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Tigertown

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1500 on: December 20, 2016, 10:21:30 PM »
Is it a crazy idea that the storms in and of themselves might just be another feedback loop?
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1501 on: December 20, 2016, 10:28:42 PM »
Is it a crazy idea that the storms in and of themselves might just be another feedback loop?

No, not crazy, just unknown.  For the Storms to be a feedback loop then their effects (increased heat and water vapor further north, increased Sea Ice loss, increased blocking patterns and disruptions to the Jet stream) would have to produce more storms.

since these storms appear to be originating from changes to the Latent heat and water vapor contents directly attributed to increased tropic sea surface temperatures and increasing tropic GPH levels then they are a symptom of other changes and not directly caused by Arctic conditions (that they are affecting so greatly!)
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Tigertown

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1502 on: December 20, 2016, 10:42:12 PM »
Yeah, I suppose I was stretching a little on that. It's just starting to all look like a vicious cycle.
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jai mitchell

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1503 on: December 20, 2016, 11:15:45 PM »
Yeah, I suppose I was stretching a little on that. It's just starting to all look like a vicious cycle.

If last year's El Nino is a major factor (as the first 4 months of this year's DMI temperatures indicate), then it will be.

That is because a rapid reduction in Arctic Sea ice will very likely lead to major changes in Northern Hemisphere weather patterns (global really, but greater effects in Northern Hemisphere)  which will, in turn lead to a greater urgency in reductions of greenhouse gasses (and their associated aerosols).

The 13% reduction in Chinese Aerosol emissions (in the first 6 months of 2016) are also a factor for these storms since the reduction of Aerosols are known to produce more positive PDO values and are likely a major factor in the very mediocre La Nina this year (compared to what was forecasted) 

Here then is the response to arctic weather shifts, leading to Northern Hemisphere weather pattern shifts, that will lead to a FURTHER reductions of aerosols from SE Asia, leading to furter increased Sea Surface Temperature anomalies, Increased atmospheric water vapor contents and greatly increased tropical geopotential heights that are directly attributed to the removal of upper tropospheric aerosol-induced cooling effects.

In that case, a definitive feedback loop exists, based on the known (and always suspected but not quantified) impacts of human activity on these systems, with system responses (weather)  leading to further changes in human behavior (emissions and aerosol reductions), which in turn leads to further accelerated climate impacts.

What it really comes down to is this: did we massively underestimate the cooling impacts of regionally loaded Tropospheric aerosols on the Pacific?  If so, then the CHANGES of those human activities will have greater impacts and will, in and of themselves, drive a (human response) feedback loop.

A Faustian bargain to be sure.
« Last Edit: December 20, 2016, 11:24:14 PM by jai mitchell »
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dnem

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1504 on: December 20, 2016, 11:32:55 PM »
Even if diminishing ice cover wasn't the direct cause of increased storminess, would it be consider a feedback if once a storm reached the arctic, reduced ice covered caused the storm to retain/gain strength and bring warmer waters up from depth, enhancing storm strength and further reducing ice cover and setting the stage for the next storm to have an ever larger impact on ice cover?

Are more storms "bombing out" in the arctic than in the past?  Did far north storms just tend to peter out when reaching ice covered arctic latitudes in the past?

jai mitchell

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1505 on: December 20, 2016, 11:41:50 PM »
Even if diminishing ice cover wasn't the direct cause of increased storminess, would it be consider a feedback if once a storm reached the arctic, reduced ice covered caused the storm to retain/gain strength and bring warmer waters up from depth, enhancing storm strength and further reducing ice cover and setting the stage for the next storm to have an ever larger impact on ice cover?

Are more storms "bombing out" in the arctic than in the past?  Did far north storms just tend to peter out when reaching ice covered arctic latitudes in the past?

The source of energy for these storms is, incredibly, the Gulf of Mexico

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/12/19/2100Z/wind/isobaric/850hPa/overlay=total_precipitable_water/equirectangular=-57.70,46.43,1192
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1506 on: December 20, 2016, 11:54:30 PM »
I got started to thinking about the spot next to Svalbard, where the warm current turns at. I have the habit of looking at surface temps, but was surprised by a temp chart johnm33 posted for Antarctica showing the temps below the surface. Using the same concept and tools for the area around Svalbard, I am surprised again. I can only imagine storms rolling over this reserve of energy. If I am reading this correctly the current has warmed the ocean here to great depths, storing much heat. I picked two spots around Svalbard to pull up charts for. Coordinates are given on the charts, but I tell you these are very close by and within the warmest areas.

