Will this strange melting season bring a minimum in August?
Minimum could come 5th-10th of Sept, but very unlikely in August. I think this thread is too early...When I see 3 (three) extent gains in a row then I will change my spreadsheets from melt to freeze. Feb 29 is going to be a pain to deal with - I see a fudge coming.
Minimum could come 5th-10th of Sept, but very unlikely in August. I think this thread is too early...We'll see
Every JAXA daily minimum so far has been during the two week interval of Sept 7-21.
The linear trend in JAXA extent over the past week is -22690 km2/day. This is the earliest in the season that such a slow week has occurred. However, several other years show a similar 7-day slowdown starting soon.
On average, a slowdown like this occurs 11 days before the minimum ... but it ranges from 28 days before minimum (in 2005) to 2 days after minimum (in 2008).
The fascinating thing, though, is that an early slowdown like this is anticorrelated with an early minimum. Years with an early slowdown tend to have late minimums, not early ones:
(https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FkyJSjgR.png&hash=1477a74ab70bc4410ee66e0653d78cd8)
The data are noisy and the standard error is large, but the p-value is highly significant (0.012) at a=0.05.
Based on that model, one would expect the 2017 minimum to be somewhere between days 257-271 (i.e., September 13-27) with a best estimate of day 264 (Sept 20).
(https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FM0vPjh4.png&hash=7a0f036790665e8cdd950a18670fe7af)
Make of it what you will.
. OTOH, I'm not sure it even makes sense to have separate melt and freeze threads...If nothing else, it ensures a switch to a new thread every six months. That at least keeps it from growing out of control.
Although the melt has slowed down, particularly surface melt and storm-associated melt due to nice weather, this thread is too soon. OTOH, I'm not sure it even makes sense to have separate melt and freeze threads...In your opinion.
Every JAXA daily minimum so far has been during the two week interval of Sept 7-21.Nice.
On average, a slowdown like this occurs 11 days before the minimum ... but it ranges from 28 days before minimum (in 2005) to 2 days after minimum (in 2008).
The fascinating thing, though, is that an early slowdown like this is anticorrelated with an early minimum. Years with an early slowdown tend to have late minimums.
....
The data are noisy and the standard error is large, but the p-value is highly significant (0.012) at a=0.05.
Based on that model, one would expect the 2017 minimum to be somewhere between days 257-271 (i.e., September 13-27) with a best estimate of day 264 (Sept 20).
Make of it what you will.
Every party needs a pooper, that's why we invited you. Party pooper.I am not going to respond to your insult.
Keep in mind that the current "melting season" thread was started on January 1 and had dozens of posts in January and February, and over 100 posts before the end of the freezing season. There's absolutely nothing wrong with starting this thread now.
It makes sense for them to overlap, because the freezing season starts in some parts of the Arctic while the melting season is still finishing up in other parts.
According to GFS, the freezing season should start next week in parts of the Canadian archipelago.
Night temperatures of -10C will be expected around Baffin Island.
@Ned nice job, for further discredit of my opening post :)
For the last metric, I was expecting area to really start reaching bottom, but not really. As unusual as this season usually has been. The area curve should be getting flat now and extent keep dropping, not the opposite.
@Ned nice job, for further discredit of my opening post :)
For the last metric, I was expecting area to really start reaching bottom, but not really. As unusual as this season usually has been. The area curve should be getting flat now and extent keep dropping, not the opposite.
Ned very interesting. Off the cuff, most areas minimum is determined by export into them. Best shown by the Greenland Sea. The CAB is really the best indicator for real freezing onset.Great, this is exactly the response I wanted.
In addition I suspect your criteria are picking up weirdness somehow. Hudson refreezing on day 220? Bering refreezing before Chukchi? Possibly small transitory blips cause this. Maybe add a threshold criterion of an absolute or percentage gain to mark a day as past the minimum. And/or use the last time at the minimum rather than the first.
Greatness! Thanks Oren for suggesting the improvement.Ned very interesting. Off the cuff, most areas minimum is determined by export into them. Best shown by the Greenland Sea. The CAB is really the best indicator for real freezing onset.Great, this is exactly the response I wanted.
In addition I suspect your criteria are picking up weirdness somehow. Hudson refreezing on day 220? Bering refreezing before Chukchi? Possibly small transitory blips cause this. Maybe add a threshold criterion of an absolute or percentage gain to mark a day as past the minimum. And/or use the last time at the minimum rather than the first.
* Yes, it's quite possible that export (er, "import" in this case) is actually what produces the first rise after minimum in many basins in many years.
* Yes, some of the "weirdness" you identified was due to my poor choice of using the first increase after the first instance of the minimum. I've now re-done the graph using the first day of increase after the last instance of the minimum:
(https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FX8WRugT.png&hash=555e06d0802cfe99ca1d001696d8b5cc)
The results are somewhat different, including addressing both the points of weirdness that you identified (though in 2000 the Bering still shows its first increase only three days after the Chukchi).
Here are the updated medians:
GrnLS 239 26-Aug
Baffn 250 7-Sep
CAB 256 13-Sep
CAA 258 15-Sep
KaraS 265 22-Sep
Beauf 266 23-Sep
Laptv 268 25-Sep
ESS 269 26-Sep
Baren 270 27-Sep
Chukc 273 30-Sep
Hudsn 274 1-Oct
Okhot 311 7-Nov
Berng 312 8-Nov
I'm going to continue to think about this and see if I can come up with further improvements.
According to GFS, the freezing season should start next week in parts of the Canadian archipelago.
Night temperatures of -10C will be expected around Baffin Island.
What is source for -10° temps "around Baffin Island"? Weather forecast for Clyde River, which is at middle of east coast of Baffin, has temps above 0° throughout next nine days, with highs above 10° for some of them.
According to GFS, the freezing season should start next week in parts of the Canadian archipelago.
Night temperatures of -10C will be expected around Baffin Island.
What is source for -10° temps "around Baffin Island"? Weather forecast for Clyde River, which is at middle of east coast of Baffin, has temps above 0° throughout next nine days, with highs above 10° for some of them.
According to GFS, the freezing season should start next week in parts of the Canadian archipelago.
Night temperatures of -10C will be expected around Baffin Island.
What is source for -10° temps "around Baffin Island"? Weather forecast for Clyde River, which is at middle of east coast of Baffin, has temps above 0° throughout next nine days, with highs above 10° for some of them.
Thanks for the correction and sorry for the confusion. I mean Ellesmere Island not Baffin. Looked mostly at the station Eureka and the GFS 2m temp forecast from GFS.
Baffin is indeed very far from freezing conditions at this stage. Sorry again.
GFS has backed off now a little but still freezing weather expected from next week. Will be exciting to see the first new ice of the year.
Not ready for fall yet...Fall is the second best season! I've have enough of the heat and humidity.
:)
Given that frazil ice can start to form when air temps are down to -6 C, we are not far off that figure according to nullschool at 85N 77W.
I think you want to watch this for an answer:Given that frazil ice can start to form when air temps are down to -6 C, we are not far off that figure according to nullschool at 85N 77W.
Alert, at the north coast and of Ellesmere, is now experiencing below 0° temps on a daily basis, but not yet down to -6°
Since the Arctic summer has been 'cool', I wonder whether the autumn will revert to mean by being relatively warmer?
Given that frazil ice can start to form when air temps are down to -6 C, we are not far off that figure according to nullschool at 85N 77W.
Alert, at the north coast and of Ellesmere, is now experiencing below 0° temps on a daily basis, but not yet down to -6°
Since the Arctic summer has been 'cool', I wonder whether the autumn will revert to mean by being relatively warmer?
Hi Sterks
This link will get you regular updates of their current location:
http://www.arcticmission.com/follow-arctic-mission/ (http://www.arcticmission.com/follow-arctic-mission/)
Are first candidate for NSIDC arctic sea ice extent minimum is 8.25.2017. The NSIDC arctic sea ice extent metric is up 92 thousand Kilometers squared the past two days. The JAXA sea ice extent metric also recorded an increase today.It's unlikely, but of course possible that this was the minimum. If it turns out that way, Sterks can take a bow and the rest of us will applaud.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/north/daily/data/N_seaice_extent_daily_v2.1.csv
Are first candidate for NSIDC arctic sea ice extent minimum is 8.25.2017. The NSIDC arctic sea ice extent metric is up 92 thousand Kilometers squared the past two days. The JAXA sea ice extent metric also recorded an increase today.It's unlikely, but of course possible that this was the minimum. If it turns out that way, Sterks can take a bow and the rest of us will applaud.
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/north/daily/data/N_seaice_extent_daily_v2.1.csv
The inverted dipole that has seized the Arctic will be pulling air from the Atlantic/Asia and compacting the ice North of Barents, so I would expect more extent loses. But the winds across the Arctic become Northernlies at the broken ice edge of the Pacific side, where one would expect those sudden refreezes like last year would happen first. So who knows.
Surprise! (or not) -- it turns out that Aug 26 was not the JAXA extent minimum. A pretty normal drop yesterday.
The re-freeze has now reached CIS maps.
By now over 95% of this years solar energy was either absorbed or reflected by the Arctic Ocean and I can finally post my refreeze-forecast.
When thinking about refreezing, the lowest sea minimum should also correlate with a low sea ice area / extent during the freezing season because a lot of open water has to refreeze. But the September minimum isn't quite as good as my AWP anomaly calculation, which considers absorbed heat by the oceans as well. For the last 11 years I compared the sea ice area minimum, the sea ice extent minimum and the cumulative AWP anomaly against the average sea ice area and extent anomaly during the October-December refreeze.
An Overview about individual years can be found here:
https://sites.google.com/site/cryospherecomputing/warming-potential
The AWP correlation is negative, because a higher solar energy absorption results in a slower refreeze, hence a negative area anomaly. See the attached graph for all 11 years.(the zero line is not the same for both axis and the secondary axis is inverted due to the negative correlation)
Correlation with Oct-Dec Extent anomaly
Minimum Area 0.779236221
Minimum Extent 0.699103822
Cumu AWP anomaly -0.84296024
Correlation with Oct-Dec Area anomaly
Minimum Area 0.748245297
Minimum Extent 0.637113296
Cumu AWP anomaly -0.784477392
Surprisingly for me all forecast methods correlate better with the sea ice extent anomaly and not the sea ice area anomaly. The ranking however always stays the same. The best is my cumulative AWP anomaly, followed by the sea ice area minimum and least skillful is the sea ice extent minimum.
For 2017 with a "cumu AWP" of +15.8 MJ/m2 we should expect an average extent anomaly of -0.22 million km2
Edit: without 2009 the AWP anomaly would correlate to 94% with sea ice extent and 93% with sea ice area
My interest today though switched to the Nansen Sound above Eureka, Ellesmere Island.
Judging how, by eye, Thomas ? As to pronounce which is worst, I wouldn't wish to comment as brain/eye can be deceptive.No, not really. It's pretty clear to a well trained eye. ;-)
These two DMI graphs of north of 80 latitude temps and Greenland ice sheet mass budget pretty show the mild and snowy story continues. Could be a pattern for the whole season
These two DMI graphs of north of 80 latitude temps and Greenland ice sheet mass budget pretty show the mild and snowy story continues. Could be a pattern for the whole season
Already ahead of the pace set in 2016/17.
These two DMI graphs of north of 80 latitude temps and Greenland ice sheet mass budget pretty show the mild and snowy story continues. Could be a pattern for the whole season
These two DMI graphs of north of 80 latitude temps and Greenland ice sheet mass budget pretty show the mild and snowy story continues. Could be a pattern for the whole season
Already ahead of the pace set in 2016/17.
Our climate is changing. We should expect to be surprised by new persistent features of this changing climate. With more moisture in our atmosphere, increased snowfall would seem to be a logical result.
That would be true only for those locations consistently below freezing. Otherwise, we would expect more of the snow to fall as rain.I think you can use the northward march of the permafrost and several species of trees as a pretty good proxy for the rain/snow line. Still far enough south that I think we can expect plenty of snow this winter, but maybe not a decade from now.
Hopefully this image comparing SST for Kara and Barents 2016 v 2017 will work:Interesting that Hycom shows very warm currents north of Svalbard resume. North of Kara almost the only area relatively cold in terms o SSTs but it most likely should be hit by warm storms, it's not the area to build meters of ice. The Laptev sea that is the factory of ice for CAB looks warmer, ESS\Chukchi\Beaufort are terrible. The Hudson Bay and Sea of Okhotsk are overheated and promising low extent for the entire freezing season. Most likely we'll expierence the negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation
https://s19.postimg.org/7f2nx4c9f/aab_sst_2016_2017.png
https://postimg.org/image/k6gu3mm1b/
Judging how, by eye, Thomas ? As to pronounce which is worst, I wouldn't wish to comment as brain/eye can be deceptive.No, not really. It's pretty clear to a well trained eye. ;-)
Looking at dmi forecast you can see that the pacific side is still melting a bit, it will take maybe 2-3 weeks before we see big refreezes here.South of 80N will refreeze more slowly, possibly not refreeze for quite a while.
In my opinion after this year we can see, that very often the effect of open ice in september in many years like last years may have a positive effect of next years ice.
Maybe the water just cools down more if it refreeze later.
So many years with catastrophic ice and regain the next year now.
I know people have considerable reservations on the usefulness of the DMI 80+ N temperature graph. For observers such as me, at least it gives an idea of the direction of travel. At the moment, it suggests slow refreezing in the high Arctic.
I'm perfectly fine with DMI 80N as a gross measure of what is going on. I can understand why people might not like it when looking at the details, but it tells us rather directly that the big change in what is going on is happening in the Fall and Winter, not the Summer.
