The 2016 melting season

[Laurent]

Broken ice 300 km from the pole.

http://go.nasa.gov/298aA50

[NeilT]

The effects of reduced solar activity on temperature is small compared to normal variation: perhaps .1deg over an eleven-year solar cycle.

True but it has a larger impact on Insolation.

Does that mean the predicted minimum will have a mitigating effect on sea-ice melt over the coming years?

Not really, it has an impact and it is measurable.  However when the huge solar minimum started around the end of 2008, Hansen and Mann analysed the impact and stated that a total minimum for 100 years would be overtaken by CO2 contributions within 25 years at the same level of CO2 output.

Output has increased since they did that calculation.

All I was stating was that ignoring the solar cycle and the position within the cycle, was to ignore _one_ of the key factors in melt.  I also said weather trumps all.  2012 was just as cycle 24 was really sparking into life but cycle 24 is really only half of cycle 23 in flux size and spot number.

[epiphyte]

Looking at nullschool this morning, it sure does look as though the arctic weather is in full recirculation mode for the next few days (in the sense that all the surface winds are from somewhere that is cold to somewhere else that is cold). The "850" temps are also verging what in fall I'd think of as refreeze territory, (with elevated pressure to boot on top of a surface low??)

...At the same time we're just past peak insolation. Given the above and the mixed albedo a big proportion of all that energy is not going straight back up, or apparently leaving in any immediately obvious manner. So to my mind it is either melting ice or warming ocean in a manner which gets sucked down into the depths, or something else about which I'm totally clueless. Any ideas out there as to which is the case?

[Tigertown]

Where or when rather did all this happen? Under the cover of clouds?
Probably be more defined in a day or two, but hard to tell right now as these almost look like shadows instead of leads.
Some of the worst of this is only a few tens of km from the pole.

[bbr2314]

Rapid break-up now occurring of the Siberian-adjacent seas. Should mostly melt out within next 10 days.

[bbr2314]

Couldn't ask for a better look for an ice-free Arctic by summer's end... holy ish!



More concerning than the absolute heat about to enter the Arctic is, IMO, its future impact. As the open water in the peripheral seas sops up all the solar radiation, the eventual switch back to low pressure will come with ***much*** more potential energy available.

[Laurent]

In the next hours there is quite a lot of doors opening in the Arctic.
The stubborn ice should start to melt in this vicinity, cause of that very small low.
http://go.nasa.gov/29j3Z6i

[Lord M Vader]

According to Michael Ventrice via twitter: "Don't place any weight on the ECMWF op in the medium-range. Last 3 forecasts showing huge volatility w/East pattern."

https://twitter.com/MJVentrice/status/748591471108947968

And Day 10 is far out so lot of things can happen. But of course, if that forecast verifies and set up with such a strong high pressure system over the Arctic we might see some interesting things for the later part of the melting season.

[Laurent]

Yes, Tigertown an other little problem there.

[Tigertown]

Yeah, you get a little glimpse in that animation on the 23rd of some hairline looking fractures(probably huge if you were standing there) and then you don't really get a good view again until today. So it really went down in that area in about a week.

[Tigertown]

The jet streams have been mixing for a few days now. Don't know how long it will continue.
Question; Maybe some of you weather guys can answer. How will this affect the Arctic?
 If it goes on this way, how will it affect the weather and melting conditions or will it cause so many other problems that we won't have time to care?

[pearscot]

From my understanding, is that this opens up 'summer' air from North America to more easily traverse the equator and flow into the southern hemisphere.  Granted, it's not quite that simple, but it will affect the summer/winter temperatures as there is less of a barrier between the two.  To me, it's scary; and it really highlights the warming arctic where less of a temperature differentiation causes the jet stream to unwind and get much more curvy.  To me, that article/discovery is pretty worrying.  I think weather is going to get increasingly more unpredictable.

[Michael Hauber]

Upper level winds are always crossing the equator, which is a normal consequence of cross equatorial monsoon flow - the low level winds that flow one way must create a counterflow somewhere or the atmosphere would become unbalanced.  I'm not sure how often they do so to the extent of the current event.  Being in the central pacific after a record El Nino I'd be inclined to suspect that anything unusual is mostly just disruptions to the atmospheric circulation resulting in the breakdown, which is still ongoing.

[Tigertown]

This is at 250hpa or 35,000 ft, approx. 11 km. So from what Paul Beckwith at the University of Ottawa, the NH jet stream is actually transferring air to the SH jet stream. Earth Nullschool shows it ongoing so far.