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Tigertown

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1507 on: December 21, 2016, 12:45:44 AM »
Whatever the cause, growth on that side of the Arctic paused on the 14th and the front began to retreat. It will continue to retreat for at least a few more days.
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Jim Hunt

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1508 on: December 21, 2016, 02:04:09 AM »
The source of energy for these storms is, incredibly, the Gulf of Mexico

See also:

http://GreatWhiteCon.info/resources/arctic-sea-ice-graphs/#CCITemp

Not to mention another interesting side effect of the big North Atlantic low:

« Last Edit: December 21, 2016, 02:10:02 AM by Jim Hunt »
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1509 on: December 21, 2016, 06:00:19 AM »
Maybe a dumb question, others might know the answer better.

"since these storms appear to be originating from changes to the Latent heat and water vapor contents directly attributed to increased tropic sea surface temperatures and increasing tropic GPH levels then they are a symptom of other changes and not directly caused by Arctic conditions (that they are affecting so greatly!)"

Could changes in the Arctic be the driving factor governing where the storms track too. Arctic rather than over Europe for example, in which case there could be an element of positive feedback?

Jim Hunt

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1510 on: December 21, 2016, 08:19:50 AM »
Could changes in the Arctic be the driving factor governing where the storms track too. Arctic rather than over Europe for example, in which case there could be an element of positive feedback?

Not a dumb question at all Glenn! An area of active research as we speak. See for example:

Links regarding Dr Francis' meandering jet stream effects

and recent reports on the effect of such storms when they reach the Arctic. There's this from NASA:

NASA Researches Storm Frank in the Arctic

and this recent AGU presentation:

http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2016/12/arctic-sea-ice-news-from-agu/#NICE2015

Quote
One winter storm raised the air temperature from -40 F to +32 F in less than 48 hours, while the moisture in the air increased 10 times. All of these factors significantly warm the surface of the snow, even in mid-winter, and slow the growth of ice.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1511 on: December 21, 2016, 03:05:15 PM »
Quote
all them Arctic storms
Must be increasing ... did we not snooze through the winter season in years gone by?

The papers of Boisvert remain the best resource for individual storm impact analysis (such as the 27 Dec 15 colossus -- a couple of figures from that added below) and their historical occurrence, see #784 or her researchgate page but see also the new free full text Nature paper:

http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,1611.msg94119/topicseen.html#msg94119
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39084 north pole meteorology

The N-ICE2015 also experienced six significant storms and documented them extensively. The Z Koenig 2016 article is out and the raw meteorological and oceanographic data have been released. These provide real data on shipside conditions unlike models or reanalysis. The storm/mixing figure from that is attached below. (First page, figures and captions are always available from Wiley even when the article is paywalled.)

Winter ocean-ice interactions under thin sea ice observed by iaoos 2016. DOI: 10.1002/2016JC012195
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm16/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/157916 some 3D images.

Just following up on effects on Fram export of mid-latitude storms sweeping up past Svalbard/FJI, #1495.

One issue in using DMI is that they post Sentinel mosaics of different dates for a single date. These dates are not specified, nor are tiles tagged with their ESA identifier. For example, "Dec 19th" is actually a composite mostly of Dec 18th with a smidgeon of Dec 19th. Tile pieces can be re-used on multiple days and can be a mix of Sentinel 1A and 1B. Howat at OSU uses a much better system involving a simple 2-bit companion layer.

This practice at DMI is very problematic for feature movement tracking because the elapsed time between two scenes has been discarded. One day displacement could appear doubled if it were really two day displacement, halving the velocity (example shown below).

It is necessary then to go to http://www.polarview.aq/arctic to find the underlying tiles as their file names contain these times both stamped irrevocably over the data but more conveniently in the urls (which can be subtracted in a spreadsheet after minor parsing, eg ... S1B_EW_GRDM_1SDH_20161218T100314_164F_N_1.jpg --> 2016 12 18 100314).

