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Glenn Tamblyn

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1650 on: December 29, 2016, 03:43:19 AM »
That 'loop' on the Hycom thickness graph is worth watching as an indicator of how much movement there is towards the Fram. In November it was sitting over the western end of Ellesmere. Now it has moved above the Lincoln Sea. How long to traverse the top of Greenland?

aslan

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1651 on: December 29, 2016, 11:28:39 AM »
does anyone have an explanation for this apparently open water lead that persists now for quite some time and despite the fact that temps are sufficiently low in barrow to overfreeze any open water by now ? hope it's not an optical illusion or something like that but it's been there for a while now :-)

Probably not an illusion... Canadian Sea ice Service is showing also a region of very weak ice near Point Barrow :



And satellite products are also showing a region of low sea ice concentration around Point Barrow :



Why ? probably because there is offshore wind, and the sea ice is extremely weak, and Arctic Ocean beneath probably still warm.

And weather forecasts are dire, showing advection of warm, moist air from the south. Chukchi is barely closed since the last few days, be will probably open here and there for the beginning of January. This is worrisome, Chukchi sea ice will never fully consolidated before Spring, allowing warm Pacific to easily reach the central pack during the melting season.

A-Team

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1652 on: December 29, 2016, 01:41:04 PM »
R Saldo at DTU has posted some fabulous Sentinel mosaics that run for 16 months and more. The file directory is here: http://www.seaice.dk/movies/ These include one for Nares + Lincoln + Morris Jesup + Fram + Svalbard and a whole-Arctic moving mosaic best viewed full screen starting from:





Testing again below if the smallest of DTU-hosted mp4 will run within the forum: no, it would have to be converted to gif and hosted elsewhere. Looking this up on the Simple Machines site, 120 people have already requested this feature. A snippet is shown below after conversion to gif.
« Last Edit: December 29, 2016, 02:01:22 PM by A-Team »

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1653 on: December 29, 2016, 01:49:31 PM »
drama enough in just one frame .. Morris Jessup .. Sentinel - 1 ... Dmi 28-12-2016
  there seems no hiding place for ice anymore ..
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1654 on: December 29, 2016, 02:14:10 PM »
Quote
there seems no hiding place for ice anymore ..

Too much warm water.  And all that energy it took to melt ice (a lot more energy to melt ice than to warm water)....is then freed up to warm the water even more.  Not good....

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A-Team

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1655 on: December 29, 2016, 03:08:02 PM »
Quote
forecasts are dire, showing advection of warm, moist air from the south. Chukchi has barely closed the last few days, be will probably open here and there for the beginning of January. This is worrisome, Chukchi sea ice will never fully consolidated before Spring, allowing warm Pacific to easily reach the central pack during the melting season.
The Chukchi, using boundaries of NSIDC director Serreze, still has a few pixels of open water left on Dec 28th but has essentially closed over. Bulk movement that pulls the whole ice pack away from the shore should probably be distinguished from open water resulting from not freezing or melting.

The Chukchi first showed open water on May 26th of this year. That would be 216 days, partly or wholly open some 60% of the year. Surely that qualifies as 'seasonally open' in part since there are 4 seasons of 91 days to a year last I checked.

The IPCC, to its everlasting shame, snuck in "five consecutive seasons" in 2013 to please a rogue delayer nation in defining an ice-free Arctic Ocean, gross ignorance in terms of the onset of planetary heat budget effects (which we already see). http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session36/p36_doc3_approved_spm.pdf ]

The Svalbard - Franz Josef region reached its maximal winter retreat on Dec 26th at 85.8ºN which is about 60 km north of the northernmost land in Greenland. The shocking animation below compares this date to the overall Arctic Ocean yearly minimum declared on 10 Sept 16.

We really need to go over to a new measure of ice coverage which assimilates the contribution of SMOS in defining thin ice (up to half a meter) because 'ice' alone significantly understates the seriousness of the Arctic situation. For example, only 77% of the ice was thicker than 0.5 m on 28 Dec 16 (using pixel counts on the geotiff at U Bremen; it's their job, not mine, to provide proper daily stats).

To reach a traditional denning site on Kongsøya (King's Island off Svalbard), a pregnant polar bear would have at best, if somehow starting on the closest ice and somehow able to hold an optimal bearing, a 260 km swim. Polar bears at Hudson Bay (Churchill) have gone from three chubby cubs to a malnourished one with none surviving the first year; in the Beaufort bears are resorbing embryos; the situation on the Bering and Chukchi seas has to be far worse.