P.S. It is starting to seem like a blue ocean event may not be altogether necessary for the damage in the Arctic to throw the system out of whack.

[Rob Dekker]

A-team, if you could do that, that would be spectacular.
But even a standard animation of the Beaufort over the full June period would be very educational.

I can't do more than this, but here's June 7-29.  I tried to use the image closest to 29z each day.  Bands M05 M04 M03 I01.

Thanks Jay, much appreciated !

Looking at that June 7-29 animation, maybe that Beaufort Gyre is not exactly a circle this season.
It looks more like there is a steady (North to South) inflow of ice from the CAB into the Eastern Beaufort, where then the "fill-in" melts out quickly while the MYI flows take longer to disintegrate and melt out.
Either way, not much of this imported ice survives the Gyre and appears on the Western Beaufort side. Only some very big pieces like A-team's "Big Block" remain.

Overall, with your animation to prove, I am again astounded how much ice moves into the Beaufort from the CAB (which is torn apart with serious holes and leads even past 80 N according to A-team's pictures), while the Beaufort still drops in both extent and area.

And with a high over the Beaufort, we can expect some serious drops in area and extent today in that area.

[bbr2314]

First sub-970 of the season appears on the CMC tonight. Possibly not going to happen but the deepest low shown by the models to date...

[Rob Dekker]

Looks like the Mackenzie coming up through lower latitudes, not to make light of insolation (pun intended) is contributing to the warm area near shore.


The Siege

Tigertown, where did you find that image of SST's ?
It looks very detailed, and thus valuable.

[bbr2314]

00z EURO now has a low into the 970s by D4 and this by D5... with the pack entirely mobile at this point this will do significant damage to the CAB

[Rob Dekker]

Temperatures in the Beaufort are not remaining at 0, but are discernably rising, if you look at the SST charts on Neven's graph page.

I really think there should be a study on the distance ambient ice needs to be on average to be conducive to ocean temperature rise above the melting point of ice.

Can't this be solved in physics, by a heat conservation equation?

Let's give these physics (of heat preservation) a try :
We know that any open water around the summer solstice absorbs something like 280 W/m^2 for average weather. That sunlight gets absorbed by the ocean, with most of it absorbed in the 'mixing layer' which is the upper 20 meters of ocean. Simple calculation, using 4200 J/kg/C, shows that a water column of 20 meters will warm by some 0.3 C per day if heated with 280 W/m^2.

In other words, it will take about 10 days for open water to warm up 3 C.

The Beaufort has been open since April, which is at least 60 days now.
Since it has not warmed up more than 3 degrees C, we can safely conclude that that only 10/60 = 16 % of the absorbed insolation went to warming up the water.
The remainder (more than 80%) of absorbed heat thus went to (bottom) melting the ice that drifts around in the Beaufort.

[Michael Hauber]

Let's give these physics (of heat preservation) a try :
We know that any open water around the summer solstice absorbs something like 280 W/m^2 for average weather. That sunlight gets absorbed by the ocean, with most of it absorbed in the 'mixing layer' which is the upper 20 meters of ocean. Simple calculation, using 4200 J/kg/C, shows that a water column of 20 meters will warm by some 0.3 C per day if heated with 280 W/m^2.

In other words, it will take about 10 days for open water to warm up 3 C.

The Beaufort has been open since April, which is at least 60 days now.
Since it has not warmed up more than 3 degrees C, we can safely conclude that that only 10/60 = 16 % of the absorbed insolation went to warming up the water.
The remainder (more than 80%) of absorbed heat thus went to (bottom) melting the ice that drifts around in the Beaufort.

And the amount of heat radiated directly back towards space?  That is getting up towards 400w/m.  And then of course there is the greenhouse effect which reflects most of this back.  The net longwave radiation escaping to space is 40w/m according to my first google source.  But that is very variable according to how much clouds.  And the greenhouse effect is dominated by water vapor, which is in short supply in the Arctic, so I'd be pretty confident that the net longwave radiation in much of the arctic is way higher than 40w/m.

The mixing layer is the layer of efficient mixing that keeps temperatures at the same level.  Substantial heat can get below the mixing layer.