These Sentinel satellites are a revolutionary new resource for Arctic ice because the near-polar orbit results in almost daily coverage of high latitudes around the central meridian (though far less for the Chukchi side). This plethora of imagery can totally swamp out the PolarView interface unless its 'custom date range' feature is used to step through individual days.

The very high resolution of Sentinel active radar (compared to passive microwave) is a mixed blessing in that full resolution file sizes are impractically large if the application is a time series feature tracking, say for movement, melt, ridging or fracturing.

In a normal field of science (like astronomy or biomedical genomics), users would simply draw a box and specify their date range and receive back a link to a compressed folder at Amazon AWS where the applicable areas of the applicable images would open as a co-registered stack in common open source software such as ImageJ.

If, like NeilT you've never done an ESA retrieval, you may have missed our previous extended discussion over at Jakobshavn of why the ESA site is such a mammoth time-waster. Here though someone took the initiative of re-posting it all on the cloud with a decent front end.

However it's still in that abandoned jp2 format without box restriction of field of view. We do not want all the whopper files that intersect some tiny corner of the box; we only want the data as cropped to the box. Again, as this involves decompression, array cropping to pixel corners and recompression, it is far better implemented once on the big computer side than thousands of times on the little computer side.

Do people really think that a field biologist, looking for safe ice to draw blood samples from a wild polar bear for chlordane, has the time or background to write python scripts? They're back on email basics, struggling to open attachments.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15093456
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1331997/

The user community for satellite imagery is vastly broader than the original PI. Both AIRS (May 2002 launch on Aqua) and SMOS (Nov 2009) illustrate this. What's this about: 2378 spectral channels of infrared; soil moisture and sea salinity?

No design intent here to measure Arctic clouds or thin ice, yet we take a daily refresh with morning coffee as a given today, but research groups had to seriously pound on the data to get anything Arctic out of them. SMOS-Cryosat-AMSR2 ice partitioning is a major advance in nuanced inter-annual comparison and current freezing season status over ice vs not-ice.

The image below shows a marked-up area north of Greenland from the 20th December Sentinel. It was feasible to track displacements and rotations of the feature shown for about six weeks. This included several patches of stall followed by large Fram-ward lurches coinciding with storms.

Daily mean velocities can be deduced from displacement and timestamps. These are consistent across the image field (ie similar for features farther to the north, not shown). The shortest distance between Greenland and Svalbard being 434 km of which perhaps 200 km is occupied by ice being exported, allows total area (and ice volume) exported to be estimated over the 04-20 Dec 2016 time frame.

But how significant is this loss of older thicker ice in the larger scheme of things, can the effect of winter storms on melt season preconditioning be disentangled from manifestly large natural variations in Fram export, has there been a softening of viscoelastic parameters with thinning warmer ice altering storm effects on the ice pack, is not Atlantic Water bottom and frontal melt along the much longer Polar Front a more important consideration?

While a causal connection between these storms and an export pulse could probably be established, it's hard to say what would have happened in the absence of the storm. As Juan and wip have noted elsewhere, the notion of decomposition into climate + weather is increasingly elusive. Quite a few sites have dropped all mention of 'climate' and are just saying such-and-such was used here as baseline, take it or leave it.
« Last Edit: December 21, 2016, 04:34:07 PM by A-Team »

Sterks

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1512 on: December 21, 2016, 04:53:22 PM »
Note: please, if anyone can explain to me how I attach animations that not need be clicked later to work
See here, key is max 700 x 700 pixels, I think there is a max for memory size as well
https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,1259.0.html

Thank you very much. To attach a figure that fits in, Ascat, an old friend of this forum's but not as much lately, presuming that this technology is not as revealing anymore. Images of 20th of December. I let others for the analysis

jai mitchell

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1513 on: December 21, 2016, 09:13:36 PM »
The coming heatwave in the Arctic is being compared to a destructive storm last December that had been described as "the worst of the extreme events" by NASA  https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/extremely-warm-2015-16-winter-cyclone-weakened-arctic-sea-ice-pack

However, what we are seeing now is an average arctic temperature that has barely fallen BELOW the 'extreme' high temps of that event all year.  The temperatures are now starting to rise and should peak out sometime in the next 12 hours or so.

