely and that the evidence pointed towards warming. Media support, 100. Scientific support, 0.

[slow wing]

Danp,

That is a powerful image, thanks for posting.
To give the size scale, how many metres or km across does the green circle correspond to?

[danp]

 

Danp,

That is a powerful image, thanks for posting.
To give the size scale, how many metres or km across does the green circle correspond to?

Thanks ... it is kind of growing in impact as I look at it.  The resolution is 250m/pixel and the circle has an 8 pixel radius, so 2km radius / 4km diameter.

[jdallen]

Very misleading as well. There has always been open water leads up there. In fact the early expeditions couldn't make it because of that factor. Winds move the ice around, and briefly open leads form.

I find your interpretation misinformed and misleading.  Those aren't leads.  That is an open expanse of  sea water of some twenty thousand KM2, in which are floating some relict ice floes.

There is no coherent ice.

[Jim Hunt]

Good morning Peter,

These images have the potential to be very powerful shared via social media and beyond in alerting those not yet fully aware of the consequences of climate change.

I hope you're not thinking of something along the lines of the recent "North Pool" social media campaign, where much of the accompanying verbiage was indeed misleading?!

These images aren't misleading per se, but to the untrained eye I suspect they're not much more than rather abstract polka dots. How do you propose going about explaining their import to the Great British Public in 160 characters or less?

[Jim Hunt]

There has always been open water leads up there. In fact the early expeditions couldn't make it because of that factor. Winds move the ice around, and briefly open leads form.

Here's a video from "a briefly open lead at the North Pole" in August 1962. Can you see any ice?

[Peter Ellis]

How would you expect them to take a photo if there were no ice for the photographer to stand on?  This is ridiculous.  Just because one side misrepresents and makes snarky comments based on these photos doesn't mean the other side can as well.

Open leads at or near the Pole are not uncommon.

[Vergent]

Leads are narrow, linear cracks in the ice that form when ice floes diverge or shear as they move parallel to each other.

http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/characteristics/leads.html

Anyone who looks at the above images and thinks they are seeing leads, needs to attend arctic 101.

Vergent

[Jim Hunt]

How would you expect them to take a photo if there were no ice for the photographer to stand on?

They could always stand on a nuclear submarine? I was referring back to Gideon's point about:

Larger polynias in the attached image reach 100 Sq. Km+ in size and are less than ~150 km from the pole itself.  If you were in the middle of one of these on a clear day without inversions causing a mirage effect, you'd see nothing but open ocean in all directions.

Have you visited any "skeptical" web sites recently Peter? If not I guess you wouldn't understand my evidently vain attempt to inject a modicum of humour into the debate.

Open leads at or near the Pole are not uncommon.

Quite so.  100 Sq. Km+ polynyas rather less so.

[TeaPotty]

Anyone who looks at the above images and thinks they are seeing leads, needs to attend arctic 101.

Vergent

Thank you Vergent

The suggestion that this isn't historic seems ridiculous to me.   
This should really be all over the news.