We need to stop peddling false hope and start presenting reality. It costs a polar bear more energy to move from goose nest to nest than the egg calories provide; they can't go on very long based on cannibalism nor nine day swims that take away 15% of precious body fat; upon mating with a grizzly bear, their many adaptations become maladaptive, with responsible alleles soon lost from the genome meaning descendants can't return to the ice should it ever come back. 

http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/news-room/scientists-and-explorers-blog/challenging-ice-year-svalbard Feb 2016

http://news.berkeley.edu/2014/05/08/polar-bear-genome-gives-new-insight-into-adaptations-to-high-fat-diet/
« Last Edit: December 29, 2016, 09:37:52 PM by A-Team »

GeoffBeacon

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1656 on: December 29, 2016, 03:43:24 PM »
A-team

Quote
a rogue delayer nation

Which nation?
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1657 on: December 29, 2016, 05:43:01 PM »
Quote
there seems no hiding place for ice anymore ..

Too much warm water.  And all that energy it took to melt ice (a lot more energy to melt ice than to warm water)....is then freed up to warm the water even more.  Not good....
Directly tied to this absurdity... where the 80N temperatures can drop fully 8C, and *still* be 10C warmer than normal.  So far this winter is running with roughly twice the positive anomaly we saw last winter.

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php

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DrTskoul

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1658 on: December 29, 2016, 05:45:21 PM »
How many FDDs below normal are we by now?

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1659 on: December 29, 2016, 05:57:07 PM »
How many FDDs below normal are we by now?
Not sure, but over a month ago we were over 600 below normal. I expect we're already flirting with last year's total for the entire season, and we've still 3 1/2 months left to go until the melt season.
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Gray-Wolf

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1660 on: December 29, 2016, 06:32:41 PM »
I think we should all remain mindful of the type of ice that melt season provided us with in Sept? This ice had already been through one warm winter but managed to limp through melt season. Will it have thickened much over winter ( a gloss of new ice over the base/sides) or have its core temp down to the minus 20's for months?

The Sun is already returning to our side of the world so we are counting down to melt season. Will it start by seeing ice again shattered and riding over itself/beaching itself and so opening up the edges even before melt is underway?

I worry that Beaufort will again be showing open water by the time the sun is up there and I believe the condition of the ice will be worse than last spring meaning if we saw a repeat of the last melt season we would still end up with less ice come min.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1661 on: December 29, 2016, 11:03:12 PM »
Quote
Beaufort will again be showing open water by the time the sun is up there
The Bering Strait is the southernmost part of the (rather lopsided) Arctic Ocean. There is enough light there by Jan 18th for near-polar orbit satellites to take visible imagery. The Beaufort is lit up by the Feb 18th and nearly the whole Arctic by Mar 18th.

While very little solar energy is available and even less is taken up by the ice on short days at low sun angle, there could be other associated effects, for example on wind, waves and mid-latitude advection.

In the spring of 2015, there was very little SMOS thin ice in the Beaufort on these dates, though the Barents area had already gone off the deep end. Split comparisons to 2016 are provided below. U Bremen provides this spring SMOS data back to 2011 which could give a better idea of variability though it's not long enough to establish a decisive trend (especially if we're in a new decline paradigm).

ktonine

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1662 on: December 29, 2016, 11:13:43 PM »
Accumulated Freezing Degree Days N80 thru Dec 29, 2016:
Climatology: 2141.1
2016:            1138.6
Anomaly:     -1002.5



Implied new ice thickness to date:
Per Lebedev:
Climo: 1.412 m
2016:   0.973 m

Per Billelo
Climo:  1.137 m
2016:    0.788 m

jdallen

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1663 on: December 29, 2016, 11:18:04 PM »
How many FDDs below normal are we by now?
Not sure, but over a month ago we were over 600 below normal. I expect we're already flirting with last year's total for the entire season, and we've still 3 1/2 months left to go until the melt season.
I've just tried downloading the NSIDC-163 data set, which supposedly is FDD's by latitude and longitude.  I was going to try tinkering with that using the Lebedev ice thickness formula:  Thickness (cm) = 1.33 * FDD (°C)^0.58

The information as to how the files are structured is infuriatingly sparse.  Hopefully someone from the NSIDC will help me make sense of it.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1664 on: December 29, 2016, 11:38:25 PM »
Thought I'd write up the Dec 1-28 sea ice changes briefly and include the transcribed remarks from the initial AGU session from the 2015 Norwegian Young Sea Ice expedition on the Lance.