If we had a blue ocean summer I'm sure the DMI graph would stray far away from norm too, in summer, once the ice is gone.
I'm sure of that, but that will be in the future, not the present (and recent past).
Actually, the big change in DMI 80N happened in a single day in December 2015. The question this winter is, will it continue for a third winter or revert to the norm -- and so far it's looking like it will continue.
Snowcover should build very rapidly through early October. GFS/CMS/EURO all show a massive area of anomalously cold temps building across most of Eurasia by D10 corresponding to generous snowfalls across much of Siberia and the Central Asian Plateau. We will also see the first falls across much of Alaska, the NW Territories/Yukon, and Quebec, with possible lasting duration across the latter.
I think it is important to reflect on the divergent signals that have emerged at the same time over the past few years. Namely, Greenland is now *increasing* in ice mass, with albedo massively increased in year over year comparisons due to the tremendous and ongoing snowfalls that have been occurring. In fact I believe we have probably still seen the same or more melt than is normally seen, however, the sheer frequency of massive snowfalls has been sufficient (IMO) to overwhelm -- i.e., the same thing resulting in Houston's floods is now seemingly occurring up north in a format that is white and not wet. This at the same time that global sea ice is once again setting a record-low maximum...!
My suspicion is that this massively unexpected positive albedo trend over Greenland was directly responsible for the surprisingly meek melt season. In fact, it is the most obviously glaring unexpected happening of the past 12 months that it is quite likely to have been the cause.
The question is what happens moving forward? Snowcover is currently somewhat above average, that should increase to well above average as we move into October, both according to the models and as indicated by recent changing climatology. Besides Greenland's increase in mass, the Himalayas have also stayed overwhelmingly white through the summer. The combination of these albedo anomalies and the record-warm Arctic ocean waters should yield more opportunities for early season snowfall (IMO) and we may see record #s.
There are two of interest, one called Melt Day Onset which seems to be a static file made in late spring 2017 and another called standard deviation of sea ice concentration which may be related to error assessment.
The former marks up ice pack locations according to the date when melt was first observed. That's of interest per se but only 2016 appears provided as a comparison year. This archive is something to be watched (along with ESRL's daily melt ponds) in spring 2018, presuming melt ponds are a helpful leading indicator for summer outcome.
This might be part of research involving Julienne Stroeve as a co-author ... she's very busy, of course. great to have this kind of info ... melt onset doesn't mean melt ponds will form right away, but it does precondition the snow on the ice, so that when solar radiation comes into play, melt ponds may form faster. mostly takes place when it's cloudy!Right all around. Clouds can have counter-intuitive effects in the off-season. It is really an upwelling versus downwelling radiation balance story where common sense can flatline into not even wrong. ESRL has some good-looking daily products in that department that we should do more with. Even if not spot-on, they're physically based and the only thing currently out there; by playing with those, we'd be ready if something more accurate comes along.
Starting to get less and less interested on stories that fall on the side of greatest drama. Like a bell I have been hearing for years and is not alarming or thrilling anymore, but a bit bothering.
What about "Volume rebounds 2000 km3 from spring, but statisticaly continues its downward trend just as area and extent do"
Maybe "A relatively cold spring and summer at high latitudes helps the Arctic end in slightly better conditions than 2016 and 2015"
Or perhaps "The least drama side (or cold-facts side) of several scientists expecting seasonally ice-free Arctic by somewhere mid-century, while not dramatic, may have some base after all"
The last one is an inconvenient statement for some with apocalyptic thoughts who want to see the blue Arctic in their lifetimes ;) preferably next year.
Yesterday snowfalls in some parts of Siberia are month earlier than usual. Snow depth in north-west Yakutia is 10cm what is the biggest ever for 27 of August, according to a russian wheather TV
the consequences of Arctic sea ice loss do not start once the Arctic is practically ice-free. They have started already ... seasonally ice-free Arctic mid-centuryThe perennial confusion on the forums over what 'seasonally ice-free' means allows just about any futuristic belief system to flourish.
Starting to get less and less interested on stories that fall on the side of greatest drama. Like a bell I have been hearing for years and is not alarming or thrilling anymore, but a bit bothering.With all due respect, I may have misread you, but I think you are looking at it in a very black and white way: Ie. "Is it at the lowest, or is it not?", as are many people on the internet today.
What about "Volume rebounds 2000 km3 from spring, but statisticaly continues its downward trend just as area and extent do"
Maybe "A relatively cold spring and summer at high latitudes helps the Arctic end in slightly better conditions than 2016 and 2015"
Or perhaps "The least drama side (or cold-facts side) of several scientists expecting seasonally ice-free Arctic by somewhere mid-century, while not dramatic, may have some base after all"
The last one is an inconvenient statement for some with apocalyptic thoughts who want to see the blue Arctic in their lifetimes ;) preferably next year.
I am very concerned that ice-aficionados are going to let the climate-science-deniers get away with it, because these ice-observers themselves are saying "things are not that bad, because extent (of sea-ice in the N. Hemisphere) is better than expected". I think it's dangerous, and neglectful.
(I know this is largely OT, just responding to what may be an OT comment - could put it somewhere else.)
.
I am very concerned that ice-aficionados are going to let the climate-science-deniers get away with it, because these ice-observers themselves are saying "things are not that bad, because extent (of sea-ice in the N. Hemisphere) is better than expected". I think it's dangerous, and neglectful.QuoteI didn't think that deniers would ever be really interested in this forum, that is bar the odd troll.
So unless I am way off track here, I think we are all on the same hymn sheet and have great concern for the Arctic.
I look at this thread for data.
FD asks: Any thoughts on what caused that big polynya this year? Or is it a regular phenomenon?Its origin and persistence remain a mystery but it finally appears to be getting sheared apart. We put our heads together on causation but nothing persuasive ever surfaced that made physical sense for that location.
If you think there there must be a perfect low albedo match between open water and a cloud-free peak solar isolation season (6 weeks on each side of on the June 21st solstice) for it to 'count', that's a long ways off because melt hardly gets underway in early May now and doesn't peak until mid-September. Thermal lag isn't going away any time soon.
Here is the next ten days of surface temperatures of the Arctic ice pack itself, not the air.
mild stretch comingGood. Unlike windyty, we don't have the ECMWF option available for ESRL or nullschool. Here is that same data for surface temperature of the ice pack, now in polar stereographic. The forum at first refused to load it, claiming an ordinary gif "failed security checks, contact admin" but now it seems to pass muster.
peak rate of volume lossThat would be the slope (first derivative) of the Piomas volume graphs. Since that is determined primarily as a first-of-the-month monthly average, those graphs are curve-fit to a very sparse set of points, only 3-4, so the nuances are illusory. As the graph stands, the rate of volume loss is flat (2nd derivative indistinguishable from zero) for most of the summer. Some products have seasonally varying error (for example SMOS thin ice thickness) which complicates assessment.
UPDATE: there is some instrumentation, see http://research.iarc.uaf.edu/NABOS2/technology.php: (http://research.iarc.uaf.edu/NABOS2/technology.php:)Thanks for relocating that. Those would be the people to ask about the persistent polynya. The late Sept view is updated through the 27th below. It would be most impressive if the polynya were able to restore itself after days of significant shear and translation.
I believe Wipneus plots his PIOMAS graph from the daily PIOMAS data, not from the monthly, and from my experience with the data there are differences in slopes during the month. Of course it doesn't change the fact that the smoothed 2nd derivative is near zero during most summers.Quotepeak rate of volume lossThat would be the slope (first derivative) of the Piomas volume graphs. Since that is determined primarily as a first-of-the-month monthly average, those graphs are curve-fit to a very sparse set of points, only 3-4, so the nuances are illusory. As the graph stands, the rate of volume loss is flat (2nd derivative indistinguishable from zero) for most of the summer.
Hi all,
As we are now moving forward into the freeze season, I have updated my FDD monitoring plots for 2017-2018 at http://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/arctic-temperatures/ (http://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/arctic-temperatures/)
Hi all,
As we are now moving forward into the freeze season, I have updated my FDD monitoring plots for 2017-2018 at http://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/arctic-temperatures/ (http://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/arctic-temperatures/)
Time will tell but it would appear that 2017 is tracking with 2016.
"It is unworkable to have every archive using a different ad hoc storage scheme. That's silo science; we don't have time for that anymore."
bringing the science together in a visual and accessible wayWhat I am doing, one-off prototyping, is not really sustainable. The real excitement is over at Dev Corner where Dryland is building a master controller that can inject data sources into sequential scripts of retrieval, html templating, Panoply, ImageMagick, gimp, ncgen and others.
Thanks A Team.The ice model was forced to assimilate a PIOMAS update. (?)
I remember asking about strange ice thicknesses near the ice edge in the Beaufort earlier in the month. So it was a normalisation glitch. Comparing these before and after glitch still images attached, the glitch was especially pronounced in the magenta highlighted areas, with thicknesses stepping from dark red to blue.
But after Sept 16th, the thicknesses do look on a par with what you would expect this year - before that date, thicknesses are not trustworthy.
Daniel B And others...uh...the freezing season is tracking like every season ever...it's freezinglol.
after Sept 16th, the thicknesses do look on a par with what you would expect this year - before that date, thicknesses are not trustworthy.No, it's just a scaling visualization issue. Here the ESRL program is experimental, PanoplyCL is in beta, and I am making novel forum-adapted graphics out of raw data files like RASM-ESRL_2017-09-28-00_t048.nc rather than using 'official' ESRL web products (from which glitches may have vanished in their better-informed processing). There's no methods paper out yet.
The model is initialized with the NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) analyses and the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) sea ice concentrations. The model is forced at the lateral boundaries by 3-hourly GFS forecasts of winds, temperature, and water vapor. Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF3.5.1; run with 40 vertical levels) atmospheric model; the Parallel Ocean Program (POP2) model; the Los Alamos Community Ice Model (CICE5.1; and the NCAR Community Land Model (CLM4.5). All components, run at 10 km horizontal resolution, are coupled using a regionalized version of the CESM flux coupler (CPL7), which includes modifications (Roberts et al. 2014) important for resolving the sea ice pack response to weather events. Other model optimizations include: a bulk double-moment cloud microphysics scheme for droplets and frozen hydrometeors, running ensemble forecasts initialized with GEFS ensemble members, and extending the model domain to include the Bering Strait and Svalbard.The most striking feature in RASM-ESRL thickness animation (passing over glitch) is how little the ice has moved about this summer (or grown or shrunk). The patches of enhanced thickness jostle about indecisively. There's no indication of textbook Transpolar Drift or Beaufort Gyre. If that persists, the plan for the frozen-in Polarstern might need serious revision.
Yes, it's freezing - but how quickly? DMI 80+ degrees north graph.Looks slightly colder than 2016 but persistant heat advection forecasted in next 10 days. The freeze up of Laptev/North Kara may happen a bit earlier than last year but in general it tracks like a quite mild (not extremely mild)
No, it's just a scaling visualization issue.
Given the still warm SST anomalies especially north of Alaska, it is difficult to see how the Arctic can cool to a level that would bring the DMI N80 graph close to the 1958-2002 mean.Looking below at Arctic surface temperatures and surface energy flux from ESRL from 04 Sep to 02 Oct 17 and noting the forecast out 09 Oct is featured at their web site, it seems that regardless of clouds, fading sun, and blanketing snow that the surface energy flux has been almost entirely negative (ie the top half of the palette is barely used.
Peter Wadhams interview on Radio NZ - Oct. 2 2017"You can't measure ice thickness from space...well, only with extreme difficulty...so the best way to measure thickness is to sail underneath the ice, and use an upward-looking echo-sounder."That may be, provided the sub can keep a perfectly level course despite passing through waters of different buoyancy. However, the expense is colossal, it only provides a very narrow swath of thicknesses, and it's not likely to be repeated regularly during the year.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/201860805/peter-wadhams-preparing-for-an-arctic-without-ice (http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/201860805/peter-wadhams-preparing-for-an-arctic-without-ice)
Peter Wadhams interview on Radio NZ - Oct. 2 2017.
""You can't measure ice thickness from space...well, only with extreme difficulty...so the best way to measure thickness is to sail underneath the ice, and use an upward-looking echo-sounder.""
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/201860805/peter-wadhams-preparing-for-an-arctic-without-ice (http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/201860805/peter-wadhams-preparing-for-an-arctic-without-ice)
QuotePeter Wadhams interview on Radio NZ - Oct. 2 2017"You can't measure ice thickness from space...well, only with extreme difficulty...so the best way to measure thickness is to sail underneath the ice, and use an upward-looking echo-sounder."
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/201860805/peter-wadhams-preparing-for-an-arctic-without-ice (http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/201860805/peter-wadhams-preparing-for-an-arctic-without-ice)
That may be, provided the sub can keep a perfectly level course despite passing through waters of different buoyancy.Pretty sure they accounted for that ::)
However, the expense is colossalIt's paid for by Her Majesty's Royal Navy. On a Navy sub.
it only provides a very narrow swath of thicknesses, and it's not likely to be repeated regularly during the year.Apparently not, according the Wadhams .. expert on the topic.
It may not be any more accurate than em induction thicknesses based from helicopter or plane.Again, the actual expert claims otherwise. I suggest you get several papers published in respected peer-reviewed journals on the topic, and then, maybe, you can take it up with him.
...More buoys could be deployed, 1000x of what is planned for 2018, for a tiny fraction of submarine or surface ship charter costs.Yes, true and important. The graphical display of the models is getting so much better but the models have insufficient calibration data from the water. A 1000x bigger deployment of buoys was discussed in last year's freezing season thread, 11 months ago - e.g. #481 (https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,1611.msg92856.html#msg92856) - with links to further discussion. A major scale-up of buoy deployment really deserves a thread of its own.