2015 and 2016 average DMI temperatures north of 80' latitude shown
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1514 on: December 21, 2016, 09:32:56 PM »
Will it ever drop to the baseline temperature?

As it is, with the winter solstice behind us shouldn't make things easier. Now the sun will shine in areas that in the past were covered in ice, increasing insolation earlier than ever. Will the arctic grow fast enough to cover that up before the sun becomes significant?

Regardless, thickness will suck. The Atlantic side has taken a beating the whole freezing season. Even if things cool down it will be low quality ice. Chukchi hasn't even closed,  its actually retreating.

But who knows, maybe the sun somehow stabilizes things in the arctic circle so that winter returns to normal for a few months. That might be enough stored cold for the summer.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1515 on: December 21, 2016, 09:35:18 PM »
The coming heatwave in the Arctic is being compared to a destructive storm last December that had been described as "the worst of the extreme events" by NASA  https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/extremely-warm-2015-16-winter-cyclone-weakened-arctic-sea-ice-pack

However, what we are seeing now is an average arctic temperature that has barely fallen BELOW the 'extreme' high temps of that event all year.  The temperatures are now starting to rise and should peak out sometime in the next 12 hours or so.

2015 and 2016 average DMI temperatures north of 80' latitude shown

Yup.

The Arctic used to be a desert.  as of 20151227 it has become an ocean.  (I've started to consistently use what I will call the ASCII dating scheme.   27 Dec 2015 would sort next to 27 Dec 2014.  20151227 sorts right next to the days before and after.  So would 20161231.)

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1516 on: December 21, 2016, 10:11:34 PM »
I thought the line was going to go higher -4 according to http://www.yr.no/place/North_Pole/Other/North_Pole/long.html
Guess it'll be higher tomorrow. :-/
« Last Edit: December 21, 2016, 10:25:47 PM by shmengie »
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Jim Williams

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1517 on: December 21, 2016, 10:18:56 PM »
I thought the line was going to go higher -4 according to http://www.yr.no/place/North_Pole/Other/North_Pole/long.html
Guess it'll be higher tomorrow. :-/

Cyan denotes 2011-15

How high it goes is interesting, but as long as there is still ice in the Arctic Ocean it is how low it fails to go which is important.  When the Summertime graph starts leaving slightly above freezing then how high becomes important.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1518 on: December 21, 2016, 11:18:13 PM »
put this together using the sentinel 1 data, note one of the images did not upload new data from the previous day in a portion of the image so it seems stalled.  Probably the most interesting is the jump on the last day (today's) image.  I expect tomorrow will be a continuation of this jump and we should be seeing rapid acceleration over the next 3 days.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1519 on: December 21, 2016, 11:18:44 PM »
As it is, with the winter solstice behind us shouldn't make things easier. Now the sun will shine in areas that in the past were covered in ice, increasing insolation earlier than ever. Will the arctic grow fast enough to cover that up before the sun becomes significant?
....

There is no sun up there for another month or two. E.g. on Svalbard, civil polar night lasts from about 11 November until 30 January. Svalbard is on N75-80, so polar night is even longer further up.
The main winter months in terms of freezing are January and February. The little sun that will emerge in February is more or less hanging on the horizon and is not able to melt any ice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_night

Adam Ash

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1520 on: December 21, 2016, 11:51:08 PM »
...
There is no sun up there for another month or two. ..., so polar night is even longer further up.
The main winter months in terms of freezing are January and February. The little sun that will emerge in February is more or less hanging on the horizon and is not able to melt any ice.

Sure, but there is sun shining on open ocean below the Arctic circle, and that warm water in surface currents and in the moist air above it is being swept into the Arctic keeping up the temps in the dark.  Nighttime in the Arctic is not a safe place for ice anywhere anymore.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1521 on: December 22, 2016, 12:34:28 AM »
...
There is no sun up there for another month or two. ..., so polar night is even longer further up.
The main winter months in terms of freezing are January and February. The little sun that will emerge in February is more or less hanging on the horizon and is not able to melt any ice.