[Rob Dekker]

Let's give these physics (of heat preservation) a try :
We know that any open water around the summer solstice absorbs something like 280 W/m^2 for average weather. That sunlight gets absorbed by the ocean, with most of it absorbed in the 'mixing layer' which is the upper 20 meters of ocean. Simple calculation, using 4200 J/kg/C, shows that a water column of 20 meters will warm by some 0.3 C per day if heated with 280 W/m^2.

In other words, it will take about 10 days for open water to warm up 3 C.

The Beaufort has been open since April, which is at least 60 days now.
Since it has not warmed up more than 3 degrees C, we can safely conclude that that only 10/60 = 16 % of the absorbed insolation went to warming up the water.
The remainder (more than 80%) of absorbed heat thus went to (bottom) melting the ice that drifts around in the Beaufort.

And the amount of heat radiated directly back towards space?  That is getting up towards 400w/m.  And then of course there is the greenhouse effect which reflects most of this back.  The net longwave radiation escaping to space is 40w/m according to my first google source.  But that is very variable according to how much clouds.  And the greenhouse effect is dominated by water vapor, which is in short supply in the Arctic, so I'd be pretty confident that the net longwave radiation in much of the arctic is way higher than 40w/m.

The mixing layer is the layer of efficient mixing that keeps temperatures at the same level.  Substantial heat can get below the mixing layer.

Michael, would you like to make an adjustment to my calculation ?

[edit] if 'net' radiation to space were 40 W/m^2 at this time, then surrounding ice fields and land surface areas would cool down very quickly. So that is simply not so.
And regarding your argument about heat going below the mixing layer, remember that there is plenty of warm water below the halocline, which is not much deeper than the mixed layer in the Beaufort. So be careful what kind of 'mixing' you wish for.

[Laurent]

Big block is weaker ! Tic Tac Tic Tac

[Tigertown]

Looks like the Mackenzie coming up through lower latitudes, not to make light of insolation (pun intended) is contributing to the warm area near shore.


The Siege

Tigertown, where did you find that image of SST's ?
It looks very detailed, and thus valuable.

arctic.io under data section

[seaicesailor]

What I might do, as time permits, is post the bare bones contrast-optimized animation for June. Folks can download, adopt-a-floe, color it throughout the animation from a provided palette, re-upload it for the next person to adopt another one. The low budget version is just to do first and last frames while watching the animation.

Coloring 20 floes over 30 days would give a very cool product; it becomes feasible with distributed input.

Big block is weaker ! Tic Tac Tic Tac

Glad that you posted that image Laurent, the large number of smaller floes around Big Block mean that the adopt-a-floe project would have required too many contributors to become rigorous.
It'd be more feasible to use the most precise daily Beaufort sea ice area data available, and that just one person skilled in the arts of image processing and pattern recognition devised a method to calculate ice (area) advection across the Beaufort sea boundaries as defined for the aforementioned product.
When adding (or substracting depending on the sign convention) regional area time variation to ice advection, we will obtain the substantial creation/destruction of ice in terms of area, without having to fall into the tedious pixel counting task.
That requires a single volunteer (yet highly educated) rather than a thousand of enthusiastic albeit untalented unschooled and rigor-lacking average posters.

[Nick_Naylor]

That requires a single volunteer (yet highly educated) rather than a thousand of enthusiastic albeit untalented and rigor-lacking average posters.

I am single and highly educated, albeit enthusiastic, untalented, rigor-lacking and average.
Worse yet, I am not a volunteer

Seaicesailor, are you volunteering?

[Laurent]

I am not counting pixels, I want to know how will that little block of 100kmx100km will disintegrate. I thought it would go in fewer blocks but it may also break in much smaller pieces. I do not pretend of something scientific just watching.

[Laurent]

Nice view of rubble alley from Beaufort to Laptev (2000km).
http://go.nasa.gov/29l5NM8

[Shared Humanity]

That requires a single volunteer (yet highly educated) rather than a thousand of enthusiastic albeit untalented and rigor-lacking average posters.

I am single and highly educated, albeit enthusiastic, untalented, rigor-lacking and average.
Worse yet, I am not a volunteer

Seaicesailor, are you volunteering?

I am an above average, married, highly educated thus cynical and periodically morose miscreant, frequently posting speculative comments with little scientific basis.   

Oh...and unapologetic.

[Tigertown]

I posted this first pic two days ago and the second pic is today at the same locale.

[Tigertown]

Here is a bigger one of the same area. As you can see clouds were in the area when the sat. made one of its passes, but it is obvious all this connects. This area is going down fast and another one about 60 or so km on the other side of the pole is too. I don't know what the pole is made out of, but I hope its waterproof.