You've missed my point entirely. My concern is not about SIE or its annual rise and fall that coincide with the freeze and melt seasons. My concern is about a qualitative shift in the ice that remains at the end of any melt season. A freeze season with temperature anomalies of 5C to 10C has to have an effect on this MYI ice and not a good one.
There have been reports of "buttery" MYI by crews on ships that traverse the heart of the CAB where MYI predominates. This is in contrast to the rigid, rock solid ice that was virtually impassable in the past. Many far more knowledgeable individuals on this site could speak to the possible transitions we can expect in the quality of the ice.
I will be following this freeze season closely and hope the temperature anomalies are mild and do not come close to 2016.
It tracks colder than last year. Also the freezing of the Laptev sea happens two weeks earlier than 2016. So I wouldn't say this years' start is a horrendously bad start
The 2017 global sea ice extent trend line is at a point where it has to decide whether it will join the pack of trend lines, or tag along with the 2016 trend line:
It tracks colder than last year. Also the freezing of the Laptev sea happens two weeks earlier than 2016. So I wouldn't say this years' start is a horrendously bad start
Of course it depends on how one considers horrendous. If I clearly understand what does mean "horrendous", it doesn't looks horrendous for me. The thing that one should be concerned about is the Pacific side. It still looks warm and iceless, I'm curious to see how Chuckchi/Beaufort/ESS will track further in the season
I'm curious to see how the Chuckchi/Beaufort/ESS will track further in the season
Of course it depends on how one considers horrendous. If I clearly understand what does mean "horrendous", it doesn't looks horrendous for me. We have already experienced the bullet and the cannonball by the end of the freezing season, so horrendous should be something more :) The thing that one should be concerned about is the pacific side.It still looks warm and iceless, I'm curious to see how the Chuckchi/Beaufort/ESS will track further in the seasonFair enough. I tend to look at recent years as all in the same boat. Until I see it all jump back up to pre-1990 levels, I won't consider it positive news. Maybe because I was promoting renewable energy in the early 1980s, and dedicated my life's work to warning of the dangers ahead, and finding solutions. To me, a slightly better "bad year" this year is not "dodging a bullet", as some call it. I think that's newcomers to the pollution disaster (ie. 10-15 years only) saying that kind of thing.
but the 2017 melt season was fairly average. The total melt for the year (max - min) was rather unspectacular, 9.78 compare to an average 0f 9.58, and the lowest total melt since 2006.I think that is incorrect. You forget that the 'average' on the extent graphs descends each year due to recent lows. If the 'average' was left at say, pre-1999 level, then the difference would seem much greater. It is like the drought in California. The average on graphs and charts now include a 5 year period of the worst drought on record, so the 'average' is now much lower than it was 7-10 years ago. There is nothing 'fairly average' going on with the Arctic Ocean ice right now. When you see it jump back to pre-1990 levels, you can say 'we dodged a bullet'. Let me know when that happens.
If you compare post 2000 Arctic with 1980s and 1990s http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php (http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php) there is a definite trend to warm autumn, winter, spring, cool summer. Whether that means a couple of cool summers would decimate the icepack or whether there is a connection between the cool summers and the other three seasons being warm who knows?
The clouds in the winter block heat from radiating into space.That brings up some interesting questions about the relative importance of the different greenhouse effects of H2O, re-radiation and enthalopy; which I think I shall bring up in the Stupid Questions thread.
sidd: winter cloudiness at the pole is very important. that's something i would watch closely, since winter cloud is a huge brake on winter cool-down. ttown: water vapor in the clouds prevents long wave radiation from escaping from the surface and reflects it back downward.Right, right again. But if we want to move beyond 'a snow blanket and clouds have (have not) been keeping the heat in' thus slowing (speeding) winter growth of ice extent and its thickness, thus preconditioning the 2018 melt season, ESRL offers various quantitative energy flux products as well as snow depth and rain monitoring.
NSIDC shows an impressive gain of 1 million km2 in arctic sea ice extent since 1 Oct 2017, with 800,000 km2 more ice extent on 12 Oct 2017 compared to 12 Oct 2016.
That coupled with an unusual regrowth of Antarctic sea ice to reach a season max 9 Oct 2017 (so far) rather than earlier means the overall global ice extent has recovered quite nicely compared to its state a year ago when both arctic and Antarctic ice were miserably low at the same time.
Pavel notes on #187: Cryosat has resumed. don't see any 3m or thicker ice and there's very little of thicker than 2.5m iceThis is a difficult data set to work with; taking a quick look at netCDF file offered on the CPOM web page (1st image below), the data was there but not in a form (Geo2D) that would allow redrawing the ice thickness map at a larger scale without the lat lon overlays.
Some threshold got re-set way too high on attachment security after the hack scare, hopefully our admin can dial that back a bit. These gifs have had zero contact with any Adobe product and have nothing whatsoever to do with "gif89a format.aip" of Adobe Illustrator.
According to the weather forecasts no significant coldness will come or even things may get warmerHere is the ESRL forecast out to Oct 24th for 80ºN. Forty 2m air temperature maps are provided at 6hr intervals and the average determined. The identical result is displayed in a variety of color tables with a scale that runs from -22º to +6º C. These variations illustrate how interpretations can be helped or hindered by presentation choices.
Snow on Arctic sea ice is an active topic. Like ice thickness and clouds, it is very difficult to characterize basin-wide, in part because depth alone doesn't capture its insulating properties in freeze season: it's blown into windrows, it may be dunked in sea water on a floe with negative freeboard, or be rained upon and refreeze. Still, it looks like some better products than what we have now may be in the pipeline.
Dear colleagues and sea ice friends,
POLAR2018 is a *unique**joint event* organized by the Scientific
Committee on Antarctic Research SCAR and the International Arctic
Science Committee IASC, which will take place in Davos, Switzerland,
from 15 - 26 June 2018 with the open science conference from 19 - 23
June; see http://www.polar2018.org (http://www.polar2018.org) for general information.
Following up with our first invitation on September 27 we would like to
encourage you to submit your presentation to the conference session
entitled "*The role of snow on sea ice for sea-ice parameter retrieval
and variability*".
We invite studies dealing with in situ observations, with retrieval from
satellite observations, modeling and combinations thereof for snow
parameters on sea ice. We also invite studies on methods for quantifying
the influence of (unknown) snow properties on the satellite retrieval of
sea-ice parameters, on reducing the noise, improving the accuracy of
retrieved sea-ice parameters due to snow properties, and related studies.
Conveners of this session are: Stefan Kern, Burcu Ozsoy, Georg Heygster and Leif T. Pedersen
Please find details about the program as well as deadlines here:
http://www.polar2018.org/program.html (http://www.polar2018.org/program.html)
unique event which will take place in Davos, SwitzerlandI am skipping both Bilderberg and Davos this year in favor of a staycation. ;)
Speaking of snow depth, here is another ESRL product, snowdepthchange.gif from their web page or archival REB_plots. It is somewhat peculiar in that D0 is not provided, only the D5 forecast.
Here are 27 days of sea water salinity from RASM-ESRL for October. As noticed before, each ten day forecast series begins at hour 24 rather than hour 00, the initial state. (Some even start at hour 48, skipping the first two days.) The odd boundary on the Svalbard side apparently results from a lack of data.
variables:
double tau ;
tau:long_name = "Tau" ;
tau:units = "hours since analysis" ;
double time(time) ;
time:long_name = "Valid Time" ;
time:units = "hour since 2000-01-01 00_00_00" ;
double time_bounds(time, d2) ;
time_bounds:long_name = "boundaries for time-averaging interval" ;
time_bounds:units = "days since 0000-01-01 00:00:00" ;
data:
tau = 24 ;
time = 155856 ;
time_bounds =
736488.75, 736489 ;
So I'm not sure what you mean by same as every 4th bit of data is the same. That would only use up 4x9 = 36 (sometimes 4x8 = 36) of the 40, suggesting the initial (or final?) state is missing in RASM_ESRL. Or rather, the latter uses intervals, n times has n-1 intervals but what does this mean in tangible terms for observational validation or animation frames, very little.
Yes, there is substantially more Arctic sea ice extent now than there was on this same day last year. But it should be noted that the NSIDC ASIE increase of 1.038 km2 since October 1 is less than that measured in 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, or 2010. Month-to-date, NSIDC SIE is still running below the ten-year average, and year-to-date, 2017 extent is deeply entrenched in second place. Bottom line, then: I'm not sure how "nicely" once can say it's recovering.
The 2017 global sea ice extent trend line is at a point where it has to decide whether it will join the pack of trend lines, or tag along with the 2016 trend line:
The 2017 global sea ice extent trend line is at a point where it has to decide whether it will join the pack of trend lines, or tag along with the 2016 trend line:
As of October 20, 2017, the SIE is running *ahead* of the 10-year average (2007 to 2016) and is currently in "5th place" behind 2007, 2016, 2011, and 2012, and has just about caught up with, and may soon surpass, 2009.
Update:
NSIDC SIE - October 20
Year SIE (million km2) Rank (for 11 year period) 2017 vs Year
2007 6.279 1st +958,000 km2
2008 8.026 11th -789,000 km2
2009 7.307 6th -7,000 km2
2010 7.508 7th -271,000 km2
2011 6.496 3rd +741,000 km2
2012 6.582 4th +655,000 km2
2013 7.992 10th -755,000 km2
2014 7.805 9th -568,000 km2
2015 7.548 8th -311,000 km2
2016 6.310 2nd +927,000 km2
2017 7.237 5th 0 km2
Someone showed the predictions in the SIE surveys for NSIDC and Jaxa, and almost everyone predicted way low, suggesting deeply engrained negative bias.
My predictions were just about dead on for all surveys. That is not to brag. Far from it. I come with no experience compared to most here. But I am also not weighed down by negative bias. I just look at the data and then make my predictions.
my predictions were perfectPreposterous. Without some idea of what the weather is going to do a few months to a year out, it's just numerology trending off hindcasts. No one had or has the slightest idea where the weather is going, least of all you.
[Already by 2014, it had been shown] synoptic patterns better explain the variability of sea ice than climate indices such as the Arctic Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Arctic dipole.These are in effect rudimentary synoptic patterns: for example the daily AO index is constructed by projecting the daily 1000mb height anomalies poleward of 20°N onto its loading pattern, the leading mode of Empirical Orthogonal Function (basis states) of monthly mean 1000mb height during 1979-2000 period.
Given the very poor start that 2017 had (the worst ever), I think it's accurate to say that 2017 has rebounded nicely, and better than almost anyone expected.
most probably places the <1 mkm2 event beyond 2020.The same rubbish every fall, catastrophism after low years, recovery chatter after upticks. What could possibly serve as a scientific basis for a 4+ year weather-ocean-ice forecast? In some ways, 2007 was the most disturbing year to date; neither it nor 2012 were foreseen or foreseeable.
Quotemost probably places the <1 mkm2 event beyond 2020.The same rubbish every fall, catastrophism after low years, recovery chatter after upticks. What could possibly serve as a scientific basis for a 4+ year weather-ocean-ice forecast? In some ways, 2007 was the most disturbing year to date; neither it nor 2012 were foreseen or foreseeable.
Very few of our registrants seem to take any substantive interest in the 2017/18 freezing season, the topic of this forum. Sharing of ungrounded speculation and personal hunches is very boring. Maybe we should just shut it down and come back in May. Visitation levels don't justify the effort.
SMOS 3.1 thin ice thickness is an interesting way to track the season though. If ice doesn't thicken much during the winter (as expected from Arctic amplification), there's that much less to melt during the melt season. Thinner ice also responds very differently to wind dispersion and export.
The first animation compares newly formed ice from 2012-2017 for the 21st of October; there's quite a bit of variability. The still image shows the same years side by side. The bottom animation computes the six year average for this date and flickers 2017 over it.
Whole Arctic trend-lining is far less informative than regional trend-lining, itself little done on our forums even though wipneus posts the necessary data. 2D maps take regional trend-lining to its end state, the resolution of the data. As there's no physical basis for drawing 'Beaufort' or 'Chukchi' boundaries etc, maps can show what is going on free of nomenclatural bias. To first order, that is latitudinal freeze-up about the cold pole (rather than the north pole).
SMOS in a sense integrates all the heat fluxes between atmosphere, newly forming ice and ocean. Since the weather has been so uneventful for so long, bottom growth prediction for older ice will have fewer problems than in past years. The interest right now is the date of final freeze-over, which is going rather slowly in the Beaufort-Chukchi-ESAS regions and unremarkably above Svalbard.
The freeze season settles down more into straight thermodynamics after freeze-over, though low clouds remain important for net heat loss. I've inquired about getting near-real time cloud synaptic state; for now we can only get at those indirectly (but quantitatively) through RASM-ESRL energy fluxes.
This is the freeze forum, one of our rare science areas. We have dedicated forums for extent, area and volume trend-trackers. Please delete off-topic, unsupported speculation and move it somewhere appropriate.
What I've marked from the current freezing:Well said Pavel. Last winter the arctic kept moving towards the Atlantic side, which was what kept the Chukchi open for quite a while, the Beaufort mostly free of MYI, and the max volume at a low level (coupled with low FDDs of course). OTOH, this same phenomenon may have stalled this summer's Atlantic melt, as a lot of volume was stuck on this side of the arctic. I suspect the same happened in the CAA, where last year's garlic press brought a lot of ice this summer that insisted on not melting out, despite warm temps and a lot of melt ponds.I don't know what to say more. It's cold and the water freezes - the summary of the freezing season
- The Garlic Press worked hard and there's a lot of thick ice in the CAA already
- The Fram export resumes but still low. There could be more MYI in the CAB by the end of the freezing than last year.
it is likely pushed mush farther beyond.
