River ice and Discharge

[Aluminium]

River ice was mentioned several times and probably has some importance for the Arctic. Also it's beautiful.

For a start, the Abakan (the Yenisei basin).

[grixm]

When rivers start to flow like that, is the water above 0C, despite there being ice on top? In other words would the water contribute to sea ice melt once it reaches the arctic sea?

[blumenkraft]

Great thread idea, Aluminium!

[Aluminium]

When rivers start to flow like that, is the water above 0C, despite there being ice on top? In other words would the water contribute to sea ice melt once it reaches the arctic sea?

Main source of water is melting snow this time of year. Ice protects water from sunlight. I think, contribution may be actually positive for Arctic ice. On the other hand, early melting have certain albedo effect.

[Stephan]

Great thread idea, aluminium.
We should also discuss here dates of river flow start in spring in comparison with former years. I remember some McKenzie River discussions from last year, but I can't remember, in which thread they had been posted.

[Aluminium]

As for old averages, I found this map. Hard to see but better than nothing. Dates was calculated in 1995.

[Aluminium]

A webcam is located near the Lena River in Ust-Kut.

[Tor Bejnar]

Somebody's gotta mention the Nenana Ice Classic.



The following is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nenana_Ice_Classic

The Nenana Ice Classic is an annual ice pool contest held in Nenana, Alaska. It is an event in which individuals attempt to guess the exact time the Tanana River ice will break up at Nenana.[1] Tickets are on sale from February 1 through April 5 of each year throughout Alaska. The Nenana Ice Classic is a non-profit charitable gaming organization. As such, the proceeds benefit many volunteer and non-profit organizations.

[grixm]

Meanwhile I've been following the Yenisei river on worldview, and the melt is well underway. Here is a timelapse of the last two weeks.

[oren]

Nice animation. For some reason only worked for me when I right-clicked open image in new tab.
Consider optimizing it in Ezgif and/or making it artificially wider at 701 pixels so it will require clicking to play.

[Niall Dollard]

Various observation reports on river ice in Alaska can be viewed at this site. Updates each day.

https://www.weather.gov/aprfc/riverNotes

[Niall Dollard]

Riding an ice floe on the River Tom (River Ob tributary) in SW Siberia.

[Freegrass]

Riding an ice floe on the River Tom (River Ob tributary) in SW Siberia.

That's insane... 
How do they get off?

[Niall Dollard]

Riding an ice floe on the River Tom (River Ob tributary) in SW Siberia.

That's insane... 
How do they get off?

More here :

Author of the video Alexander told The Siberian Times that he went outside as soon as he saw that ice on River Tom started to move. 

'We always go out to enjoy the sight of the ice breaking and beginning to move. Riding on ice floes is a typical kind of fun for our children and teens.

'They do it every year. They get bored in quarantine, not everyone has a computer.

'I saw these guys jumping off that ice floe safely and walking away to find a new one

[Aluminium]

A webcam is located near the Lena River in Ust-Kut.

A week after first movement, more floes go to the Arctic. Water level rises observably last hours.

[Aluminium]

Data.

The Lena River and the Arctic, 1999-2019. Trends:
Maximum discharge = MD_t = 111200 + 916 * (year - 2000), m³/s.
Time of maximum discharge = TMD_t = 5.7 - 0.28 * (year - 2000), days of June.
Minimum sea ice extent = MinSIE_t = 5.86 - 0.107 * (year - 2000), millions km².

I removed linear trends and took anomalies for a graph.

X = 0.0000077 * MD_a + 0.06173 * TMD_a
Y = MinSIE_a

Maximum discharge happens with ice flow usually. The river accumulates this power to break ice jams.

[Aluminium]

The Yenisei River, 1999-2019. Trends:
MD_t = 134700 - 1998 * (year - 2000), m³/s.
TMD_t = -0.2 + 0.16 * (year - 2000), days of June.

Graph:
X = 0.0000174 * MD_a + 0.03165 * TMD_a
Y = MinSIE_a

[Aluminium]

I repeated these calculations using sum of maximum discharges and weighted average time.

Lena+Yenisei. Trends:
MD_t = 245900 - 1082 (year - 2000), m³/s.
TMD_t = 2.4 - 0.03 * (year - 2000), days of June.