[JimboOmega]

Michael, would you like to make an adjustment to my calculation ?

[edit] if 'net' radiation to space were 40 W/m^2 at this time, then surrounding ice fields and land surface areas would cool down very quickly. So that is simply not so.
And regarding your argument about heat going below the mixing layer, remember that there is plenty of warm water below the halocline, which is not much deeper than the mixed layer in the Beaufort. So be careful what kind of 'mixing' you wish for.

I think the term net is used loosely - like that is the total that goes out to space (after some bounces back down, and some of that bounces back up, and so on), which would make the total radiation flux 220-40=180W.  Anyway, it's true that there are a lot of variables that go into it is the point being made. It's a discussion I've had a few times and you might want to check out the albedo impact thread.

To bring it back to 2016:

I feel like for a few weeks now we've been seeing posts that show more cracking and thus open water in areas that are still substantially ice covered.  What I wonder if these act to substantially introduce heat into areas that wouldn't otherwise have it. If areas in the middle of the pack are all full of cracks and stuff, what does it do?

Is that new for 2016, caused by the weather that spent a lot of time pulling the pack apart?

[Andreas T]

I have started a thread http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,749.0.html
on radiative balance, maybe too far out of the way to catch peoples eyes but I think there is some useful information if you prefer to see what has been done on the topic.
The attached plots I have posted before and although the data available is only up to 2015 it is better than making rough guesses.
the site is not very user friendly I am afraid but it is worth persisting and figuring out what it all might mean.http://ceres-tool.larc.nasa.gov/ord-tool/srbavg
background info http://ceres.larc.nasa.gov/index.php
I chose all sky monthly averages for the beaufort sea which I think includes the effects of the observed weather conditions of that month (earlier years are available)

[Andreas T]

and here are net fluxes for june july august

[A-Team]

the Ceres site is not very user friendly.

Excellent summary.

A great project however if you can get through it and explain what it means and how we might use real-time Ceres data to make our forums more accurate.

Our contribution here is real time coverage of events but we need to paste that over the scientific literature rather than just winging it.

Reading the collected works of D.K. Perovich (249 papers) backwards from 2016 provides a more concrete approach than Ceres. Perovich has worked for decades on the very issue of experimental radiation balance from instrumentation on the ice. The last three years of titles are certainly intriguing:

https://www.researchgate.net/researcher/33797252_D_K_Perovich

Atmospheric conditions in the central Arctic Ocean through the melt seasons of 2012 and 2013: Impact on surface conditions and solar energy deposition into the ice-ocean system

Geometric Effects of an Inhomogeneous Sea Ice Cover on the under Ice Light Field

Advancing polar prediction capabilities on daily to seasonal time scales

Optical properties of melting first-year Arctic sea ice

Seasonal evolution of melt ponds on Arctic sea ice

Influence of ice thickness and surface properties on light transmission through Arctic sea ice

Observations of the Summer Breakup of an Arctic Sea Ice Cover

Melt pond fraction and spectral sea ice albedo retrieval from MERIS data – Part 1: Validation against in situ, aerial, and ship cruise data

Regional variability in sea ice melt in a changing Arctic

Object-Based Detection of Arctic Sea Ice and Melt Ponds Using High Spatial Resolution Aerial Photographs

The WWRP Polar Prediction Project

Impact of snow accumulation on CryoSat-2 range retrievals over Arctic sea ice: An observational approach with buoy data:  impact of snow on CryoSat-2 freeboard

Physical and morphological properties of sea ice in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas during the 2010 and 2011 NASA icescape missions

Toward quantifying the increasing role of oceanic heat in sea ice loss in the new arctic

Preconditioning of the 2007 sea-ice melt in the eastern Beaufort Sea, Arctic Ocean

Evolution of summer Arctic sea ice albedo in CCSM4 simulations: Episodic summer snowfall and frozen summers

The Seasonal Evolution of Sea Ice Floe Size Distribution

The melt pond fraction and spectral sea ice albedo retrieval from MERIS data: validation and trends of sea ice albedo and melt pond fraction in the Arctic for years 2002–2011

Arctic sea ice in transformation: A review of recent observed changes and impacts on biology and human activity

Interdecadal changes in snow depth on Arctic sea ice

Phytoplankton blooms beneath the sea ice in the Chukchi Sea

Autonomous observations of solar energy partitioning in first-year sea ice in the Arctic Basin

The Arctic shifts to a new normal

A parameter model of gas exchange for the seasonal ice zone

Transition in the fractal geometry of Arctic melt ponds

[bbr2314]

While clouds continue to obscure the extent of the damage in the CAB, I am very inclined to believe that the below model is accurate given the glimpses we can see on satellite. As the ATL pack is annihilated, concentration in the heart of the pack is also crashing. The cleavage is now looking a bit more like a donut, with the heart of the ice now hollowing out completely...

