however the medium term impact on the ice is rather teeny, or can you show me SSW drops in PIOMAS or area?
Hi arcticio,
Does the pebble kicked off the top of a mountain, which starts an avalanche, have a teeny effect? ANYTHING that causes the polar vortex to break down ENDS the Arctic ocean, and extends the Atlantic by 14,000 km
2.
WebGL, yup, a fantastic technology and I have a GFS/PIOMAS project 80% ready... any ideas?
Short answer: multiple layers defined in a .kmz file for display in Google Earth. The time-series animations are already build-in, and the .kmz can point to the source data on the web.
However, I'm not that keen on just reproducing PIOMAS. I'll let some Grad student do that as his or her Masters project. PIOMAS does not distinguish between FYI/MYI, and therefore gets the thermodynamics wrong by at least 10%. Mechanical strength in shear / compression is another big difference between FYI/MYI, as attested by the massive Feb/Mar 2013 cracking event over the entire FYI area in the Central basin. Choosing an average value between FYI and MYI means both domains will be poorly modeled.
So I believe PIOMAS is getting the volume increase wrong for Feb/Mar 2013. Slabbing/thickening is a process that happens mostly with MYI, which is hard enough to resist the pressure from a wind-driven impact by another massive ice floe. FYI just spreads more when pushed, rather than resist. Look how the MYI domain has pushed into the Beaufort sea during this time period. There's been quite a few recent papers on sea ice rheology, and there are real differences.
I therefore believe PIOMAS will be of minimal value as a predictive tool come the final days of the Summer sea ice. To wit, in Aug 2012, the system was still predicting 4.3 m km
2 as the Sep SIE. Statistical models were much closer to NSIDC's final monthly value for September.
Ideas? Many. What in particular are you trying to solve? How to make more time? My uncle Albert would have been a better fellow to ask, but there's this much younger guy named Stephen up in Cambridge...