Quotemost probably places the <1 mkm2 event beyond 2020.... Not only is <1 mkm2 likely pushed beyond 2020, it is likely pushed mush farther beyond.
<snip>In eastern tradition in the i ching they talk about rain makers. People that influence weather. This is entirely discounted in the west. The farmers almanac has a proprietary method for predicting the weather with good results.
Which melt season is driven by future weather that you (and everyone else) have not the slightest clue about, a la 2007 and 2012. Watch that 30 year sea ice age video of Tschudi's -- it's all right there.
<snap>
Looking at the actual temperature forecast for this day, these warm temps appear to coincide with an arctic storm.
Very few of our registrants seem to take any substantive interest in the 2017/18 freezing season, the topic of this forum. Sharing of ungrounded speculation and personal hunches is very boring. Maybe we should just shut it down and come back in May. Visitation levels don't justify the effort.Please continue. I apologize for my lack of participation over the last few weeks - personal events have overtaken me (including surgery and full recovery from thereof). I hope to be back on the saddle shortly.
I'm actually struggling to understand these forecast maps. Both precipitation and cloud cover are supposed to be forecast. It is easy to see the precipitation forecasts but I'll be damned if I can understand cloud cover here. How are you supposed to see % overcast?
Does solid white mean thick cloud cover? If so the Arctic is forecast to be solidly overcast for the entire next week.
The farmers almanac has a proprietary method for predicting the weather with good results.*What*?!
trying to model heat flow
Almost by definition there will be guess work involved regarding water temperatures, as once the ice is in place we no longer have satellite data. For data on temperatures at depth, we're much worse off - but that's exactly one of the factors I need for following what I think is a key metric - total arctic ocean enthalpy. I'm mulling how to source that, and I think it's key to the refreeze as well.trying to model heat flow
That sounds very interesting.
With all this talk of early ice growth trapping summer heat in the water underneath the ice, I've been wondering what data there is on that... and at what depth the water temperature is most relevant for a seasonal ice outlook.
I know ARGO floats have some capability to operate under sea ice and save up the data until it's safe to transmit... but I've never seen any actual data beyond 65N.
The Polar Vortex hadn't had time to even form, it is already shredded to Pieces.
The Polar Vortex hadn't had time to even form, it is already shredded to Pieces.
Hi meddoc, what metric or timeframe are you looking at? Our developing PV doesn't seem that unusual to me.
I'm actually struggling to understand these forecast maps. Both precipitation and cloud cover are supposed to be forecast. It is easy to see the precipitation forecasts but I'll be damned if I can understand cloud cover here. How are you supposed to see % overcast?
Much better depiction of cloud cover to be had here :Incredibly useful! Thanks!
https://weather.us/model-charts/standard/north-pole/total-cloud-coverage/20171102-0000z.html
Can be broken down into low,middle and high cloud also.
Much better depiction of cloud cover to be had here :Incredibly useful! Thanks!
https://weather.us/model-charts/standard/north-pole/total-cloud-coverage/20171102-0000z.html
Can be broken down into low,middle and high cloud also.
Is this available on ASIB's chart tab?
Yes, meant ASIG. Too bad. Could you set these kinds of resources up as just a link to the site?
Itp 95 hovering around 84nth polewards of svalberd has been showing some regular overturning to below 700m with above the scale temps and salinity rising from deep to replace surface to depth downwelling as the surface cools. This location being well inside the pack, this cannot be good for atlantic side ice formation/survival. Particularly over deep ocean as tis. As of day 304:trying to model heat flow
That sounds very interesting.
With all this talk of early ice growth trapping summer heat in the water underneath the ice, I've been wondering what data there is on that... and at what depth the water temperature is most relevant for a seasonal ice outlook.
I know ARGO floats have some capability to operate under sea ice and save up the data until it's safe to transmit... but I've never seen any actual data beyond 65N.
It is on the Atlantic side that I think most desperately needs instrumentation, to track exactly the kind of overturning and changes in the water column you are mentioning. While the Bering and increased captured insolation are important to what we see playing out, I think input from warm more saline Atlantic water is really what will tip the balance in the Arctic's heat budget.Itp 95 hovering around 84nth polewards of svalberd has been showing some regular overturning to below 700m with above the scale temps and salinity rising from deep to replace surface to depth downwelling as the surface cools. This location being well inside the pack, this cannot be good for atlantic side ice formation/survival. Particularly over deep ocean as tis. As of day 304:trying to model heat flow
That sounds very interesting.
With all this talk of early ice growth trapping summer heat in the water underneath the ice, I've been wondering what data there is on that... and at what depth the water temperature is most relevant for a seasonal ice outlook.
I know ARGO floats have some capability to operate under sea ice and save up the data until it's safe to transmit... but I've never seen any actual data beyond 65N.
(https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whoi.edu%2Fitp%2Fimages%2Fitp95dat3.jpg&hash=6ebb094c548a14820c3f9f50dcc04a22)
They have some new buoys itps 100,101,108 out on the central beaufort. They appear to be showing the halocline stabilising there, after a shaky period before it crusted over, not much salinity differential compared to a decade back.
But on the other hand the Pacific side will still struggle to freeze up.
The 3 earthquakes N of FJL, M5.7, 5.7 and 6.0 were all normal faulting earthquakes. They may be associated with a submarine volcanic center associated with the very slowly extending Gakkel ridge.
Thanks Rox, for the journal link. We need to stick to the science.
Being in tropical storm force winds for 24 hours at a time is a new experience for me. It’s a bit unpleasant. I can’t imagine waiting it out in a hide tent (there’s not enough snow for an igloo yet).Depends on the construction. The Plains Indian tipi is quite storm resistant. Have experienced that: All other tents blown away, the tipi still standing (except one broken pole). Dunno if they have it up there. The Sami in northern Scandinavia and some northern Siberian people also use tents similar to the tipi.
It is on the Atlantic side that I think most desperately needs instrumentation, to track exactly the kind of overturning and changes in the water column you are mentioning. While the Bering and increased captured insolation are important to what we see playing out, I think input from warm more saline Atlantic water is really what will tip the balance in the Arctic's heat budget.
Interesting GFS forecast for 10 November. The coldness could be everywhere except the inner basin
Interesting GFS forecast for 10 November. The coldness could be everywhere except the inner basin
It is very nice if legends are included when images are posted.
Interesting GFS forecast for 10 November. The coldness could be everywhere except the inner basin
It is very nice if legends are included when images are posted.
Additionally, we should abstain from posting model forecasts past tau=120h on them. The GFS is a total tossup after this period, ECMWF is slightly better. At 5d+ intervals we should only be looking for very basic synoptic trends from the model runs.
Interesting GFS forecast for 10 November. The coldness could be everywhere except the inner basin
It is very nice if legends are included when images are posted.
Additionally, we should abstain from posting model forecasts past tau=120h on them. The GFS is a total tossup after this period, ECMWF is slightly better. At 5d+ intervals we should only be looking for very basic synoptic trends from the model runs.
Not really clear to me why predictions are being posted at all -- other than perhaps seasonal ones.
I have been reading the 2017 melt season for a couple months. That was easy to follow, because i just had to read the numbers. But the freezing season is harder to get. What is the problem ? Is the arctic not doing what it should be doing at this time. The melting season stoped somewhere in september, if i'm correct. And now we are in november. Is it not adding extra ice every day ?
I have been reading the 2017 melt season for a couple months. That was easy to follow, because i just had to read the numbers. But the freezing season is harder to get. What is the problem ? Is the arctic not doing what it should be doing at this time. The melting season stoped somewhere in september, if i'm correct. And now we are in november. Is it not adding extra ice every day ?Just boring. No cataclysm in sight
I have been reading the 2017 melt season for a couple months. That was easy to follow, because i just had to read the numbers. But the freezing season is harder to get. What is the problem ? Is the arctic not doing what it should be doing at this time. The melting season stoped somewhere in september, if i'm correct. And now we are in november. Is it not adding extra ice every day ?
No cataclysm, but no ice in Iqaluit yet, or even as far up as Qik. Unless some ice starts to form this week, it'll be slower than last year in this specific locality.
I'm seeing some deniers crow about how much faster the freeze-up is going this year than last year. Yawn.
Just boring. No cataclysm in sight
yawn indeed but their pleasure will be short lived IMO
Itp 95 hovering around 84nth polewards of svalberd has been showing some regular overturning to below 700m with above the scale temps and salinity rising from deep to replace surface to depth downwelling as the surface cools.Looking at the "Plot of ITP T & S Contours" vs the contents of "itp95last.dat" for the 3rd and 4th of November...
yawn indeed but their pleasure will be short lived IMO
Will it? It would be shocking if this freezing season were even worse than last year's.
Some Atlantic weather for the weekend?
Weather-forecast.com. It is a big operation.
I don't know where you got that chart from Gerontocrat but the pressure centre labelling is all mixed up. Look at the three centres I've circled in bright green labelled "H".
The surface wind goes around the centres in an anticlockwise fashion so in the NH, they should be labelled "L". :)
2016 was unprecedented. 2017 now looks like it is trying to break away from the pack, not only with a slow refreeze but with FDD anomalies as well. The question in my mind, if this continues, is whether we are seeing a shift in winter climate. I have found winters to be as exciting as summers. I just wish there were more experts commenting during the freeze season to explain what I am seeing.I don't post much on the freezing thread atm as I can't think of much to contribute. What you wrote represents my thinking as well, and I think the jury is still out on whether it's a step-changed winter climate or just random variations on a slow trend.
I just want to point out that the seasonal FDD chart is much more appropriate to this thread than the yearly one.
Won’t be long for the freeze-up in Iqaluit
The post by Numerobis above shows the FDD anomaly, which though high is significantly below 2016. The first image below shows 2017 and 2016 Daily Mean Temperatures North of 80 degree North, so far somewhat colder this year though still well above average.I think the pattern will persist as long as we have so much open water in the Beaufort and Chukchi. They're a powerful heat engine right now dumping energy directly into the Arctic.
The second image shows temperature anomalies forecast for the next few days, which indicate the continuation of high positive anomalies on the extreme Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Arctic, as has been the case for some time.
Will this pattern persist and what will be the effect on the where and when of freezing in extent and volume?
I'm doubtful that much of this can be attributed to misgraphing of missing data. Many of these stripes are five to ten days wide. And show on disolved oxygen and up-down composit plots for temp salinity and do also. With two sampling descents per day that would be 10-20 missing logging runs in a row and half the last few months being publicly misrepresented.Itp 95 hovering around 84nth polewards of svalberd has been showing some regular overturning to below 700m with above the scale temps and salinity rising from deep to replace surface to depth downwelling as the surface cools.Looking at the "Plot of ITP T & S Contours" vs the contents of "itp95last.dat" for the 3rd and 4th of November...
I really have to suspect that there is no such "overturning to below 700m", and that it only looks like that on the contour plot because of how they fill in missing data.
The 3rd of November had a massive cuision of very cold very fresh water from 26m to 100m, the 4th of November had no data readings shallower than 529m depth... but the contour plot for day 309 (Nov 4th) shows the top 100m as being suddenly warm and salty. There was no actual evidence to suggest a dramatic change.
I'm doubtful that much of this can be attributed to misgraphing of missing data.Ok. Let's dive deeper.
If a Low Minimum in average produce higher min next year, The onlY Option ist, thathat ICE is warming, ICE helps Not to lose energy, ICE triggerrd Indikation ist bigger Thema less albedo in Summer.
Smartphone writing ist awful.
Ich
But with the anticlockwise low pressure dominated circulation patterns we are increasingly seeing. This is like a spin cycle with fresh riverine influxes not replenishing the halo but expelled by coriolis out bering and CAA, greenland coasts. Big negative sstas in the nth pac and greenland area presently look like this to me.
Your stripes... What happened? It seems the contour plots have had a little update!Not sure which you alluding to. 95 still stripy. Not implausibility that pulses of salty water are sliding in under the icepack when basin wide seals do pressure drops. Get cooled to freezing point near surface and sink, and under rising pressure central basin surface waters washing out. Unless we go "Naah, must all just be mechanical!". The co-located imb-crrel-dartmouth.org is potentially able to shed some light if you can strip search it's thermistor string data. Water temp with ice in proximity is a proxy for salinity.
They now show a more plausible story of active deep water formation.
If a Low Minimum in average produce higher min next year, The onlY Option ist, thathat ICE is warming, ICE helps Not to lose energy, ICE triggerrd Indikation ist bigger Thema less albedo in Summer.
Smartphone writing ist awful.
Ich
Anyone knows about Hycom Forecasts?It has now a Global version including Antarctica https://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycomcice1-12/POLAR.html
Hasn't been updated since 24th October.
year rel 2013 rel mean 2017 1.88 1.27 2016 1.53 1.04 2015 1.32 0.90 2014 1.64 1.11 2013 1.00 0.68 |
on the Chukchi front, refreezing is actually the slowest in years. while the Svalbard front is actually receding poleward.That's right, Oren. It appears primarily attributable to influxes of Bering Sea and Atlantic Waters that are too warm, given their immense heat capacity relative to the freezing capacity of cold air in conjunction with net upwelling radiative energy flux loss. (Ice pack bulk motion, compaction and dispersion need to be factored in but have been fairly minimal.)
For a belated PIOMAS update (http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2017/11/piomas-november-2017.html) over on the ASIB, I produced this graph showing Arctic Temperatures (65-90N) for October since 2005. 2017 second lowest on record
As of 30 Sept 2017, ACNFS will be replaced by the Global Ocean Forecast System (GOFS 3.1). Daily Arctic and Antarctic ice products are available from the GOFS 3.1web page. The ACNFS webpage will remain in service for historical purposes but will not be updated with real-time ice forecast products.
https://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycomcice1-12/POLAR.html
Quite a change ... one of our long-time resources for sea ice thickness has been replaced. The ice is markedly thinner in the new products; whether it is any more accurate is questionable. Still, the forecasts give some idea what is coming.