Sure, but there is sun shining on open ocean below the Arctic circle, and that warm water in surface currents and in the moist air above it is being swept into the Arctic keeping up the temps in the dark.  Nighttime in the Arctic is not a safe place for ice anywhere anymore.
Perhaps its time to coin a term - "Freezing Momentum" - to reflect the rate at which heat is exiting the Arctic to permit refreeze.

Hefaistos, you are absolutely correct that returning Sun won't have a significant impact in the high Arctic until March at the earliest. As Adam points out, the story here is actually playing out in the peripheral seas.  There in the North Atlantic, Barents and Bering, the sun will start returning much sooner.  If our "Freezing Momentum" hasn't been powerful enough, it will return to find water free of ice, and ready immediately to start taking up insolation.

We got something of a preview of that last season with anemic ice growth in the Bering and Barents, and the entire Atlantic front chewing up ice all winter.

Compound that with the fact that astonishingly high temperatures will the thickening of ice by 10's of centimeters, if not full meters, if it continues unabated.  If large stretches of the ice fail to get past 2 meters in thickness, particularly around the edges, the melt season may become very exciting in unpleasant ways very early.

And then we have the accelerating Fram export, which by A-Team's qualitative calculation have caused over 50,000KM2 of mostly thicker multi-year ice to exit the basin.

What will be our next bit of bad news, do you think?
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1522 on: December 22, 2016, 12:57:38 AM »
It's not hard to imagine the ice go through a series of 'flash' melts leaving little behind by September. Next northern winter then sees even more reversal of anomalous heat/cold between the pole and sub-polar and temperate land area. 2018, with that, begins whatever comes after the Anthropocene.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1523 on: December 22, 2016, 04:39:55 AM »
I've started to consistently use what I will call the ASCII dating scheme.   27 Dec 2015 would sort next to 27 Dec 2014.  20151227 sorts right next to the days before and after.  So would 20161231.)
I call that an ISO date - is there an ASCII standard for date formats as well?

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/iso8601.htm

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1524 on: December 22, 2016, 05:58:29 AM »
Dec 14th til now. The front withdrawing around FJL, while Hudson Bay fills in.
( For those that can spare two minutes or so; FJL slideshow )
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1525 on: December 22, 2016, 06:46:31 AM »
Dec 14th til now. The front withdrawing around FJL, while Hudson Bay fills in.
Wow that's really quite a lot of loss, especially in percentage of Kara Sea.  And of course with more winds, heat and moisture to come.  In regards to Fram export, look at how persistent these export favorable winds are from the 21st to the 25th (click to animate)


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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1526 on: December 22, 2016, 07:16:54 AM »
Dec 14th til now. The front withdrawing around FJL, while Hudson Bay fills in.
The amazing thing is despite Hudson filling up so fast, extent still remains at record low. The Atlantic and Pacific fronts are so weak. The action around FJL. Chukchi refusing to fill up. "Interesting" year.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1527 on: December 22, 2016, 09:00:07 AM »
[clip]
And then we have the accelerating Fram export, which by A-Team's qualitative calculation have caused over 50,000KM2 of mostly thicker multi-year ice to exit the basin.
...

And first winter in our knowledge I suspect that the CAA Garlic Press is still shoving ice south to its demise.  I cannot imagine how that would be quantified but it is a substantial leak in what was previously a solid barrier of multi-year ice.  Now mush and small bits of ice are likely to be heading south all winter.  I cannot find any imagery to support that feeling, but it seems likely to me.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1528 on: December 22, 2016, 09:01:01 AM »
Seems like we're seeing the effects of our season-long atmospheric heat (and wind) anomalies around FJL and Chukchi.  This consistently warmer air (along with warmer and turbulent water) is yielding thinner-ice extent gains that can quickly reverse to losses with cyclonic activity. 

We really need the polar vortex to keep showing signs of recovery and then propagating it's recovery into a more-zonal/less-meandering jet stream. The ice requires a serious thickness build up, so when a cyclone comes it can't significantly compact/melt the pack.  This unfortunately creates extra open water – which according to previously mentioned research, supports a meridional/blocked jet stream along with more cyclone canons.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1529 on: December 22, 2016, 10:15:39 AM »
Arctic lakes thawing earlier each year

Quote
Scientists from the University of Southampton have found Arctic lakes, covered with ice during the winter months, are melting earlier each spring.