[Tigertown]

AND HOW!!! Looks like this might be the first year everything gets broken up. Whether or not it will all have time to melt remains to be seen.

Hudson Bay looks like a prune drying up in the animation.

[A-Team]

Broken ice 300 km from the pole.

To actually see through the clouds near (but not quite at) the north pole, there is nothing quite like S1A active radar (with ~200x the resolution of passive microwave emission sensors). Four consecutive scenes are roughly tiled up below from http://www.polarview.aq/arctic 

The ice pack is very cracked at very high latitude but there is no suggestion of imminent breakup into floes, formation of open leads, or melt-out (unlike in the leftmost tile).

The blue text is metadata spilling out over the data and ruining what's underneath. Can you imagine yourself making a coding blunder like that and letting it stand unremediated for six months? It seems no one at PolarView ever uses Polarview, fascinating!!!

This is a really wide image needing a click yet nowhere near the full resolution available. The 'attachment server' got rebooted despite it being Friday and the image uploaded in 2-3 seconds despite its size.

[plinius]

The jet streams have been mixing for a few days now. Don't know how long it will continue.
Question; Maybe some of you weather guys can answer. How will this affect the Arctic?
 If it goes on this way, how will it affect the weather and melting conditions or will it cause so many other problems that we won't have time to care?

To answer your question: It will not affect the Arctic. It will also not noticeably affect the Antarctic. It will also not noticeably affect anyone else. Winds have to cross the equator en masse during summer and winter, since one hemisphere is cold, and the other one is warm. On Mars this effect is even far stronger, and there it's not pole melt, but the atmosphere freezing out.
You have now three choices:
i) either come to your mind, use your brain and find out for yourself, that those equator crossing winds simply don't matter (perhaps write down the associated heat flow/advection for a change, it is ridiculously small).
ii) or you let someone else debunk the crap for you, like this guy
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/06/30/claim-that-jet-stream-crossing-equator-is-climate-emergency-is-utter-nonsense/
Has the risk though that if you do not simultaneously apply option i) you might one day end up believing the wrong guy.
or iii) choose to believe in everything that some Scribbler scribbles down for you, because it sounds soooo exciting and fancy, and has such nice emotions and doomsday thoughts associated with it (mark your own pseudo-factual language enjoying the doomsday scenarios you concoct). In this latter case, your family photo might one day look like this:
http://oneofus.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/signs_foil_hat-thumb-550x373-17996.jpg
but I suppose you might still feel happy.


No pun intended, but I feel frustrated with a world in which not even people with the best intentions (which is certainly the case with you writing here) and high intelligence (otherwise one typically does not find one's way into such a forum, instead of the local pub) appear unable to divide fact and fiction, having their judgement clouded by emotions and catastrophe voyeurism (no, you won't be the first one to spot a real catastrophe, and if yes, you are very likely not the one to be able to report it).

[seaicesailor]

That requires a single volunteer (yet highly educated) rather than a thousand of enthusiastic albeit untalented and rigor-lacking average posters.

I am single and highly educated, albeit enthusiastic, untalented, rigor-lacking and average.
Worse yet, I am not a volunteer

Seaicesailor, are you volunteering?

I am an above average, married, highly educated thus cynical and periodically morose miscreant, frequently posting speculative comments with little scientific basis.   

Oh...and unapologetic.

My sarcastic post of the month, no offense implied to anybody.
Being absolutely unschooled but enthusiastic, though time-limited, throwing hunches and speculation;, love this discussion in general, like most of us here.

Back on topic @tigertown I cant see anything that we have not seen recently. 2013 near the pole about this time, 2015 North of CAA and Greenland in August. In both cases the Central Arctic healed in winter. More seasoned people will know more examples (ice holes in 2010 or 2011? 2012 ice state before GAC?).

[Tigertown]

That requires a single volunteer (yet highly educated) rather than a thousand of enthusiastic albeit untalented and rigor-lacking average posters.