Graph:
X = 0.00001 * MD_a + 0.0713 * TMD_a
Y = MinSIE_a

The maximum deviation is 2 times less than from a simple linear trend. Early and low maximum discharge in big rivers is probably a sign of strong melting season. 10000 m³/s or 1.4 days is equivalent to 100000 km² by September.

[Niall Dollard]

The Nenana Ice Classic Tripod has fallen over.

I doubt if the clock is stopped yet, however.

[Aluminium]

Where is ice?

[Ranman99]

Wow and very clear after the clock stopped. It will be interesting to see what comes through in the next days.

[grixm]

Yenisei river melt is really ramping up. At this pace it will be free of ice all the way to the arctic ocean in less than two weeks. Gif is the last four days.

[Aluminium]

Wow. It's exceptionally early. In 2019 there was more ice 3 weeks later.

[Aluminium]

The Yenisei River, Turukhansk, 2020. April was the warmest in 150 years of observations, 10.1°С above normal.

[Aluminium]

A nuclear-powered icebreaker near Dudinka. It's an usual work to prevent ice jams and floods in vulnerable places.

[Aluminium]

The Lena River, Olyokminsk. Current melting is slightly earlier than in 2019. The Yenisei River stuck for a while but the earliest breakup in Dudinka is still possible (before May 21).



There is a statue of the Lena in Olyokminsk.

[Niall Dollard]

Thawing of the Lake Ice on Lake Baikal can be a slow process, however this year the end came pretty fast.

Two Worldview images, a week apart, show nearly all the ice gone now.

[gerontocrat]

Remaining Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) in Eurasia is still at least 700 GT (more than double) above average, most of which will end up in the next few weeks in the Arctic Ocean. That's a lot of water, sediment, organic matter etc.

[Aluminium]

Is this anomaly for the Arctic Ocean? A big part is located on the Tibetan Plateau and Kamchatka Peninsula. A lot of red color in Siberia and northern Alaska at the same time.

[gerontocrat]

Is this anomaly for the Arctic Ocean? A big part is located on the Tibetan Plateau and Kamchatka Peninsula. A lot of red color in Siberia and northern Alaska at the same time.

The 700 GT excess snow refers to snow on land in Europe & Asia, which I think includes the Tibetan Plateau - but in previous years that big blue blob did not disappear from the snowmap at the end of August. Which is why I said most of the excess over & above the normal amount would end up in the Arctic ocean.

[oren]

Eyeballing the chart it looks more like an excess of 500GT above normal. Some of the blues and purples are in Baltic drainage and in Pacific drainage. There's also a respectable amount destined for Hudson Bay drainage, supposedly this is the Arctic but in reality the effect is very different. In addition, some of the excess will sublimate or turn to vapor after melting. Some will drain into the ground. So I would hazard a very rough guess that 200-300GT will be the excess flow into the Arctic ocean.
I wonder if this can be quantified by looking at flow data of the major Arctic rivers, and their annual variability compared to SWE variability. I once posed this as a challenge to bbr when he was running wild with the repeat Younger Dryas theory, but he did not rise to the task.
If anyone is aware of downloadable flow data for some or all relevant rivers, I would appreciate any pointers.

[Freegrass]

If anyone is aware of downloadable flow data for some or all relevant rivers, I would appreciate any pointers.

I googled what I put in bold, and this came up. I hope that's what you were looking for.

https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/cems-glofas-historical?tab=overview

This dataset contains global modelled daily data of river discharge from the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS), which is part of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS). River discharge, or river flow as it is also known, is defined as the amount of water that flows through a river section at a given time.

This dataset is simulated by forcing the hydrological river routing model with modelled gridded runoff data from global reanalysis. Data availability for the historical simulation is from 1979-01-01 up to near real time.

The land surface model that produced the runoff was HTESSEL, and the river routing model component was LISFLOOD, run with a 0.1 x 0.1 degree lat-lon resolution.

More details about the products are given in the Documentation section.

[Aluminium]

If anyone is aware of downloadable flow data for some or all relevant rivers, I would appreciate any pointers.

I used this to check correlations with SIE in September.

Data.

[grixm]

After a few days of apparent stalling, the Yenisei river melt is accelerating again, and today we got a very clear picture. Spots of open water is reaching all the way to Dudinka.