(whereupon A-team tells me it is sea temperatures at surface and depth that really matter ?).
is GOFS an improvement, otherwise what's the point?Good question. Ditto for RASM-ESRL which seems to offer a third version of similar products (below). But that could be asked as well for UH and UB SMOS. Hamburg has coordinated salinity polarizability with Cryosat thickness; Bremen with another soil satellite SMAP. Maybe the two could get together and offer one optimal product?
sea temperatures at surface and depth matterThe air temperature at 2m can be quite cold relative to the sea water freezing point yet the re-analyzer temperature anomaly can still be a pronounced orange, especially for a 30 year base period that misses out on more recent Arctic Amplification (which is largely a fall and winter phenomenon).
water vapor intrusions can have very significant impactsYes indeed, seems like last season had a number of notable and persistent events. Anybody recall the link to that very fine TPW web graphic? It showed counter-rotating water vapor trails sometimes rising up into the North Atlantic and beyond, bring warm vapor from the Caribbean.
Thanks Neven. But i would have phrased it as second highest on record. :)
Yes indeed, seems like last season had a number of notable and persistent events. Anybody recall the link to that very fine TPW web graphic? It showed counter-rotating water vapor trails sometimes rising up into the North Atlantic and beyond, bring warm vapor from the Caribbean.
You mean this TPW?Yes! Surprising that it display, original size is 1000 x 470
There are no active temperature gauges today in the Arctic Ocean itself,
You mean this one?
You might also mention that it's the one linked at the bottom of your Arctic Sea Ice Graphs.
does IMB 2017B count?Not if it wasn't used in producing the 2m Tropical Tidbits temperature model map. If independent, it has some interest in terms of a reality check (validation point) for the later, though one point per 9 million sq km is rather sparse. Whatever, 2m is not what the snow/ice surface is experiencing which is 0.1m or better, Teff.
Ice reported in Black Bay (Ontario shore of Lake Superior) by both CIS and GLSEA on Nov 16.
From what I can figure it's the 2nd earliest reported great lakes ice on record (since 1972/3 season). 2014 was 2 days earlier, 1995 was one day later.
All years with November ice: '95 '96 '05 '07 '12 '13 '14 '15 '17 - Correlated with decreasing arctic ice?
Look at those isobars.Have to say i dont like 2 hPa spacing on large charts. Gives a wrong impression.
Extremely windy these next days in the Central Arctic
I've been playing a bit with temperature data from the NCEP reanalysis datasetThank you Neven, very interesting. It seems 2016 automn "craziness" was mostly in the Pacific sector, which also shows the strongest long-term warming trend.
I've divided the Arctic (65-90N) into four sections:
Here are graphs for October 2005-2017 and 1948-2017:
I've been playing a bit with temperature data from the NCEP reanalysis datasetThank you Neven, very interesting. It seems 2016 automn "craziness" was mostly in the Pacific sector, which also shows the strongest long-term warming trend.
I've divided the Arctic (65-90N) into four sections:
Here are graphs for October 2005-2017 and 1948-2017:
A general warming trend over the last 4 decades.
Looks more to me like the continents are flat while the oceans are warming -- though the Pacific is more variable than the Atlantic.
Look at those isobars. Extremely windy these next days in the Central Arctic
A general warming trend over the last 4 decades.
Looks more to me like the continents are flat while the oceans are warming -- though the Pacific is more variable than the Atlantic.
Freshwater storage in the Arctic Ocean has increased. Compared with the 1980–2000 average, the volume of freshwater in the upper layer of the Arctic Ocean has increased by 8,000 cubic kilometersDo you know if that includes freshwater *ice*?
Do you know if that includes *freshwater* ice?There's a comprehensive and quite readable discussion of every aspect of Arctic freshwater in Chapter 7 of the assessment. By freshwater, oceanographers don't mean drinking water fresh, merely how not-as-saline as 34.8 psu seawater. So 34.7 psu is already freshened by how much water would have to evaporate to bring it up to 34.8 psu. The surface freshwater anomaly extends down a few tens of meters at most (first image).
Some warm air moving up Baffin at the moment (as Numerobis mentioned already) spreads further north over the next couple of days.
Look at those isobars. Extremely windy these next days in the Central Arctic, very cold in Siberia, not really in the Atlantic sidem
I can't really add much, except a new resource. (Unless someone has already posted these which I didn't see)
I'm not really a fan of Ryan Maue, but he left weatherbell and is working with a new site called WeatherDotUS.
It has more ECMWF data, all freely accessible in 6 hour increments.
For the deterministic ECMWF, it has an Arctic view and these parameters.
MSLP
10m winds. (first attachment)
850mb wind
300mb winds
850mb temp anomaly
500mb height anomaly
Total precipitation
Precipitable water venues
Modeled snowfall
2m temp anomalies
http://wx.graphics/models/ecmwf/ecmwf.php
@Zlabe has a nice graphic on temperature anomalies the last couple of months, consistent with persistent open water in the Chukchi and north Svalbard (where both air and water are too warm).Ah, as stated above your post.... the Present High Arctic Berserker ;D(2), PHAB ;D(2) or FAB ;D(2):
Edit: I've just seen I have become an ASIF Citizen ! :)
Present High Arctic Berserker ;D(2), PHAB ;D(2) or FAB ;D(2)) has been over average temperature for 90+ days.
The FAB ;D(2) is now 95+ days in length, of which I predicted in its pre-60 days, that it could reach 100 days in length.
JAXA High Arctic temperature line graph
Personally, I find a measure like FDD more useful than just the period of time a trend line spends above the baseline.
It is the Danish Meteorological Institute data above the 80th parallel.
Yes, that is the one, plus all the charts going back to 1958.It is the Danish Meteorological Institute data above the 80th parallel.
It would be helpful if you could include links to and/or pretty pictures of the data you are referring to. Is this the one (http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php)?
(https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Focean.dmi.dk%2Farctic%2Fplots%2FmeanTarchive%2FmeanT_2017.png&hash=59eb65f128ffbe7ae10e4673b1a7d998)
If you need some help in how to get the right picture in the right place in your post please do not hesitate to ask. The image above is linked to the DMI web site, so it will change as the days go by.
n Frobisher Bay, new ice formation has begun as early as mid October, and as late as the second week of November.
To answer your question, long High Arctic continuous over-temperatures, during the late 1950's & early 60's were ~ 30 to 40 days. Over decades, these continuous over-temperatures very slowly increased their periods. I started paying attention to them when the over-temperatures got to 80days. Then, one of the FAB ;D 's got to one hundred days. But, it didn't stop there. One went for 140 days. In latter 2016, everyone paid attention when one FAB ;D (what I named FAB ;D(1) ) jumped to ~ 20degC over the average" temperature line. Of course, the 20degC over-temperature was quick up & down, & people quieted down, the lower the temp went. However, FAB ;D(1) went from latter 2016, deep into 2017, for over 230 days. That's one of the reasons I thought, once FAB ;D(2) got to 55-58 days in length, it had a good chance to get to 100 days (of which it is very close now). I can't say if FAB ;D(2) will get as long as FAB ;D(1), but it could if the continuing cold fronts over Canada & northwestern Siberia don't push hard into the High Arctic. Also, FAB ;D(2) started earlier than FAB ;D(1), so we'll see how long FAB ;D(2) can last.I agree with Neven, that FDD data are the best way to scientifically determine High Arctic changes. But, on the AGW denier liar whiner webcysts that I oppose such, I am having real-time fun presenting the ever lengthening days of existence of continuous High Arctic over-temperatures. I show their rapid rises & falls & as surmised from the above, during low sun & sun below horizon seasons, the low falls are increasingly ABOVE the average temperature lines, established since 1958. Here is one of my posts, open to your enjoyment or critique:
It is no coincidence that these Present High Arctic Berserkers (FAB ;D) occur in the High Arctic during the sun periods, very low on, but mostly below the horizon.
litesong wrote:FAB ;D(2) has dropped to 8degC over average temperature for the High Arctic. FAB ;D(2) appears to be very close to 100 days of existence, which was my prediction ~ 40+ days ago.... much like my posts, nurse-maiding FAB ;D(1) to its record breaking 230+ days of existence from latter 2016 to deep into 2017.Quotelitesong wrote:....FAB ;D(2) has now risen to 10degC over recorded average for the 4 million square kilometer-sized High Arctic & appears to be ~ 95 days in length. A High Arctic warm front has enveloped on the North Pole & High Arctic, with enough heat remaining to interact with the "continuing Canadian cold front" & thrusting the most northerly part of the cold front to the south. The solid cold front has been on Canada for a month (more?). But, the powerful warm front is showing it has more... "solidity".....FAB ;D(2) has now risen to 10+degC over recorded average for the 4 million square kilometer-sized High Arctic & appears to be ~ 95+ days in length. However, the northern portion of the long term Canadian cold front may re-establish itself over the Canadian archipelago. Plus, the cold front over Northwestern Siberia is extending itself south deep into China.
Mercator Ocean is a privately-owned non-profit company. It provides a service of general interest to France and Europe as a whole. The organization was founded and is funded by the five major French institutions involved in operational oceanography: CNRS, Ifremer, IRD, Météo-France and SHOM.
So many storms in South Baffin this year.Mercator Ocean offers an interesting depth section of water temperature and salinity from Labrador to Greenland. One hopes there is a mooring or two that provides actual data to anchor modeling.
Hudson Bay's refreeze over the last week has been one of the earliest on record over the past twenty years it seems. Should be mostly frozen by 12/5-12/10!
Today I noticed that cci-reanalyser has updated their service to provide several new visual data sets on the condition of the arctic (and world). Significant new additions are their Snow Depth figures and 500hPA Geopot. Height.
(https://www.alaskapublic.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/11292017_Chukchi-600x360.jpg)
The Chukchi Sea should be almost fully covered in sea ice by now. Instead, it’s mostly open water.
Brian Brettschneider, with our Ask a Climatologist segment, says the ice coverage right now in the Chukchi is typical for mid-October, not late-November.
Hudson Bay is freezing much faster than 2016 but pretty much in line with 2012 through 2015.Right, it's been coldish there relative to way too warm 'everywhere' else (except Siberia).
Hudson Bay's refreeze over the last week has been one of the earliest on record over the past twenty years it seems. Should be mostly frozen by 12/5-12/10!
In late October, the ice begins to form along the northwestern shores of the Bay. Some years there may also be a simultaneous development in the cold waters near Foxe Channel. In November, the ice thickens as prevailing winds move it east and southeast. In December the Bay becomes covered with thickening first-year ice.
Beaufort Gyre forecast to become re-established in early December along with Fram export. (From Arctic16.gif of NOAA REB plots at ESRL; speeds shown in m/s, direction with arrows.)
Hudson Bay's refreeze over the last week has been one of the earliest on record over the past twenty years it seems. Should be mostly frozen by 12/5-12/10!
Per the ice atlas, that's about normal -- of course we haven't had normal in a while:QuoteIn late October, the ice begins to form along the northwestern shores of the Bay. Some years there may also be a simultaneous development in the cold waters near Foxe Channel. In November, the ice thickens as prevailing winds move it east and southeast. In December the Bay becomes covered with thickening first-year ice.
It's well above normal in Iqaluit through the end of the forecast period, with the lows being warmer than the normal high, and lots of snow.
Reanalyzer shows an angry hot Canadian Arctic. The only exception is the West side of Hudson Bay, which is slightly cooler (and outright cold inland).
I just noticed that the cci-reanalyzer doesn't have a border between NWT and Nunavut. They're up to date on the climate, but not the politics, it seems ;)
Despite the warmth, Frobisher Bay is freezing up a bit today. There's little blobs of ice out in the bay, with a cap of snow on each.
What happens if at some point we end up with MYI in Okhotsk + HB and only FYI in the CAB?
QuoteDespite the warmth, Frobisher Bay is freezing up a bit today. There's little blobs of ice out in the bay, with a cap of snow on each.
Well that went quickly.
Yesterday:
(https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fice-glaces.ec.gc.ca%2Fprods%2FWIS33CT%2F20171201180000_WIS33CT_0009762830.gif&hash=17af1b1319388f6a6ceea55b9d7f4b17)
Today:
(https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fice-glaces.ec.gc.ca%2Fprods%2FWIS33CT%2F20171202180000_WIS33CT_0009764381.gif&hash=0fb9e4a424ce1f42cdeb24f7f932376a)What happens if at some point we end up with MYI in Okhotsk + HB and only FYI in the CAB?
How would you get MYI in Hudson Bay? Temperatures are higher than historical, and historically there was none.
Ask a Climatologist: Chukchi Sea ice at record low (https://www.alaskapublic.org/2017/11/29/ask-a-climatologist-chukchi-sea-ice-at-record-low/)Quote(https://www.alaskapublic.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/11292017_Chukchi-600x360.jpg)
The Chukchi Sea should be almost fully covered in sea ice by now. Instead, it’s mostly open water.
Brian Brettschneider, with our Ask a Climatologist segment, says the ice coverage right now in the Chukchi is typical for mid-October, not late-November.
What happens if at some point we end up with MYI in Okhotsk + HB and only FYI in the CAB?
How would you get MYI in Hudson Bay? Temperatures are higher than historical, and historically there was none.
You would need a cooler repeat of summer 2017, where snow is retained along much of the shoreline til the end of June or July. If we see the current snowfall feedback make much more progress, this will not be unfeasible (explaining why 2017 was so anomalously snowy).