The team, who monitored 13,300 lakes using satellite imagery, have shown that on average ice is breaking up one day earlier per year, based on a 14-year period between 2000 and 2013. Their findings are published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.
...
They found a strong relationship between decreasing ice cover and an increasingly early spring temperature rise.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-12/uos-alt121916.php
This will affect sea ice if the albedo of the region drops one day early yet again.  Or will it be even earlier this coming spring?
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A-Team

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1530 on: December 22, 2016, 01:14:43 PM »
Just an update on the effects of the storm...

The hycom animation starts 6 days back and continues 6 days forward from Dec 22. Some regions are marked up that illuminate overall motion and thickening (mostly lack thereof). There's been no export out the CAA garlic press this month. The squeeze on Fram export is predicted to continue. Note too a significant sag down towards Greenland on the final two days best seen below FJI.

DTU does not seem to archive their whole Arctic mosaics. Apparent 'stalls' in ice movement arise from reuse of the same slice of Sentinel pie in building sequential mosaics. The best bet here is PolarView because it provides actual Sentinel film strips with the time stamps necessary for velocity determination, (d2-d1)/(t2-t1).

The overall velocity vector field is hard to get at in detail because of the lack of simultaneity in coverage. However locally we could do this quite well in view of the six day repeat Sentinel 1AB coverage. However what we are doing is totally obsolete in view of T Scambos' automatic feature recognition tracking process now being done globally as a massive compute on all the planet's ice.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-usgs-landsat-8-satellite-provides-global-view-of-speed-of-ice

The December UHH AMSR2 averages are shown for the Chukchi and Svalbard-FJI in the second animation. Both regions are surprisingly trendless. In image averaging, here a stack of 21, transparency is set so each layer contributes equally to the resultant image. (Yes, there's an app for that.) The palette needs to desaturate properly to a quantitative grayscale as does U Hamburg's.

The third image suggests a region in and about 85º N that is still not solid ice after averaging away weather artifacts.

The fourth shows the dramatic change yesterday poleward of Franz Josef Islands. Some of this is displacement and some is compaction but the rest is melt. A similar event of Dec 27 last year studied by Boisvert also produced significant ice melt.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2016, 05:31:10 PM by A-Team »

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1531 on: December 22, 2016, 01:18:28 PM »
I've started to consistently use what I will call the ASCII dating scheme.   27 Dec 2015 would sort next to 27 Dec 2014.  20151227 sorts right next to the days before and after.  So would 20161231.)
I call that an ISO date - is there an ASCII standard for date formats as well?

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/iso8601.htm

That would sort fine too, but the dashes are unnecessary.  It would have to be one or the other to work.  mixing with and without dashes would not sort in ASCII standard order.  ASCII (now called UTF-8) is a character encoding that fits in a byte.  It has a natural sort order simply by treating the characters as numbers, so if you plug dates in that format into just about any computer program that likes to sort things in alphabetical order then they will sort into date order.  (The obvious case being filenames in a directory.)

6roucho

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1532 on: December 22, 2016, 01:24:50 PM »
I've started to consistently use what I will call the ASCII dating scheme.   27 Dec 2015 would sort next to 27 Dec 2014.  20151227 sorts right next to the days before and after.  So would 20161231.)
I call that an ISO date - is there an ASCII standard for date formats as well?

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/iso8601.htm

That would sort fine too, but the dashes are unnecessary.  It would have to be one or the other to work.  mixing with and without dashes would not sort in ASCII standard order.  ASCII (now called UTF-8) is a character encoding that fits in a byte.  It has a natural sort order simply by treating the characters as numbers, so if you plug dates in that format into just about any computer program that likes to sort things in alphabetical order then they will sort into date order.  (The obvious case being filenames in a directory.)
Agreed. I was being pedantic, Jim. ISO date format is with or without the dashes. It's a standard sortable date format in programming.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2016, 01:35:14 PM by 6roucho »

NeilT

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1533 on: December 22, 2016, 01:55:06 PM »
I was most interested to see that the ice had begun for form in the very north of the Baltic, only to suddenly diminish and then become fleeting ice which is showing as almost nothing on the Bremen overheads.