See: http://www.megiddo666.apocalypse4real-globalmethanetracking.com/2016/12/arctic-heatwaves-storms-and-sea-ice.html

Mats Granskog, a sea-ice researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø and chief scientist of the Norwegian Young Sea Ice (N-ICE2015) project, presented at the AGU conference, there were...

“Lot’s of surprises. We saw a new Arctic where the ice is much thinner, only three to four feet thick and this ice functions much differently than it did five to ten years ago when the ice was much thicker.”

“We were also surprised that there was so much snow on the ice. Way more than we expected from earlier work."

“We observed the first northern most under sea ice phytoplankton bloom very early in the season when the ice was still snow covered. It was only this new Arctic ice, very mobile ice, that allowed this to happen."

"So we can say that this thinner and younger ice today works very differently than the ice we knew. It moves much faster. It breaks up more easily. It is way more vulnerable to storms and winds."

“The so called Arctic Amplification, the rapid warming of the Arctic, is in part caused by a reduction in the Arctic sea ice, seen in the last decade. And this has already impacted the patterns of weather and climate on the planet.”

"It is disturbing that the accelerated warming in the Arctic actually feeds more warming in the Arctic, and can even result in more drastic changes. And these drastic changes in the Arctic sea kind of calls into the question the knowledge that we have today about Arctic sea ice.”

Source: Youtube AGU

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1665 on: December 30, 2016, 12:24:51 AM »
Could it be that it is thin ice that formed after the last snowfall?

with "a while" i mean weeks, only a few pictures in the dark were not showing this, the reason why i asked is that the very same place was definitely frozen solid in previous years, first i thought it might be a cloud or mist bank but on some images it appears to be clearly open water or wet mush ice. i suspect a current that could carry warmer waters from somewhere else along the coast but cannot verify, that would take an oceanologist or another specialist to explain.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1666 on: December 30, 2016, 02:40:34 AM »
What is there is not frozen solid. Lot's of fracturing. Latest METOP-1 AVHRR image attached for partial Canadian Arctic ice state as illustration.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1667 on: December 30, 2016, 04:01:54 AM »
The water close to shore at Barrow is not terribly warm below the surface, but it is not cold as it should be either.
« Last Edit: December 30, 2016, 04:07:37 AM by Tigertown »
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1668 on: December 30, 2016, 04:07:45 AM »

jdallen

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1669 on: December 30, 2016, 06:04:49 AM »
The water close to shore at Barrow is not terribly warm below the surface, but it is not cold as it should be either.

A lot of heat lurking very close to the surface, pretty easily accessible once sunlight returns.  Until then, what ice *is* there protects the reservoir of heat from dispersal.  Intrusions of moisture and heat from further south reinforce that.

Hmmm.  With a little bit of disruption from a storm to move ice around, break things up and pull some of that heat up from depth, major May melt out of the Beaufort perhaps?  Who needs melt ponds if we can go straight to open water, eh?
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1670 on: December 30, 2016, 06:40:27 AM »
Taking a look at the big picture regarding sea surface temperature anomalies.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1671 on: December 30, 2016, 07:28:48 AM »
Quite common sight these coastal leads on locations, either due to tides, directional winds packing the ice over the sea, or other compaction. And of course the already mentioned "more heat" applies too. Might just be the Pacific pulse of warmth has surfaced due the cape nearby.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1672 on: December 30, 2016, 07:51:59 AM »
Funny thing I noticed on Earth NS, the total precipitable water seemed to be higher over the Bering Strait than anywhere else in the Arctic, and at all altitudes.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1673 on: December 30, 2016, 12:45:37 PM »
Funny thing I noticed on Earth NS, the total precipitable water seemed to be higher over the Bering Strait than anywhere else in the Arctic, and at all altitudes.

Did you mean latitudes? Total precipitable water is measured in kg/m2 so it includes all altitudes and it doesn't matter which pressure level you select.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1674 on: December 30, 2016, 01:52:48 PM »
Funny thing I noticed on Earth NS, the total precipitable water seemed to be higher over the Bering Strait than anywhere else in the Arctic, and at all altitudes.