Even though extent has gone into lag mode, volume continues to perform phenomenally and historically well:
Four equal quadrants, I see. (Forgive me if you don't see them as being equal: I'm not wearing my glasses at the moment, and it might be relevant that I am an American.)
:D :-\ ::)
November 2017 averaged 17.2°F in Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska, a new monthly record—besting the previous record of 15.3°F established in November 1950—and some 16.4° above average. This was also the second month of the year with a record-high average temperature, the other being this past July with a 46.0°F monthly average (the fourth highest reading observed in any month on record).https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/amazing-autumn-alaskas-north-slope-record-warmth-record-low-sea-ice-extent
Winters in Utqiaġvik have seen a dramatic warming over the past 10 years, as Figure 1 below illustrates. In fact, it has not just been the winters. As of November 30, the average in Utqiagvik for 2017 stands at 19.5°. That value will surely drop once the upcoming cold of December is factored in, but if December temperatures are near or above average, then 2017 will still end up as the second warmest year on record in Utqiaġvik, behind only 2016 (which averaged 18.9°F). As long as this year ranks in the top eight, as seems very likely, then eight of the warmest years on record for Utqiaġvik will have occurred in just the past 10 years....[lots more]
Why not making the Pacific region larger, even if it overlaps other regions. When I think on the Pacific side (and I believe many people here too) I think on a much broader region including most of the Beaufort sea, reaching Amundsen Gulf on one side, and taking on the other side part of the ESS as well (almost reaching the New Siberian Islands).Four equal quadrants, I see. (Forgive me if you don't see them as being equal: I'm not wearing my glasses at the moment, and it might be relevant that I am an American.)
:D :-\ ::)
The American quadrant is the biggest!
Hmm, maybe I should make them equal in size, but I'm not sure how that looks geographically (especially Pacific)...
Nice summary of extreme warmth for the Alaskan Arctic coast today by Bob Henson:QuoteNovember 2017 averaged 17.2°F in Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska, a new monthly record—besting the previous record of 15.3°F established in November 1950—and some 16.4° above average. This was also the second month of the year with a record-high average temperature, the other being this past July with a 46.0°F monthly average (the fourth highest reading observed in any month on record).https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/amazing-autumn-alaskas-north-slope-record-warmth-record-low-sea-ice-extent
Winters in Utqiaġvik have seen a dramatic warming over the past 10 years, as Figure 1 below illustrates. In fact, it has not just been the winters. As of November 30, the average in Utqiagvik for 2017 stands at 19.5°. That value will surely drop once the upcoming cold of December is factored in, but if December temperatures are near or above average, then 2017 will still end up as the second warmest year on record in Utqiaġvik, behind only 2016 (which averaged 18.9°F). As long as this year ranks in the top eight, as seems very likely, then eight of the warmest years on record for Utqiaġvik will have occurred in just the past 10 years....[lots more]
My question never be answered in a german forum, maybe the question is to complicated, because there are so many factors.
Lets take a scenario.
Lets take the same condition, that occur 20 years agon.
Now lets replace the arctic ocean water with a fluid with a much lower freezing point.
I have to do this to look for the effect of ic in the energy flux.
So we have the case, that after low ice minima, ice is growing.
So it seems (at least on the surface) that the extra energy is lost due to later refreezing, lower insulation etc pp.
Now the question.
What would be the temperature of the arctic ocean say for the nieveau of 1980, if the freezing point of water would be 20 degree lower.
This question is intersting.
Would the ocean be much warmer, no, if so, there would be a massive positive feedback and ice would dissapear faster and faster.
But also this feedback is different at different north, at n80 it may be the case, that ice was warming over the year, but at n 70 it was cooling.
Every discussion is difficult, because arguments of higher temperatures and higher ohc are named, but of course this is the case is arctic is flued with warmer air and the temperatures are higher in general.
The question is more like if there is a decent negative feedback, so that open water or a higher energy input in the arctic at least at n80 has a higher radiaton in winter then the less albedo can compensate.
The only option would be something like a quicker cooling surface, that outperform the more heat due to summer, but deeper water is warming, so that ohc is still rising.
I dont know, what happens if water gets like an extra heat in summer. After refreeze is the Temperature delta bigger, so that deeper water is warming or is it like.
Ice got later and growth is slower, that also means there is more heat goint to space and also deeper water could adjust.
I dont know.
My question never be answered in a german forum, maybe the question is to complicated, because there are so many factors.
credit for Alaskan historic data goes to C Burt and R ThomanDuly noted and welcome aboard, Bob!
one scary chartPresumably an objective rationale for picking the breakpoint in the two linear regressions?
Arctic sea ice data from a variety of historical sources have been synthesized into a database extending back to 1850 with monthly time-resolution. The synthesis procedure includes interpolation to a uniform grid and an analog-based estimation of ice concentrations in areas of no data. The consolidated database shows that there is no precedent as far back as 1850 for the 21st century's minimum ice extent of sea ice on the pan-Arctic scale. A regional-scale exception to this statement is the Bering Sea. The rate of retreat since the 1990s is also unprecedented and especially large in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. Decadal and multidecadal variations have occurred in some regions, but their magnitudes are smaller than that of the recent ice loss. Interannual variability is prominent in all regions and will pose a challenge to sea ice prediction efforts.
That is one scary chart with the inflection point in the 1990's. Clearly something has changed and the change appears to be persistent, if not permanent.
Why not making the Pacific region larger, even if it overlaps other regions. When I think on the Pacific side (and I believe many people here too) I think on a much broader region including most of the Beaufort sea, reaching Amundsen Gulf on one side, and taking on the other side part of the ESS as well (almost reaching the New Siberian Islands).
In other words 120W to 150E,
clockwise
around the pole
north pole
Thanks for the suggestion, Sterks. I'll give it some thought.
is there any way to make our dorky flat graphs come to life?ESRL has quite a few items we have not made use of so far, notably the 'meteograms' and 'xsections' in the archive of 'Reb Plots'. These are mostly for selected weather stations around the western Arctic, with the exception of one which seems to average the whole Arctic Ocean but over current sea ice only. (These are ten day predictions but include the initial state.)
Nice Neven. Do you have longer range data for the quadrants? Based on your graphs, the temperature shows an increase due to the 2016 El Nino (except for Siberia). It would be relatively flat otherwise. Perhaps a longer timeframe would be able to confirm these results.
The actually equal-in-size quadrants makes some sense when comparing regions.
I feel appropriately put in my place :'( only because I thought the irony was warranted. ;)
I finally had some time again playing around with sea ice concentration data.Thanks, very interesting stuff.
BTW, the Chukchi is where all the action is happening recently, maybe you can get some graph or map focusing on the Chukchi and showing the lengthening of the ice-free period.
Although two years, statistically, won't determine a new state, it has only gotten 'cold' once in almost two years, according to the DMI 80N graphs (http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php).I'll hazard a predictive summary of their comments- warmer water, thinner ice, far greater inputs of moisture from lower latitudes.
I wonder what the atmospheric physicists and climate modelers and such have to say about what could steadfastly maintain North Pole winter 'warmth'.
See the NOAA report threadlink=topic=2213.msg136159#msg136159 date=1513160047
Quote:Despite relatively cool summer temperatures, observations in 2017 continue to indicate that the Arctic environmental system has reached a 'new normal', characterized by long-term losses in the extent and thickness of the sea ice cover, the extent and duration of the winter snow cover and the mass of ice in the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic glaciers, and warming sea surface and permafrost temperatures.
the Arctic environmental system has reached a 'new normal'I sincerely doubt if anyone will step forward and admit to having writing that grossly misleading sentence but the implication -- that some sort of new 'equilibrium state' or pause in Arctic Amplification has set in -- is dead wrong.
Special issue to highlight impact of changes in Arctic climate (https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-12/ioap-sit112917.php)
INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
There's controversy in climate change research--not whether climate change exists, but how the evidence is gathered and used to inform predictions. To help bring convergence to the field and potentially accelerate action, a special issue of the Advances in Atmospheric Sciences is highlighting recent scientific work.
"Our understanding of Arctic-midlatitude linkages is still at a pre-consensus stage," said Thomas Jung, a professor of climate dynamics at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. He also co-authored the issue's preface as a guest editor. "...it is important, therefore, to bring together the latest research results."
Titled, "Towards improving understanding and prediction of Arctic change and its linkage with Eurasian mid-latitude weather and climate" ---or "Impact of a Rapidly Changing Arctic on Eurasian Climate and Weather" for short---the special issue focuses on understanding how changes in the Arctic influence the mid-latitude regions of the globe. These areas sandwich the central tropical region. They are capped by the Earth's poles, and include Europe, most of Asia, north Africa, and much of North America.
While the increased near-surface temperature of the Arctic and the significantly decreased sea ice are undisputed facts, the link between such changes and the extreme climate and weather events in the mid-latitudes is still debated.
"The results published in the journal further present where divergence occurs," said the lead editor of the special issue and preface co-author Xiangdong Zhang, a professor at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the United States. Zhang noted that this knowledge will help scientists identify areas in need of collaborative work.
The special issue includes observational results and modelling work on the problem of Arctic and Eurasian climate links, yet the work does not yet clarify the correlation. According to Zhang, areas of progress include the use of different prediction models, an increased data sample size with the help of coupled model simulations, as well as more focus on regional linkages. The entire Northern Hemisphere was examined, rather than distinct zones.
Quotethe Arctic environmental system has reached a 'new normal'I sincerely doubt if anyone will step forward and admit to having writing that grossly misleading sentence but the implication -- that some sort of new 'equilibrium state' or pause in Arctic Amplification has set in -- is dead wrong.
The downward trend that continued in 2017 -- with record-setting delays in freeze-over in the western portal (Chukchi) -- is the exact opposite of the meaning of steady state in the physical sciences.
In my view, the climate is undergoing unprecedented and largely unpredicted rapid change already, though very unevenly depending on location, eg the western coast of North America is hyper-sensitive to changes in the adjacent Pacific whereas as other areas might plod along at a barely noticeable 2ºC-by-2100.
For this reason, model papers that build on Old Arctic conditions should be rejected at the time of peer-review. It's not at all uncommon to read a December 2017 paper only to discover in the fine print that it assumes an entirely pre-2014 foundation.
Whoa ... a whole lot has happened since then, even with a discount for natural variation. Why wasn't that change in baseline conditions incorporated? A four year delay is unacceptable, long beyond the shelf life of utilizability. Only an eight of that is attributable to journal review.
I follow near-real and annual changes quite closely and have provided several thousand time series so that carefully sourced current data is readily available to even the laziest scientist on the planet. So what's the excuse for all the dilatory papers?
The Arctic is changing too fast for the modeling community to keep up.
Quotethe Arctic environmental system has reached a 'new normal'I sincerely doubt if anyone will step forward and admit to having writing that grossly misleading sentence but the implication -- that some sort of new 'equilibrium state' or pause in Arctic Amplification has set in -- is dead wrong.
The downward trend that continued in 2017 -- with record-setting delays in freeze-over in the western portal (Chukchi) -- is the exact opposite of the meaning of steady state in the physical sciences.
The term "new normal," is somewhat nebulous, and not well defined by NOAA. It could refer to the observations of either declining sea ice maxima or plateauing sea ice minima. Their report mentions both warming winter temperatures and cooling summer temps.
The quote you're replying to doesn't claim there's an equilibrium state or a pause -- quite the opposite.
The normal thing to expect in the Arctic now is that it's warming fast and sea ice is trending down fast.
So reports [for AR6?] finalised in 2021 / 2022.
The timeline for the modelling and associated science is somewhat different. See image below. Will new data from 2018, 2019, 2020 data even get considered?
geronocrat
Does that mean a 2 to 5 year lag between data and reports?
What happened in AR5?
And sorry for the off-topic.
geronocratQuoteSo reports [for AR6?] finalised in 2021 / 2022.
The timeline for the modelling and associated science is somewhat different. See image below. Will new data from 2018, 2019, 2020 data even get considered?
Does that mean a 2 to 5 year lag between data and reports?
What happened in AR5?
geronocratQuoteSo reports [for AR6?] finalised in 2021 / 2022.
The timeline for the modelling and associated science is somewhat different. See image below. Will new data from 2018, 2019, 2020 data even get considered?
Does that mean a 2 to 5 year lag between data and reports?
What happened in AR5?
It is the purpose of the present paper to describe a method and a derived dataset that allow us to shed more light on the development of the age distribution of the Arctic sea ice. For this purpose, we have taken advantage of some new datasets on sea ice drift and concentration developed and distributed by the EUMETSAT Ocean and Sea Ice Satellite Application Facility (OSI SAF). In addition, we have developed a new Eulerian scheme of advection supported by the Sea Ice Climate Change Initiative (SICCI) project of the European Space Agency (ESA). These improvements have allowed us to produce a new sea ice age dataset which in each grid box contains not only the age of the oldest ice, but the actual age distribution provided as fractions of ice of different age categories (hereafter refered to as sea ice age fractions). The dataset will be presented and compared with earlier attempts to map Arctic sea ice age as well as with the standard products for sea ice type classification from scatterometer and microwave radiometer observations.
Yes, the sun is going to turn back to the north and the Chukchi sea still has not experienced the real coldness. If the spring and June will be snowy one can keep calm, otherwise things could get to the new record lows
Great animation, thank you Ice Shieldz.There might need to be a thread to take bets on that. :)
It will probably freeze over by February.
Now without the corduroy, the last 10 days, contrast enhanced of Nares mouth & Lincoln Sea.Awesome!