I am single and highly educated, albeit enthusiastic, untalented, rigor-lacking and average.
Worse yet, I am not a volunteer

Seaicesailor, are you volunteering?

I am an above average, married, highly educated thus cynical and periodically morose miscreant, frequently posting speculative comments with little scientific basis.   

Oh...and unapologetic.

My sarcastic post of the month, no offense implied to anybody.
Being absolutely unschooled but enthusiastic, though time-limited, throwing hunches and speculation;, love this discussion in general, like most of us here.

Back on topic @tigertown I cant see anything that we have not seen recently. 2013 near the pole about this time, 2015 North of CAA and Greenland in August. In both cases the Central Arctic healed in winter. More seasoned people will know more examples (ice holes in 2010 or 2011? 2012 ice state before GAC?).

Regarding the last paragraph:
I well acknowledge 2013 especially. What is different this year is that a patch that looked fine day after day  can go down so quickly instead of gradually. And I believe there are some places that are giving that didn't before, at least not at the same time. A matter of a couple weeks and we will find out. Till then, I got plenty of time to speculate on it.

[seaicesailor]

Tigertown you will have matter for it since more storms are coming to the region
Interesting forecast where we have a little of everything with some dipole formed pulling winds from Pacific, with warm High over Beaufort and strong storm in Siberian side and CAB, and a bit of export toward the Atlantic.
I personally as Laurent expect the big block to break up and melt out, my hunch mostly by bottom melt, and the scattered debris finished up by a couple of seemingly insignificant storms.

[slow wing]

Yes, according to both of the main weather models the Arctic Basin weather will be dominated by a large low pressure system for at least the next 10 days.

[Tigertown]

The jet streams have been mixing for a few days now. Don't know how long it will continue.
Question; Maybe some of you weather guys can answer. How will this affect the Arctic?
 If it goes on this way, how will it affect the weather and melting conditions or will it cause so many other problems that we won't have time to care?

To answer your question: It will not affect the Arctic. It will also not noticeably affect the Antarctic. It will also not noticeably affect anyone else. Winds have to cross the equator en masse during summer and winter, since one hemisphere is cold, and the other one is warm. On Mars this effect is even far stronger, and there it's not pole melt, but the atmosphere freezing out.
You have now three choices:
i) either come to your mind, use your brain and find out for yourself, that those equator crossing winds simply don't matter (perhaps write down the associated heat flow/advection for a change, it is ridiculously small).
ii) or you let someone else debunk the crap for you, like this guy
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/06/30/claim-that-jet-stream-crossing-equator-is-climate-emergency-is-utter-nonsense/
Has the risk though that if you do not simultaneously apply option i) you might one day end up believing the wrong guy.
or iii) choose to believe in everything that some Scribbler scribbles down for you, because it sounds soooo exciting and fancy, and has such nice emotions and doomsday thoughts associated with it (mark your own pseudo-factual language enjoying the doomsday scenarios you concoct). In this latter case, your family photo might one day look like this:
http://oneofus.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/signs_foil_hat-thumb-550x373-17996.jpg
but I suppose you might still feel happy.


No pun intended, but I feel frustrated with a world in which not even people with the best intentions (which is certainly the case with you writing here) and high intelligence (otherwise one typically does not find one's way into such a forum, instead of the local pub) appear unable to divide fact and fiction, having their judgement clouded by emotions and catastrophe voyeurism (no, you won't be the first one to spot a real catastrophe, and if yes, you are very likely not the one to be able to report it).

I am by no means an expert on the subject and am always willing to learn and strive to be humble enough to be corrected when wrong. That being said, I have only found evidence of Trade winds, which are at lower altitudes, crossing the equator; north to south in December/January and south to north in June/July. These are responsible for the monsoons. The jet streams are at 250hpa, which is much higher than the trade winds and are currently mixing willy nilly as shown by Earth Nullschool. By the way, I did not personally try to declare an emergency as I take everything as needing to be verified. I would like to hear any scientific explanations or rebuttals anyone has, as I am open minded about the subject.

[bbr2314]

That requires a single volunteer (yet highly educated) rather than a thousand of enthusiastic albeit untalented and rigor-lacking average posters.

I am single and highly educated, albeit enthusiastic, untalented, rigor-lacking and average.
Worse yet, I am not a volunteer

Seaicesailor, are you volunteering?