Did you mean latitudes? Total precipitable water is measured in kg/m2 so it includes all altitudes and it doesn't matter which pressure level you select.
No, I meant altitude, as I did not know that it was all included. I guess the word 'total' should have given that away? I knew the units, but did not realize the implications. Thanks.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1675 on: December 30, 2016, 03:14:50 PM »
I have a problem with SST anomalies when it comes to the Arctic when compared to a base like 1971 to 2000. Much of the positive anomaly is actually capturing shrinking on the ice edge. Open water is warmer than ice covered water. It would be interesting to look at the anomaly when compared to a baseline of, say, the last decade but compare it only to sea water that has been ice free for every single one of these years. In other words, overlay the maximum extent for each of the baseline years and then compare open water to open water.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1676 on: December 30, 2016, 03:40:57 PM »
Based on what I'm seeing at nullschool, Chukchi should reopen within the next 3-4 days. It seems the Pacific side and the Atlantic side are taking turns at destroying ice.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1677 on: December 30, 2016, 07:37:00 PM »
Funny thing I noticed on Earth NS, the total precipitable water seemed to be higher over the Bering Strait than anywhere else in the Arctic, and at all altitudes.

TPW, being the weight of the entire mass of water in a square meter up through the entire atmospheric column, is not altitude dependent, though I am sure you probably figured that out already ;-)

It seems to me that the Barrow lead was formed as a result of a strong wind event starting here:  https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/12/22/1800Z/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-144.66,70.57,3000/loc=-156.563,71.430 

This storm basically stalled out directly over Barrow for > 24 hours with 30+ Km/hr winds blowing directly offshore.  so yeah, that would about do it.  The total wind event was about 4 days long
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1678 on: December 30, 2016, 11:50:39 PM »
An interesting (but inconsequential?) breakup of landfast ice took place a few days ago along the coast of Morris Jesup. These are very big blocks of thick ice, over 88 km for the piece shown. The third Sentinel image (S1A_EW_GRDM_1SSH_20161229T101209) is at one-third of full scale. As noted earlier, the ice is being squeezed against the tip of Greenland, forcing ice either to the west or down the Fram.

« Last Edit: December 31, 2016, 04:26:25 PM by A-Team »

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1679 on: December 31, 2016, 02:04:52 PM »
One unique feature of 2016 is the failure of the Dmi 80N to fall below the daily mean at any time while the mean itself was below the freezing point of the sea . Only during summer did temps struggle to even get above mean values . If this changes ...
This freeze/thaw season has been almost exactly as I expected thus far . A huge amount of damage done , I see no potential for recovery in 2017 . My ringside seat remains warm .. as does the weather here in Ireland
I wish everyone here a wonderful wonder-filled New Year . May it be the year the world wakes up to the rapidity of change at our poles
 
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1680 on: December 31, 2016, 02:45:01 PM »
From January to March DMI 80º temperatures were about 5º above average - from April to August only just above average - and then from September to December it's been about 10º above

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1681 on: December 31, 2016, 03:22:42 PM »
You could maybe compare the arctic year to a single day elsewhere? Over the globe the nights are breaking records and their contribution is raising the daily averages. Without turning up the sun the peak daytime temps are hard to better in many places but when you give temps a head start on the day then maybe you can push the record?

The record breaking winter temps are giving the Arctic 'Day' a head start ( as we saw last year) and so that thing which keeps summer temps pegged, the ice, will soon be gone from beyond 80N and we will then see our first 'summer spikes' in temp.

I am sure that the timing of those first 'spikes' will become a thing to be feared in the new blighted areas of the Northern Hemisphere as they will promise more disaster as the Autumn/early winter arrives and so begins the process of squeezing out a Nino's worth of energy into the atmosphere above.

We have moved on from warning about the changes to come to witnessing them.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1682 on: December 31, 2016, 03:34:44 PM »
Quote
One unique feature of 2016 is the failure of the Dmi 80N to fall below the daily mean at any time while the mean itself was below the freezing point of the sea .

I've attached 3 graphs of DMI.  You can see that 2016 is "off the charts" compared to the other two (especially in the Fall and early winter).  Last year is really the "closest thing" to this year.  I inserted 2012 because it was the record low year for the Arctic....and you can see what the temps were AFTER that record low ice level.