Looks like the polar vortex is going to blow some cold wind across the US. If i'm right that's because the jet stream is weak. But i have no idea about the scale of that cold burst. For example, can it have an impact on how much ice we get on the arctic this year ? Or is it to small for that ? Because normaly that jet stream keeps that cold weather above the arctic. And if i'm right that jet stream is behaving more unstable the last years. Is there any consensus why it is more unstable ?
Looks like the polar vortex is going to blow some cold wind across the US. If i'm right that's because the jet stream is weak. But i have no idea about the scale of that cold burst. For example, can it have an impact on how much ice we get on the arctic this year ? Or is it to small for that ? Because normaly that jet stream keeps that cold weather above the arctic. And if i'm right that jet stream is behaving more unstable the last years. Is there any consensus why it is more unstable ?
Perhaps the 2013 and 2014 years may give some insight. They were characterized by similar occurrences.
Yes, the sun is going to turn back to the north and the Chukchi sea still has not experienced the real coldness. If the spring and June will be snowy one can keep calm, otherwise things could get to the new record lows
Where do you think that heat comes from ? Because that's a big difference , 20 to 25 degree more than normal. I have no idea if it's related. But i do remember we had a heatwave in the south of Europa and the north of Africa not that long ago. It was a pretty late heatwave. Maybe that extra heat is moving into the arctic, creating a vortex-shot for the US and China.
Canada and the USA are certainly being clobbered with really freezing weather - but look at the Arctic, a different story.
Canada and the USA are certainly being clobbered with really freezing weather - but look at the Arctic, a different story.
WACC-y weather.
Great animation, thank you Ice Shieldz.There might need to be a thread to take bets on that. :)
It will probably freeze over by February.
I've been reading this forum for quite a while and it seems - just like last summer - that with 2017 sea ice having come up to 2nd place (meaning 2nd lowest) people are getting excited again, and we start to see the same sentiment that always prevails when ice extent is very low. With this come the usual forecasts of imminent collapse of sea ice (and all life an Earth :D).
I believe this is wrong. Noone, meaning noone can forecast a chaotic system and Arctic Sea Ice being one, it is impossible to say whether we are going to lose (most of) all summer ice in 2018 or 2048. I do appreciate hard data, studies and facts and all the people who contribute, but the expectation of miracles and wild, baseless forecasts (which in fact are not forecasts at all) are really unnecessary and tiresome.
Also, the world will not come to an end when we lose ASI although it seems to me that many people on this forum hope (and at the same tiime dread) to see just that, only to prove them right and everyone around them wrong.
I think that losing the ice is now fait accompli, not much can be done about that. The only question is adaptation which is still possible. Dreaming about the apocalypse is just a waste of time which could be spent much better, preparing for (possibbly very abrupt) climate change.
Anyway, I wanted to write about these things last summer, and even 2016 autumn. I promise not to be so offtopic next time. Thanks everyone for the effort and all the valuable contribution!
Focusing on "volume" has its merits, as ice grows or shrinks via 3-dimensional molecules (via the physical chemistry that works in this 3-dimensional realm), but is minimally measured (mostly modeled). When the sun shines, albedo (causing or suppressing solar heat gain) is strongly affected by sea ice area (SIA), so it is a significant component of Arctic health. Finally, sea ice extent (SIE) is meaningful, partly because it is more accurately measured, and partly because the difference between SIE and SIA gives some clues as to mid-ice sheet albedo (thus melting). (Warm marginal seas will affect future ice (or lack thereof) in those areas, but doesn't much affect Central Arctic Basin (CAB) melting.)
But as this is the "freezing" thread, we note that low SIA means there is open water where there used to be ice with the resulting significant transfer of heat from this water to the atmosphere, increasing temperature and humidity, and, most likely, snowfall on nearby ice. "Warm" (less severely cold) air depresses ice volume growth, as does increased snow cover (more insulation). Thick ice (other parameters being equal) thickens much more slowly than thin ice (due to 'self-insulation', basically). (So, here we are, back to volume!)
Yup, it's all important, and crucial to our deepening understanding of Arctic sea ice!
It seems to me that in the past winters it was either warm in Europe and cold in the US or the other way around, as if the cold air can "splash" out of the Arctic only in one direction and then it stays there. Is there any scientific explanation for that? Or are my "feelings" utterly baseless?An east-west swing has been known here in the states since I was a kid in the 1950s. In the winter, if it is warm in the west it is usually cold in the east -- and the reverse. I think the pattern is a bit too complex to strictly say the same about Eurasia and America, but I'm sure there is some sort of pattern there.
Closing in?
It seems to me that in the past winters it was either warm in Europe and cold in the US or the other way around, as if the cold air can "splash" out of the Arctic only in one direction and then it stays there. Is there any scientific explanation for that? Or are my "feelings" utterly baseless?
↓ ↓ ↓Closing in?What are we looking at here?
Closing in?
What are we looking at here?
I wonder how that might impact sea ice formation ?
The cci-reanalyzer outlook for the next 5 days shows how there is lots of activity in the Bering Sea and the Atlantic end of the CAB, but the Arctic, most of N. America and most of Siberia are drize-a-bone.I wonder how that might impact sea ice formation ?
I also wonder what it will mean for precipitation (snow) on the sea ice in the Pacific side of the Arctic? Last year, we saw what the train of Atlantic storms eventually meant for the melting season.
Not quite sure how it would be quantified, but it looks to me like the DMI 80N is settling into a much narrower temperature band that it used to in winter. Not as narrow as summer, but still visibly different from the past.
The 8 or 9K average temperature 'step change' (eyeballed difference between current winter average and graph's average line) occurred at the end of December 2015 on the DMI 80N chart (http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php). I don't recall anybody identifying a concurrent weather/climate change. Did I miss the discussion or is this worthy of its own thread [maybe "DMI's 80N step change in winter temperatures" or "Step change in winter temperatures (e.g., DMI's 80N)"]. If so, someone with weather-cred should start such a thread, as they could better describe what appears to be happening ("climate" being '30-years' and we have 'two'.)
Indeed - that snow provided significant protection for the ice.I wonder how that might impact sea ice formation ?
I also wonder what it will mean for precipitation (snow) on the sea ice in the Pacific side of the Arctic? Last year, we saw what the train of Atlantic storms eventually meant for the melting season.
The 8 or 9K average temperature 'step change' (eyeballed difference between current winter average and graph's average line) occurred at the end of December 2015 on the DMI 80N chart.Interesting observation, Tor. The graphic below quantitates that by looking at the 'outer' two-thirds of the year via blue pixel counting that shows the mean temperature difference between 2017 and climate as 5.3ºC. We could name this
The graphic below quantitates that by looking at the 'outer' two-thirds of the year via blue pixel counting that shows the mean temperature difference between 2017 and climate as 5.3ºC...That is all well and good, but the range prior to this winter was indicative of a wildly unstable system, and suddenly we have a system which so far is looking very stable.
The 8 or 9K average temperature 'step change' (eyeballed difference between current winter average and graph's average line) occurred at the end of December 2015 on the DMI 80N chart (http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php). I don't recall anybody identifying a concurrent weather/climate change. Did I miss the discussion or is this worthy of its own thread [maybe "DMI's 80N step change in winter temperatures" or "Step change in winter temperatures (e.g., DMI's 80N)"]. If so, someone with weather-cred should start such a thread, as they could better describe what appears to be happening ("climate" being '30-years' and we have 'two'.)
The graphic below quantitates that by looking at the 'outer' two-thirds of the year via blue pixel counting that shows the mean temperature difference between 2017 and climate as 5.3ºC...That is all well and good, but the range prior to this winter was indicative of a wildly unstable system, and suddenly we have a system which so far is looking very stable.
created a mid October SIA yearly comparison starting at 2012. Shocking difference between 2016 to 2017Nice effort! I have a request in for near-real time updating for the new sea ice age display (it's stuck on 01 Oct 17) and to fix existing glitches in their netCDF files (which go back to 01 Oct 12). These are much more interesting than indicated above. A log10 scale had to be used to bring out color since the ice age classes are so heavily weighted towards first year ice.
NH snow cover is also interesting right now:Down???
NH snow cover is also interesting right now:
NH snow cover is also interesting right now:
Interesting as in the old curse "may you live in interesting times" :-S
At least, on the positive side, there shouldn't be any direct link between E Europe snow in the region where it's less than normal and arctic sea ice.
I am trying to it embed here on ASIF (not sure exactly how to do that or how to embed youtube videos)
NH snow cover is also interesting right now:Down???
That is very interesting..., and I'm not sure of the correct way to take it. Is there less humidity all of a sudden?
Exactly my thoughts. Cover may be down because cover may have been melted.NH snow cover is also interesting right now:Down???
That is very interesting..., and I'm not sure of the correct way to take it. Is there less humidity all of a sudden?
not less humidity but perhaps more rain instead of snow ?
I have been tracking precipitation on Greenland. Since the beginning of November it has been average or well below average. I look at cci-reanalyzer to see what the next few days may bring.Exactly my thoughts. Cover may be down because cover may have been melted.not less humidity but perhaps more rain instead of snow ?NH snow cover is also interesting right now:Down???
That is very interesting..., and I'm not sure of the correct way to take it. Is there less humidity all of a sudden?
Trouble is, that while there is easily accessible data on Northern Hemisphere snow cover, I as yet have found nothing on snowfall amounts, i.e. thickness ( reminds one of sea ice thickness v. extent?).
Trouble is, that while there is easily accessible data on Northern Hemisphere snow cover, I as yet have found nothing on snowfall amounts, i.e. thickness ( reminds one of sea ice thickness v. extent?).
On the ASIG there's a NH snow depth departure (ie anomaly) map:
And a snow water equivalent map:
I don't know how they are made or how trustworthy they are. I believe it's difficult for satellite sensors to track this, as with sea ice thickness, but for other reasons.
Data are derived from the operational global snow depth analysis run at the Canadian Meteorological Centre, Environment and Climate Change Canada Canada, since 1998. The CMC analysis is based on optimal interpolation of real-time climate station snow depth observations merged with background information from a simple snow model, as described in Brasnett (1999). This snapshot is a contribution to the Global Cryosphere Watch (GCW) programme of the World Meteorological Organization. (Brasnett, B. 1999. A global analysis of snow depth for numerical weather prediction, Journal of Applied Meteorology 38:726-740.)
Trouble is, that while there is easily accessible data on Northern Hemisphere snow cover, I as yet have found nothing on snowfall amounts, i.e. thickness ( reminds one of sea ice thickness v. extent?).
According to NOAA's NCEP/NCAR data 65N-90N December air temps at 1000mb set a new record, although seemingly not as much of a record as the 925mb temps illuminated in Neven's PIOMAS update: http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2018/01/piomas-january-2018.html (http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2018/01/piomas-january-2018.html)
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries1.pl (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries1.pl)
We measured CO2 fluxes along with sea ice and snow physical and chemical properties over first-year and young sea ice north of Svalbard in the Arctic ice pack. Our results suggest that young thin snow-free ice, with or without frost flowers, is a source of atmospheric CO₂ due to the high pCO2 and salinity and relatively high sea ice temperature. Although the potential CO₂ flux through the sea-ice surface decreased due to the presence of snow, snow surface still presents a modest CO₂ source to the atmosphere for low snow density and shallow depth situations. The highest ice to air fluxes were observed over thin young sea ice formed in leads. During N-ICE2015 the ice pack was dynamic, and formation of open water was associated with storms, where new ice was formed. Open leads and storm periods were important for air-to-sea CO₂ fluxes (Fransson et al., 2017), due to undersaturation of the surface waters, while the subsequent ice growth in these leads becomes important for the ice-to-air CO₂ fluxes in winter due to the fact that the flux from young ice is an order of magnitude larger than from snow-covered first-year ice.
Technical note: this is technically difficult to make because of the immense initial file size prior to cropping down to the Arctic Ocean. Yet at the end, it is not a large file though not all web browsers seem able to display forum mp4. However download seems to work ok and can be viewed on your local movie player. Even Opera is showing an artifactual green stripe down the Fram that is not in the original file or its QuickTime representation. However a crop at the level of the original gif seems to cure this problem. Note the day-number is initially hidden under the inept controller.
Seems the way to make the forum play nice with embedding video is to upload the video to a youtube account and then paste the youtube video's 'share link' (not the embed link) straight into your forum message.
I cannot watch mp4s due to lack of software.No computer, no web browser other than the phone's?
upload the video to a youtube account and then paste the youtube video's 'share link' (not the embed link) straight into your forum message.Are not youtubes restricted to fixed length x width proportions? That would not work too well given Arctic Ocean shape. Then there is Twitter but their software has major weirdness issues.
cyclone looks like it's still going to be very deep and cause extreme issues for Fram ice due to wave actionHere are Fram and Nares export the last two years, from the mid-September minimum until January 11th. Again, way too large as gifs. To best view, turn controller off, loop to on, hit play.
Here are Fram and Nares export the last two years, from the mid-September minimum until January 11th. Again, way too large as gifs. To best view, turn controller off, loop to on, hit play.
Yuha's doesn't work for me directly or via download!Double ditto. Not compatible with Mac QuickTime Player.
HELP Ice looks sicker in 2017! What does the colour coding mean?Nothing was intended other than binning the 256 grayscale colors into 16 arbitrary distinct colors (ie 8-bit to 4-bit) for purposes of possibly illustrating floe motion better. This was the most effective of the canned palettes in ImageJ. However now I see that it actually is a 'spectral' lookup table and so the colors do correspond to snow/ice surface dielectric ~ ice surface salinity ~ extent of brine exclusion ~ sea ice age ~ sea ice thickness. More or less, the more less the farther down the chain towards thickness.
one last try with the mp4 format, this time converting it using HandBrakeLoads and plays for me on Opera and Chrome but oddly not Safari mac. Handbrake is at https://handbrake.fr/
if I change that manually to .mp4 it seems to play ok but only loads as an attachment, does not play here. So I ran it by an online converter to get a legitimate mp4 that is playing for me at least.