I am an above average, married, highly educated thus cynical and periodically morose miscreant, frequently posting speculative comments with little scientific basis.   

Oh...and unapologetic.

My sarcastic post of the month, no offense implied to anybody.
Being absolutely unschooled but enthusiastic, though time-limited, throwing hunches and speculation;, love this discussion in general, like most of us here.

Back on topic @tigertown I cant see anything that we have not seen recently. 2013 near the pole about this time, 2015 North of CAA and Greenland in August. In both cases the Central Arctic healed in winter. More seasoned people will know more examples (ice holes in 2010 or 2011? 2012 ice state before GAC?).

No other year compares to this one. While 2013 may have had melt near the pole and 2015 was bad, the latter occurred in August, not by 7/1! And 2013 still had an intact Beaufort with peripheral seas relatively untouched.

Even 2012 is miles better than what we have this year.

I know people harp on ARC/HYCOM but as long as the data is consistent (whether right or wrong, as Neven previously said), that is what matters.

Here is the forecast for 7/8 this year and all previous years since 2012.

[Tigertown]

I think that possibly goes back to an earlier discussion we had on here about using SIE as a primary gauge as opposed to volume, maybe because the info is a little(or a lot) more readily available and somewhat more empirical.
You can obviously look at these concentration maps and see the reality, but you have the extent numbers in your mind at the same time.
If these were targets and you were aiming for the heart, 2016 would be the kill shot.
2013 needs a medi-vac.

[A-Team]

Here is 87.3º by 80ºE, as close as cloud-penetrating S1A can get to the north pole (189 km), on 01 July 16. The resolution is ~150m per pixel. The ice looks quite solid other than a possibly fresh crack running diagonally down the far right side (more evident in full resolution original).

[Tigertown]

You can see the area pretty well on June 23rd on worldview. It looked rough then and by now no doubt worse.

[bbr2314]

That zoom shows the only real cohesive area of the pack left, which is primed to be pushed into the ATL's heat.

00z EURO maintains the next big low of the season begins cranking around hr72, by 96 it is down to the mid-970s and wrecking the donut-hole in the CAB. Buckle up...

[Rob Dekker]

Jimbo, Andreas and A-team,

I very much appreciate your references to past conversations, Ceres radiation site, and Perovich' papers, but I think you guys are way over-analysing this.

The issue was simply how much energy is absorbed by the open waters of the Beaufort, and how much of that went to (bottom) melting.

Now, if there is any longwave radiation imbalance at this time, then the surface would be cooling.
But we know that is not happening (if anything, it is warming. After all, we heading into summer), so whatever radiation cooling is there, it is compensated by warming from the atmosphere.
After all, even a "white" surface in the Beaufort like A-team's "Big Block" is at melting temperature.

If air temps are below freezing, then yes, open ocean water close to 0 C (as we see in the Beaufort) will loose energy to the atmosphere. But likewise, if air temps are above freezing, the ocean will absorb energy from the atmosphere.

Either way, there is simply no reason to subtract 40 W/m^2 (or any other number) from the insolation energy input into the open water of the Beaufort at this time when air temps are about the same as water temps, unless you also include the heat transfer from the atmosphere.

This is also consistent with Screen et al 2010, which found that in the transition from spring to summer, around 70 N there is really not any "surface radiation imbalance" to speak of.

[edit] Does anyone want to make an adjustment to my calculations of bottom-melt in the Beaufort ?

[Andreas T]

Rob, your comment is demonstrating the dangers of thinking you can get to grips with heat transfer without "overanalysing". Unless you have just expressed your thoughts poorly, I get the impression you don't know what radiation balance is. Could you provide a link for Screen et al?

Just a few pointers:
(solar)energy is absorbed by open water, and how much of it goes into bottom melting how soon can not be answered the way you seem to think.
Your analogy with land surfaces can be useful when needing to simplify, but the point you are making is undermined when bad statements are made about radiative balance.
The plots from ceres show that landsurfaces have a negative LW balance ( we also know that because they are warmer than clouds or atmosphere) The plots also show that the SW balance is strongly positive (we also know that because the albedo is low) The temperature of land surfaces goes up and warms the atmosphere.
Open water has even lower albedo but as you say absorbs over a large volume of water (unless water is very opaque,  sediment rich waters absorb within a comparatively small depth and surface temperatures rise quickly). So SW balance is  more positive and LW balance is a little less negative because surface temperatures are less, if cloudiness is the same above sea and land.