Too much warm water....combined with too much warm air.  Interesting times....
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1683 on: December 31, 2016, 04:09:47 PM »
Layered 2011-2015 in cyan behind 2016 and its...  Chilling?
« Last Edit: December 31, 2016, 06:02:32 PM by shmengie »
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1684 on: December 31, 2016, 04:57:11 PM »
The race is on: will JAXA/IJIS stay as lowest till the bitter end of this year? (Not bitter as in cold, but as in, well, bitter: been a bad year in many ways). Although New Year is astronomically inconsequential it does have a symbolic value. Any bets?
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1685 on: December 31, 2016, 05:17:26 PM »
thank you all for the very useful replies on the barrow lead. first of all i assume that all of you agree that there is indeed a lead and it's not a shadow LOL, i wasn't that sure to be honest.

further i observed that lead to be there for weeks with only a few images in the past where i couldn't make it out, mostly under pitch black conditions, which is why i suspected some kind of upwelling due to currents or something similar.

further, considering all your replies i'm still somewhat puzzled to see the lead stationary over weeks and that in a place where i did never before see such a lead at this time of year at all.

so what we have are many good theories and ideas as to the cause but as it seems only in situ observations and measurements (another point for more buoys) would allow for a definite answer.

I wish you all a happy new year and a nice rumbling new years eve's party. since my better half is a few decades younger i will probably suffer of that LOL, same procedure as every year i'd say.

cheers

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1686 on: December 31, 2016, 05:52:31 PM »
another of those "hot spots" (relative)

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1687 on: December 31, 2016, 06:28:38 PM »
Still looking at the persistence of intermediate sea ice concentration in the central ice pack (according to UH AMSR2). In the past we've generally blown off these one day wonders as passing moisture artifacts in the atmospheric column, but this one has drifted and persisted for almost a week now (see earlier jdallen post).

It corresponds fairly well to a dark area on Sentinel active radar and (as dark means smooth surface) may represent a local melt or swath of rain from Dec 24th. The region seems too broad to represent water sloshing over low-freeboard ice and refreezing as observed in N-ICE2015.

There's always an issue in comparing successive days, since features are invariably change day to day, has a given feature has moved or been replaced by a superficially similar but unrelated pattern -- it's somewhat in the eye of the beholder. The second animation looks at ten days of AMRS2 in interactive 3D with the idea it improves the persuasiveness of a displacing pattern interpretation.

Operation IceBridge had quite the adventure flying from Thule over a heavily instrumented and simultaneously read-out line the frozen-in RV Lance had put down on the ice north of Svalbard. Needless to say N-ICE2015 did that with all the applicable satellites too.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/icebridge/spr15/icebridge-overflies-norwegian-camp-on-drifting-sea-ice

This simultaneity is really key to getting the remote sensing instruments calibrated to measured ice and atmospheric conditions. Here conditions were changing rapidly, meaning a time-stamp off by an hour would be incorrectly interpreted. Sentinel-1A was launched on 3 Apr 2014 but seems not to having been imaging the Svalbard region during N-ICE2015. It would add great value if an expert could annotate a series of S1AB Arctic ice imagery that had ground annotation.
« Last Edit: December 31, 2016, 10:07:27 PM by A-Team »

crandles

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1688 on: December 31, 2016, 06:58:26 PM »
Accumulated Freezing Degree Days N80 thru Dec 29, 2016:
Climatology: 2141.1
2016:            1138.6
Anomaly:     -1002.5



Implied new ice thickness to date:
Per Lebedev:
Climo: 1.412 m
2016:   0.973 m

Per Billelo
Climo:  1.137 m
2016:    0.788 m

If temperatures for 2017 Jan to July were to be the same as 2016 Jan to July then 2016/7 would end up with about 3650 FDD compared to 2015/16's 4249. That is quite a warm path to follow, but I haven't worked out which of the last 10 years rises most in FDD yet.

So what thicknesses would 3650 and 4249 FDD make (per Bilello)?

Do you have data to 29 Dec and 31 July for each of the last 10 or more years that you could copy and paste here?

jdallen

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1689 on: December 31, 2016, 11:17:08 PM »
Accumulated Freezing Degree Days N80 thru Dec 29, 2016:
Climatology: 2141.1
2016:            1138.6
Anomaly:     -1002.5



Implied new ice thickness to date:
Per Lebedev:
Climo: 1.412 m
2016:   0.973 m

Per Billelo
Climo:  1.137 m
2016:    0.788 m

So what thicknesses would 3650 and 4249 FDD make (per Bilello)?



Don't have Billelo's formula immediately at hand, but Per Lebedev, I get 1.37Meters for 3650 FDD's vs. 1.50 Meters for 4249 FDD.