Whilst we have much more oddness in the CAB, it is yet another indication of the weirdness going on this year.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1534 on: December 22, 2016, 04:15:14 PM »
In case anyone hasn't noticed via the other threads, we are going backwards again.
NSIDC extent (106 km)
2016,    12,  18,     11.785,     
2016,    12,  19,     11.853,     
2016,    12,  20,     11.983,     
2016,    12,  21,     11.835,

From the Europe facing side of FJL, I picked two points to check the SST's. My take is that there was some upwelling from storms, but I am curious about what others think.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2016, 05:04:51 PM by Tigertown »
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1535 on: December 22, 2016, 04:34:32 PM »
Years-long lurker, signed up to post this image:

I have no idea how precise this model is with current temps, but wow.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1536 on: December 22, 2016, 05:14:23 PM »
Quote
we're going backwards again
The 01-21 Dec 2016 time series below shows how extraordinary yesterday was for the Franz Josef region, in terms of day-on-day new open water (taken as 0 concentration AMSR2 differencing).

So what's it going to do tomorrow (ie today, Dec 22nd): storm-over or game-over? DTU offers an undated image with no color key dated only as 'today' which is something short of science. Sentinel-!A did pass over FJI timestamped to the 22nd and PolarView has it processed but as acquired on the 21st! 

The goal with Sentinel 1AB would be to produce a very high resolution version of sea ice concentration. The images seem to benefit slightly from global brightness contrast adjustment but benefit greatly from adaptive contrast processing (CLAHE) as do Landsat-8's over ice.

Here we need to synch up Sentinel with N-ICE2015 in situ observations in order to properly interpret ice types. (They used closed-source RadarSat imagery and had other agendas.)

The orbital swaths are also very favorable for repeat Fram transects (N Greenland to Svalbard flux gate). These arrive processed into discrete tiles much like a strip of movie film. Since the ice is not moving that fast (~16 km/day, above post) and, after a certain terminal velocity is approached, starts to greatly resist further acceleration by wind, top edge features will remain visible on the southern edge on successive 6-day 1AB orbital tiles. The underlying Transpolar Current provides a fairly steady backdrop (?) to whatever the wind is able to add.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2016, 07:05:59 PM by A-Team »

jai mitchell

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1537 on: December 22, 2016, 05:32:01 PM »
I suspect that the CAA Garlic Press is still shoving ice south to its demise. 

It doesn't appear to be so.  all locked up frozen solid.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1538 on: December 22, 2016, 05:34:59 PM »
@tigertown

what are your thoughts about intersecting lines looking at the attached images ?

to analyze development to rely on optical (graphs) without considering air and water temps as well as wind and wave action does probably not work. further i think that the amount of ice in km2 and/or km3 has to be priorized over mm in graphs, they are misleading at times.

however i don't think we gonna those touch for some time to come if at all, let's see

BTW great stuff coming from you, in the antarctic threads as well, very usefull indeed, thanks for all that.

cheers and merry Xmas to everyone just in case i won't post before :-)

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1539 on: December 22, 2016, 05:43:01 PM »
It looks like the low pressure systems moving up from the Atlantic are getting  a little weaker and will continue to weaken in the coming days. It looks like a lot of moisture in the atmosphere moving up from mid-latitudes over the next week. I don't know too much about that and have nothing to compare as far as what it should normally look like, but the huge plumes extending halfway over the planet seem weird looking to me.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1540 on: December 22, 2016, 05:55:00 PM »
@tigertown

what are your thoughts about intersecting lines looking at the attached images ?
I may not be the best person to ask about that, as I am about color blind. I can tell the shades apart, but can't look across at the code and match them. However, I think you are probably right, but leave room for me to be corrected.
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Apocalypse4Real

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1541 on: December 22, 2016, 07:07:49 PM »
Arctic "heat wave" storm in IR imagery. Source: Environment Canada. Black is the warmest temps. Looks like the storm is devouring the North Pole.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1542 on: December 22, 2016, 09:05:16 PM »
Based on the forecast, I expect it to rise again tomorrow.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1543 on: December 22, 2016, 09:16:50 PM »
Arctic "heat wave" storm in IR imagery. Source: Environment Canada. Black is the warmest temps. Looks like the storm is devouring the North Pole.

