GFS model suggests temps at 850hp have dropped below -8 for much of the remaining ice pack. Andrew Slater's 925hp temps have dropped a good way below 0, although not quite as far as I thought they might go. Is the surface melt season all but over now? And perhaps an early end to the bottom melt season later on?
Until we get to -10C and below, I expect bottom melt will continue as long as we have weather stirring up the pack. That will continue the process of retrieving heat from depth to replenish that lost to re-radiation. With as much heat as has entered the basin and peripheral seas, I expect we may continue losing extent and area through the end of September.
I think so too. Even with the current drop if something should keep up bottom melt is current weather. The question is what happens with atmospheric temps when all these gales end, anything I guess.
I wrote my final "guess" about the 2016 melt season on the blog rather than the forum. But to repeat. If it follows 2006 as I have said all along, there will be an increasing melt season in August (I said that already), followed by a sharp stop and some re-growth at the end of the first week in September, but with bottom melt into the third week in September.
That, for me, will be the final observation. Well apart from all that heat derailing the onset of the winter ice pack and leaving it both weak and thin for the next season's melt.
For anyone who watches Hurricanes quite closely (not at a meteorological level but more where they go and what it does to SST), it's clear that hurricanes work on the differential between excessive SST's and the colder atmosphere above. Hurricanes suck the heat out of the sea and, in parallel, give it to the upper atmosphere and sequester it in water vapour which is both cooled and delivered to another location (often land), in the form of torrential downpours.
That is what I'm seeing here. The deeper the pressure gradient, the more heat is being sucked out of the sea to be transported elsewhere. That, I believe, whilst having a short term effect of pumping heat from the depths right now, will end the bottom melt earlier than would otherwise have been the case. Without the storms we should see bottom melt into October.
Storms or no storms we can see that areas of ice (ESS for instance), are simply not melting the way they did in 2012.
If I'm correct and top melt ends less than 3 weeks from today, we'll have a 3rd/4th place finish in extent with, as I've said all along, something quite interesting in the area stakes. I believe effective open water pretty much to the pole classifies as "interesting" and that's what it's looking like now.
That falls into the same category as the open lead of September 2006 where the excessive SST's continued to do their damage under the ice even after the top melt had ended.
I'm already looking forward to the winter growth season and next years melt season. 2016 may have some surprises yet, but my anticipation is all for the next 14 months.