Edit:  It might be more instructive to evaluate the ice that would have been produced by the *anomaly*.  In this case, plugging the 1002 FDD deficit into Lebedev's formula, that implies that the heat anomaly has arctic wide prevented the equivalent of 64CM of ice from forming. For the non-metric folks, that's 2 feet of ice which hasn't frozen.

Regardless of questions regarding the starting thickness and volume of the ice, this quantifies reasonably well the absolute impact of the heat on the Arctic taken as a whole.
« Last Edit: December 31, 2016, 11:52:44 PM by jdallen »
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jdallen

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1690 on: December 31, 2016, 11:52:14 PM »
Found the Billelo equation which summarized looks like:

Ice thickness = SQRT(InitialThickness^2+(FDD/804.2082)) 

(Thank you, DOSBAT)

Assuming an initial thickness of zero, comparing the product of 3650 vs 4529 FDDs, that suggests a reduction of 1.1M of ice. 

That seems a bit high to me, though it may actually apply to areas starting with no ice.   

(corrected numbers - arithmetic fail  ;) )

However, as this is an average across the entire Arctic, assuming a starting thickness of ~1.5 meters, to approximate average thickness and then applying 3650 and 4249 respectively, I get  2.67M - 2.45M = 0.22M less ice formed.

Where you have starting ice, this method may be more skillful, as it appears to take in account of the reduction in thermal transfer caused by existing ice.

My instinct is, to average the two values (Billelo & Lebedev) to provide an approximation - which suggests there's ~0.43M/1.4' less ice now as compared to last year, and quite a bit less compared to the average.

[Post Script - some additional thoughts] Thinking at a qualitative rather than quantitative level, the effect of increased heat earlier in the year, when there is less or no ice, will actually be more pronounced.  This in particular is what's suggested by the Bellelo equation, which gives increasingly greater effect for the FDD's with thinner ice.

By extrapolation, once we have ice in place, even if it is fairly thin, the effect of the FDD's starts lower and decays faster with increasing thickness; once you get past about a meter of thickness, hundreds of additional FDD's gives only a couple of 10's of centimeters of additional ice.

QED, by crushing the fall freeze, the worst of the damage which could be done to the pack, has already been done.  This was just the opposite of what I had been thinking as I'd hoped that a cool down in the last half of the refreeze might help us recover.  I am now much more pessimistic.
« Last Edit: January 01, 2017, 12:32:43 AM by jdallen »
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jdallen

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1691 on: January 01, 2017, 12:54:39 AM »
Resurrecting Chris Reynold's thread on the topic:

http://dosbat.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-simplest-model-of-sea-ice-growth.html

One problem he mentions in the calculations, is the problem of starting thickness in the model producing potentially anomalous growth with low thickness numbers.

At a very approximate scale, this might be addressed through the Billelo equation by stacking growth numbers over more shorter time periods based on the starting and ending FDD numbers for each period. (Five day blocks to match some of our current 5 day average reporting? Perhaps we'd see a correlation in values?)

The extreme form of this would be to isolate the numbers regionally, which might give us a proxy for more local volume growth and thickness changes.  Now to find building blocks to do this...
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1692 on: January 01, 2017, 02:14:02 AM »
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crandles

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1693 on: January 01, 2017, 02:16:18 AM »
Found the Billelo equation which summarized looks like:

Ice thickness = SQRT(InitialThickness^2+(FDD/804.2082)) 

(Thank you, DOSBAT)


Sorry I am lost already. I make 2015/16 as having 4249 which seems fairly similar to ktonine graph which seems to show about 1.7m thickness.
sqrt(0^2+(4249/804.2082)) = 2.3m

Hmm.

Ahh, from the comments on Dosbat post perhaps it is 1.33*FDD^.58
That converts 4249 to 169. Presumably that is cm and then it looks like ktonine's calculation.
3650 then converts to 155cm

So that comes out at 8.4% less thickness from 0 starting thickness.

