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How much do you think is going into melting Permafrost?
It does look like a lot is going into the NH upper latitude waters.
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but while the arctic basin is "relatively" cool this summer. Many large swaths where permafrost resides are getting baked.
Quite so. Some of us have our eyes (brains?) glaze over here with all the numbers and stats here. Some of us struggle to see big pictures instead. Like, "how is the new normal for the arctic changing from the old normal?"
It seems to me that part of the new normal may be a tendency towards what whe've called "Warm Arctic, Cold Continents" (WACCy weather) during the fall and winter, and now, perhaps "Cold Arctic, Warm Continents" (CAWCy weather) is the new normal for summer.
The region seems to be going all WACCy-CAWCy on us.
A Hypothesis came to me now looking at this, straight out of my youth on the coast of Cape Cod bay; that's what this seems like, writ large - the result of persistent sea breezes - strong local advective circulation.
On hot days in the summer (think 30C+), after mid day, we would look forward to the breeze, sometimes down-right windy flow that would come in off of the 15-17C water. Depending on how early the heat started and wind strength, these could get 10-15KM inland before petering out, and get as fast as 30KPH, which the sail craft owners very much appreciated.
Where you have that kind of sharp, significant (+/-10C) difference in surface temperature, it would tend to form a 20-30KM border between the extremes, where sharp circulation would tend to isolate the air masses on either side them. During high summer, at arctic latitudes, you don't have sunset to turn off the flow, though it would diminish somewhat with lower insolation values around 12AM.
Greater difference in temperature, greater strength to the local circulation, which may tend to interfere with movement of air masses at lower levels.
On the Atlantic side, while the gradient is not as abrupt, it does exist, when you consider the SST's in the Barents region. (current DMI SST's below and Canadian weather service images below)
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/weather/arcticweather_imagecontainer.phphttp://weather.gc.ca/data/analysis/351_50.gifOver a distance of about 500KM in the Barents, SST's go from about -1C to almost 10. That strikes me as enough of a gradient to support persistent flow. Put a spin on it, and I think we have the source for our persistent lows emerging and puttering along the coast until dying over the Kara and eastern Laptev.
To preserve the character of the flow (and balance the heat transfer), the advection of warmer air would be at altitude, which would tend to carry it (and additional moisture) into the interior of the pack, where it would cool from a combination of transfer and radiation, increasing pressure and supporting the weak highs we see. So, we see two basic "cloud decks" - the higher level, with moisture advected into the Arctic by higher level flow, and low level/fog, which is a result of sublimation/evaporation from open water, melt ponds and the ice itself. Lack of strong local airflow might tend to produce the kind of "popcorn" like regions of cloud we have been seeing a lot of this season.
So, perhaps it is one of the things we've been missing this season, is that we may have been overlooking the effect of local (I'd say micro, but its not that small) climate effects in how they change circulation, as a result of local thermal differences.