[oren]

Big thanks for both river discharge data sources.
And another question to the esteemed posters: Where can I find downloadable SWE numbers? Preferably detailed by regions.

[gerontocrat]

I think you might get somewhere @ https://land.copernicus.eu/global/products/swe

You will need to register with Copernicus - not a hard task.

Then you will need to figure out how to get the data. I was tired, I gave up.

[Aluminium]

A movement of ice in Dudinka. The biggest Arctic river finally wakes up there. Breakup is expected in 1-2 days.

[oren]

Thanks G., I already registered for Copernicus to download the river discharge data, which is taking ages. Will look for their SWE data as well.

[Freegrass]

Thanks G., I already registered for Copernicus to download the river discharge data, which is taking ages. Will look for their SWE data as well.

I'm happy you were able to find the data Oren! I just saw that this data is stored on the computers of VITO, a Flemish research organisation, and we've got good internet here in Belgium! So I'm surprised the download is taking a long time. Is it that much? Or just slow?

[oren]

It requires several hours processing by Copernicus before the download link is ready.
It is about 1.2GB of data per year.
Effectively you are only allowed to select up to 5 years.
The 6GB file took 3 hours just for the actual download, which I guess is limited at the source.
But never mind, as long as the data is there.

[Freegrass]

That's a whole lot of data... 

[oren]

Turns out to have been a huge overkill. A gridded NetCDF file for every single day, which I can't use, lacking the tools and the processing power.
The SWE data is the same, a large gridded file for each single day.

All I want is one number - total discharge - per day for each of the Arctic rivers. It's available in the other data source in exactly the right format, but a lot of the days are missing for some reason. Maybe I'll use that anyway, with some interpolation.
As to the SWE data, I'm looking for total SWE per region / drainage basin over time. Will keep on looking.

[Freegrass]

Turns out to have been a huge overkill. A gridded NetCDF file for every single day, which I can't use, lacking the tools and the processing power.
The SWE data is the same, a large gridded file for each single day.

All I want is one number - total discharge - per day for each of the Arctic rivers. It's available in the other data source in exactly the right format, but a lot of the days are missing for some reason. Maybe I'll use that anyway, with some interpolation.
As to the SWE data, I'm looking for total SWE per region / drainage basin over time. Will keep on looking.

That's a bummer... Have you gone through the search results on Google to see if you can find something there? That's how I was able to find that Copernicus link. Maybe you can find other websites in those results that have what you need?

Or you could write an email to VITO or Copernicus to ask them if they know where you can find what you are looking for? That would only take a few minutes, and I'm sure they'll help you if they can.


Edit: That first result in the google search results has a few links that should work.

Can anyone tell me of a free portal to download river discharge data?
I need time series river discharge data for rainfall runoff modelling. If I can get the location of those stations as long-lat it would be more helpful.

[Aluminium]

The Siege of the North, May 15. The Yenisei River broke up ice in Dudinka. 21 days earlier compared to 2019. 6 days earlier than ever. Broken ice retreats to the Arctic Ocean. This reinforcement is not huge but it still requires energy to melt and keeps water cold. Sometimes the river delivered high quality 1.5...2 meter thick ice. 10+ meter high mountains was built and destroyed and built again in just seconds. This year the ice looks much thinner.

[Aluminium]

2019.05.23 - 2020.05.19, the Lena River near the delta.

[blumenkraft]

Apropos Lena River, Rammb-Slider having a nice cloud-free picture today. Compared it with an image from the 14th.

The darker the blue, the wetter the ice/snow.

[Aluminium]

May 18-21, active movement in the Lena River near the Arctic Circle. North is down.

[blumenkraft]

Lena River.

[Aluminium]

How it looks from eye level. Ice floes on the bank of the Lena River after flood.

https://ru-ru.facebook.com/topyktru/videos/547884109237260/

[oren]

Some Lena information. Water level in Kusur, about 200km upstream of the Arctic Ocean, have risen sharply in the last few days. I do not have data to compare it with other years. As can be seen, serious discharge usually starts in June.




One of our Russian-reading users could perhaps crack this website to find if there is more information on current discharge and temperatures, and comparison with other years.
http://gis.vodinfo.ru/