Where there is some initial thickness, the percentage difference is going to be less. So what has happened so far this freeze season seems to me to be unlikely to reduce volume from 22k km^3 to 20k km^3. I think we need to get down to about 18k km^3 to have a good chance of melting out the ice by minimum.  So I don't think what has happened so far is enough to halve the ice volume by minimum. Obviously loads of assumptions built into that which I haven't carefully made clear.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1694 on: January 01, 2017, 05:00:12 AM »
Per DMI's Daily Mean Temperatures North of 80 degree North graph, it appears to me 2016 ending right where 2015 ended (-20C), but the path to this temperature is sure different!  (It's funny to say 2016 has ended when my clock says I have an hour to "Rabbit Day", but it is tomorrow already for most of the world, and I suspect the Danish Meteorological Institute bases it days on the graph on GMT (or something close to it, like CET).)
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1695 on: January 01, 2017, 05:17:03 AM »
Another stall in Extent, however short-lived it may end up being. Seems like, for the most part, SST's have the Arctic under siege. There are very few places for growth to move into; sometimes, it's difficult for ice simply to grow back where it has recently melted from. The forecast shows little intention of changing up anytime soon either. Temp. anomalies will continue for the foreseeable future and frequent flyer miles for Arctic bound moisture coming up from equatorial origins.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1696 on: January 01, 2017, 08:44:47 AM »
203 days (55%) of 2016 set record low extent figures for the day of the year (JAXA figures).   2005 is the oldest year in the records for low extent (11 days of the calendar year).

2016 = 203 days at record low extent
2012 = 83
2015 = 24
2011 = 23
2006 = 12
2005 = 11
2010 = 6
2007 = 4

Jan
2016: 1-7, 9, 15, 28-31 = 13 days at lowest recorded extent
2011: 8, 10-14 = 6 days
2006: 16-27 = 12 days

Feb
2016: 1-5, 7-24 = 23 days
2015: 27-29 = 3 days
2005: 6, 25, 26 = 3 days

Mar
2016: 30-31 = 2 days
2015: 1-21 = 21 days
2005: 22-29 = 8 days

April
2016: 1-30 = 30 days

May
2016: 1-31 = 31 days

June
2016: 1-27 = 27 days
2010: 28-30 = 3 days

July
2016: 4-7 = 4 days
2012: 25-31 = 7 days
2011: 8-24 = 17 days
2010: 1-3 = 3 days

August
2012: 1-31 = 31 days

September
2012: 1-30 = 30 days

October
2016: 20-31 = 12 days
2012: 1-15 = 15 days
2007: 16-19 = 4 days

November
2016: 1-30 = 30 days

December
2016: 1-31 = 31 days

jdallen

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1697 on: January 01, 2017, 12:46:10 PM »
Another stall in Extent, however short-lived it may end up being. Seems like, for the most part, SST's have the Arctic under siege. There are very few places for growth to move into; sometimes, it's difficult for ice simply to grow back where it has recently melted from. The forecast shows little intention of changing up anytime soon either. Temp. anomalies will continue for the foreseeable future and frequent flyer miles for Arctic bound moisture coming up from equatorial origins.

Growth at this point will be taking place the Bering, Okhotsk, Kara and Barents seas primarily, with some growth in Baffin/Labrador Sea and possibly the Greenland sea.

The SST's pretty much everywhere but the Okhotsk, coastal Greenland and spotty bits elsewhere are 1-4C above normal, with spikes over 8 in the Barents (!).

There's not a lot of places the ice can grow easily.  I think we may see a serious stall over the next couple of weeks, unless a cold High can set up *somewhere* over the CAB.  Even then, the prognosis isn't particularly good.

In short, most of the surface right now which can freeze, finally has.  It's not thick - much of it under 1M - but that's enough to slow down extent and area increases.

Back to my previous posts - I think the damage has already been done.  I don't see the Arctic picking up that much thickness through the rest of the season.  If we get some spring storms, the start of the melt season could be spectacular in a very bad way.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1698 on: January 01, 2017, 01:18:53 PM »
Have to agree jda, last year I waited for the ice to form and then waited for it to mature ( which it didn't) from day zero to day 100. This year we have not has anything like the same 'rebuild' of the ice and I expect day zero to 100 to be pretty much what we've seen over recent years with plenty of WAA ( and damaging winds) arriving keeping the temp well above average?

So no ice formation and no maturation plus the loss of over 1/3 of our good ice that was sat over Fram at ice min.

Last year the amount of early open water , in Beaufort and across Barentsz, shocked me. I worry that we might go down that route again over the coming melt season with even poorer ice than last year?
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1699 on: January 01, 2017, 03:57:37 PM »
If I were a betting man (I'm not.), I'd wager that the 2017 melt season will deliver us to never before seen territory for SIE, SIA and volume.