Nullschool is claiming that the current temp at the pole is -1.6; which, if I remember correctly, is just about freezing.  Not going to get much thicker at that rate.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1544 on: December 22, 2016, 10:24:23 PM »
Arctic lakes thawing earlier each year

Quote
Scientists from the University of Southampton have found Arctic lakes, covered with ice during the winter months, are melting earlier each spring.

The team, who monitored 13,300 lakes using satellite imagery, have shown that on average ice is breaking up one day earlier per year, based on a 14-year period between 2000 and 2013. Their findings are published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.
...
They found a strong relationship between decreasing ice cover and an increasingly early spring temperature rise.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-12/uos-alt121916.php
This will affect sea ice if the albedo of the region drops one day early yet again.  Or will it be even earlier this coming spring?

Very interesting, and also a solid evidence of global warming.

I believe this trend is much longer than that.
You can compare with the lengthening of meteorological summer. Sweden has an interesting definition of "summer": that's when the average temperature stays above +10 C for at least five days in a row. In the graph attached they defined the average length of Summer from 1969-1990, and then looked at deviations at four different places (Stockholm e.g. is on N60 latitude, Falun and Haparanda are to the north, and Växjö to the south).
Green columns mean that Summer is longer, measured in nr of weeks, blue columns that Summer is shorter.
It turns out that Summer has indeed become longer on average, in Stockholm and Falun it's about 2-3 weeks longer Summer nowadays compared to the average. I suppose the same trend is noticable in the warming Arctic region.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1545 on: December 22, 2016, 10:33:19 PM »
Arctic "heat wave" storm in IR imagery. Source: Environment Canada. Black is the warmest temps. Looks like the storm is devouring the North Pole.

Nullschool is claiming that the current temp at the pole is -1.6; which, if I remember correctly, is just about freezing.  Not going to get much thicker at that rate.
In terms of heat flow, the rule of thumb I use is that you get 1CM of ice per degree C below about -10C.  Temperatures above that (-10C) actually support melt, and heat flow from the water will exceed the loss required to freeze the ice.

QED, if the temps are above -10C, not only is the ice not thickening, there may actually be active bottom melt.  Not much, mind you, but the opposite of what should be happening.

Another thing to consider here is the core ice temperature.  In the past, with thicker ice (2+M), the central 1-2M of ice would chill to the ambient average temperature - -20-30C.  This not only strengthened the ice significantly, but provided a heat sync to resist transient warming.

Without very cold conditions - consistently more than -20/30C - you don't get that chill and hardening - actual changes to the ice's crystalline structure.  The general effect will be to make the ice more sensitive to changing conditions and vulnerable to physical stress.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1546 on: December 22, 2016, 10:54:08 PM »
Here is total precipitable water coming into the Atlantic-facing sector of the Arctic Ocean. The scale bar is 20 mm in height. (Notion from ZackL's twitter site; crop and palette swap to improve northern latitude visualization.)

Data taken from the anon ftp site provided by:

http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php?color_type=tpw_nrl_colors&prod=europe&timespan=72hrs&anim=

Jim Hunt

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1547 on: December 22, 2016, 10:57:46 PM »
Nullschool is claiming that the current temp at the pole is -1.6; which, if I remember correctly, is just about freezing.  Not going to get much thicker at that rate.

Buoy 300234064010010 near the pole briefly recorded an air temperature of zero Celsius:

http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/raw_plots.php?bid=300234064010010


« Last Edit: December 22, 2016, 11:03:43 PM by Jim Hunt »
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1548 on: December 22, 2016, 11:01:45 PM »
Tt "but I am curious about what others think" I was thinking rain[?] seems A-Team beat me to it.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1549 on: December 23, 2016, 12:03:10 AM »
I live in the Southeast U.S. and am used to seeing moisture come up through here out of the Gulf of Mexico in a similar war; but that's the Arctic it's going into. Right? Looks like it, at least.
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