QuoteHELP Ice looks sicker in 2017! What does the colour coding mean?Nothing was intended other than binning the 256 grayscale colors into 16 arbitrary distinct colors for purposes of possibly illustrating floe motion better. However now I see that it actually is a 'spectral' lookup table and so the colors do correspond to snow/ice surface dielectric ~ ice surface salinity ~ extent of brine exclusion ~ sea ice age ~ sea ice thickness. More or less, the more less the farther down the chain towards thickness.
In other words, the whiter grays tend to be older and thicker and so are shown more as reds and magenta. However to compare volume export, wipneus estimates that on Piomas forum; to compare years for the whole Arctic Ocean in January, SMOS is probably best.
Ice pack motion -- and Fram export -- really picked up this fall and has continued into January 2018. It's easy to see but difficult to describe ice pack motion.
Is it possible to slow the damn thing down. My eyes feel like they've been strobed !
Here is Dec 28 - Jan 11 (Fram, Nares (some days are missing due to clouds)). Images: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/morrisjessup.uk.php
It's like fragments of older rock in a breccia.Nice summary and an important distinction. Oren also made this point over at the Lincoln Sea collapse video. There's still ice forming in narrow leads and cold polynyas even in summer. So some of this ice is neither fish nor fowl in terms of FY, SYI or MYI. Overall, the latter two are more of a melange every year.
I agree, made it 10 times slower.Is it possible to slow the damn thing down. My eyes feel like they've been strobed !
Here is Dec 28 - Jan 11 (Fram, Nares (some days are missing due to clouds)). Images: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/morrisjessup.uk.php
I've added .m4v, .avi and .mov to the list of allowed attachment files. I've changed settings in the Simple Audio Video Embedder mod so that .avi and .mov get played as well. .m4v wasn't in the list, so I'm not sure whether it will be played.
To test it, here's the HandBrake m4v. It's the same file as the mp4 I posted earlier with only the file name extension changed.
Follow up on Bering Strait inflow. There's a good preprint on the Uni. Wash. PSC web site.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/HLD/Bstrait/BeringStraitDrivingMechanism2017.html
With temps at +5.4C currently at Longyearbyen, Svalbard, buildup of any seaice at least at the western side of Svalbard, will have hard time taking place!At first I read your post as referring to the temp anomaly, then I realized this is the actual temp. With heavy rainfall. Surreal indeed.
www.yr.no/place/Norway/Svalbard/Longyearbyen/?sp
The risk for events like the slides taking place in februar 2017, are increasing by the hours. Pretty surreal this happening in the middle of winter at those latitudes...
actual temp. With heavy rainfall. SurrealThe freezing season is not going so well off Alaska either, 1st image and animation.
Rebecca Woodgate from the PSC would have info on thisActually that paper, to the extent it deals with summers 2014-16, is somewhat passé given the rate of change in the Arctic.
Climatology for the 30 years upto 2010 was for Oct-Dec winds to blow from north to south in the Bering Strait region. Those winds helped build up the ice pack in the Bering sea. This year the southerly winds kept the ice from forming and were strong enough to push Pacific water and a some ocean heat into the Arctic.
The Polar Science Center lost one of its founders: Alan Thorndike, inventor of the sea ice thickness distribution theory at the heart of many sea ice models.
Alan Thorndike died on Jan 8, 2018 from an aggressive pneumonia. He was 72 years old.
The thickness distribution of sea ice
AS Thorndike, DA Rothrock…
https://tinyurl.com/ydb2z3l3
The polar oceans contain sea ice of many thicknesses ranging from open water to
thick pressure ridges. Since many of the physical properties of the ice depend upon its
thickness, it is natural to expect its large-scale geophysical properties to depend on the
Cited by 682
Simulating the ice‐thickness distribution in a coupled climate model
CM Bitz, MM Holland, AJ Weaver… - Journal of Geophysical …, 2001 - Wiley Online Library
… [1975] suggested a plausible b(h) might decrease linearly with the cumulative thickness
distribution up to some value G*. We adopt Thorndike et al.'s … 7(h•,h2)dh2, which describes the
increase in the concentration of ice in the interval (h2, h• + dh•) when a unit of ice of thick …
Cited by 300
Estimates of sea ice thickness distribution using observations and theory
AS Thorndike - Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 1992 - Wiley Online Library
Abstract The thickness distribution of sea ice is maintained by a balance of thermal and
mechanical processes. Observations now exist that make it possible to quantify this balance
and to test models of the individual physical processes. In particular, the observed
Cited by 23
Influence of the sea ice thickness distribution on polar climate in CCSM3
MM Holland, CM Bitz, EC Hunke… - Journal of …, 2006 - journals.ametsoc.org
… Mechanical redistribution is parameterized following Rothrock (1975), Thorndike et al. (1975),
and Hibler (1980) … Figure 4 shows the simulated seasonal climatological Southern Hemisphere
ice thickness. The thick solid line shows the 10% concentration from SSM/I data …
Cited by 206
Measuring the sea ice floe size distribution
DA Rothrock, AS Thorndike - Journal of Geophysical Research …, 1984 - Wiley Online Library
Abstract Sea ice is broken into floes whose diameters range from meters to a hundred
kilometers. This fragmentation affects the resistance of the ice cover to deformation and the
melting at floe sidewalls in summer. Floes are broken by waves and swell near the ice edge
Cited by 142
Ridging and strength in modeling the thickness distribution of Arctic sea ice
GM Flato, WD Hibler - Journal of Geophysical Research …, 1995 - Wiley Online Library
… The transfer function, 13(hl, h2), defines the distribution of ridged ice thicknesses produced by
deformation of an area of thin ice. Thorndike et al. [ 1975] proposed that ice is ridged into a fixed
multiple C2 of its original thickness, namely, 1 [•(hl, h2) = •5(h 2-C2hl)•2 (16) …
Cited by 214
Sea ice thickness distribution in Fram Strait
P Wadhams - Nature, 1983 - Springer
… Thorndike et at. 15 estimated that ice growing thermody- namically will reach a draft of 1m
(thickness 1.11 m) in late April after a growth period of 76 days … during the observation period,
ice within 100 km of the ice margin in the Pram Strait was mainly first-year ice, while ice in the …
Cited by 86
The under‐ice thickness distribution of the Arctic Basin as recorded in 1958 and 1970
AS McLaren - Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 1989 - Wiley Online Library
… open water [Thorndike et al. 1975]. Thickness distribution is basically the frequency of different
ice thicknesses arising from the spatial coverage of open water, thin ice, and thick ice. A particular
combination generally determines its degree of roughness (ie, the thicker and more …
Cited by 92
Theory of the sea ice thickness distribution
https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05198
S Toppaladoddi, JS Wettlaufer 22 Aug 2015
We use concepts from statistical physics to transform the original evolution equation for the sea ice thickness distribution g(h) due to Thorndike et al., (1975) into a Fokker-Planck like conservation law. The steady solution is g(h)=(q)hqe− h/H, where q and H are expressible in terms of moments over the transition probabilities between thickness categories. The solution exhibits the functional form used in observational fits and shows that for h≪1, g(h) is controlled by both thermodynamics and mechanics, whereas for h≫1 only mechanics controls g(h). Finally, we derive the underlying Langevin equation governing the dynamics of the ice thickness h, from which we predict the observed g(h). The genericity of our approach provides a framework for studying the geophysical scale structure of the ice pack using methods of broad relevance in statistical mechanics.
What are the boldest predictions for an ice free arctic ? A couple days ice free.
What are the boldest predictions for an ice free arctic ? A couple days ice free.Predictions, in my experience, are a sure path to self-humiliation.
Sounds all realistic. What would be the result of having an ice free arctic for a week ? Probably a week long flow of water that is moving out of the arctic in a significant warmer condition than what it is today.
Allowed file types: gif, jpg, mpg, pdf, png, txt, jpeg, mp4, m4v, mov, aviBuild it and they will come!
Sounds all realistic. What would be the result of having an ice free arctic for a week ? Probably a week long flow of water that is moving out of the arctic in a significant warmer condition than what it is today.
This conversation probably belongs elsewhere, but if the Arctic is without ice for a week at min then it probably means a cold and snowy following winter for most of the Northern Hemisphere. There will be no polar vortex at all.
it's possible for any year from now on to become nominally ice-freeIt reminds me of the critters around here getting extirpated, like the elf owl, deer and jackrabbits. There's a long-term declining trend as the habitat deteriorates, upon which the usual wild swings of natural variation are superimposed.
...So lets assume that hotter than normal water moves out of the arctic for a week. Moving into warmer places. So that will probably make it warmer faster. So when it moves into the caribean sea and the gulf of Mexico....
...What??!! Are you guys saying all our 'hot air' has no effect?
Note nothing we post here affects the ice outcomes one way or another ... previous words of wisdom from Oren.
Quoteit's possible for any year from now on to become nominally ice-freeSo more thought from the scientific community should be probably allocated to what comes after that, though I expect mostly wait-n-see as previous modeling didn't worked out and it won't be any better in fast-moving uncharted territory (eg permafrost emissions).
According to Environment Canada the southernmost of the two cyclones off Greenland was down to a MSLP of 942 hPa at 12:00 UTC:I've been browsing the various model runs for 500hpa on tropical tidbits, and they're very consistent. There's a persistent trough that for the next few days is going to rapidly transport warmer mid-latitude air masses past NW Europe into the Barents/Kara and then into the central Arctic proper. The longer term/less reliable (96 hours +) models have the trough oscillating back and forth across the N. Atlantic, but generally persisting with a deep flow from further south into NW Europe and the Atlantic front of the Arctic.
<snippage>
While the FDD deficit this year is much less troubling than last, it's still bad. With the marginal seas still taking such a beating from weather I'm not sure the improvement will really do us much good.
Do you know of any useful recent modelling effort that has any chance of realistically forecasting NH midlatitude climate in a seasonally open-ice Arctic scenario (which we will most likely soon experience)?
According to Environment Canada the southernmost of the two cyclones off Greenland was down to a MSLP of 942 hPa at 12:00 UTC:
Andrew Slater used to make a FDD graph for the entire Arctic Ocean (vs only 80N). I've asked Nico Sun, aka commenter Tealight, if it would be easy to make a 66N FDD chart as well for the last 10 years. I can't believe I haven't asked this before. :-[
In the meantime, snowfall still relatively low on the Northern Hemisphere, still mainly because there's no snow in Europe (we finally received like 1-2 cm of snow today, here in Southeast Austria), but in parts of the US as well:
In the meantime, snowfall still relatively low on the Northern Hemisphere, still mainly because there's no snow in Europe (we finally received like 1-2 cm of snow today, here in Southeast Austria), but in parts of the US as well:Well, some parts of Europe have seen snow - and ridiculous amounts at that. The Italian and parts of the Swiss alps had record breaking snowfalls last week, with towns and ski resorts isolated for several days.
I dont think that these NH snow charts are very useful. Snow in E-Europe, or mid-USA does not matter, it melts in March quickly anyway. What does matter is snow on arctic ice - at least that is what last summer proved. If there is lots of snow on some thin ice it can still insulate it for quite a while and protect it long enough. However, if the thin arctic ice is not protected by much snow - then all bets are off for next summer. So we should know how much snow is on arctic ice, and as far as I know we dont know that...this is very incorrect.
...this is very incorrect.
Snow in southern latitudes does a much better job of reflecting sunlight back into space and reducing overall heat anomalies vs. snow in sunless high-latitudes (that are probably covered anyways).
Additionally, snowfall over thin ice can do a better job of insulating heat underneath, paradoxically creating warmer conditions if heavy snows occur when initial refreeze completes.
I dont think that these NH snow charts are very useful....this is very incorrect.
Snow in southern latitudes does a much better job of reflecting sunlight back into space and reducing overall heat anomalies vs. snow in sunless high-latitudes (that are probably covered anyways).
Additionally, snowfall over thin ice can do a better job of insulating heat underneath, paradoxically creating warmer conditions if heavy snows occur when initial refreeze completes.
940 hPa now! With Iceland almost perfectly in the eye of the storm.
Snow isn't escaping, cold is, which effectively detonates on contact with moist air at the mid latitudes when the air masses collide. There's still plenty of moisture of snow pack on the ice, as this chart below seems to indicate. 20-40CM is plenty of blanket to slow down heat transfer significantly. That's equivalent to a 10CM thick wall filled with fiberglass insulation, more or less.
...this is very incorrect.
Snow in southern latitudes does a much better job of reflecting sunlight back into space and reducing overall heat anomalies vs. snow in sunless high-latitudes (that are probably covered anyways).
Additionally, snowfall over thin ice can do a better job of insulating heat underneath, paradoxically creating warmer conditions if heavy snows occur when initial refreeze completes.
Yeah, then we should be heading into a Rebound Year according to ur Analysis.
All that snow and cold should have stayed inside the Arctic Fridge. But no, it is escaping into lower latitudes, where it will disappear and fast. Causing flash floods, inundations and a lot of erosion- not to mention wildlife damage.
equivalent to a 10CM thick wall filled with fiberglass insulation, more or less.If dry fluffy powder. But how does that stay in place given month after month of strong surface winds? More likely it will drift onto irregularities, leaving bare ice in some places and meter-thick snowdrifts on the lee of pressure ridges. There's only an even blanket of snow when viewed with 50 km x 50 km grid cell averaging. No one goes out there to measure snow transects Oct through May.
Quoteequivalent to a 10CM thick wall filled with fiberglass insulation, more or less.If dry fluffy powder.
Arctic ice is sometimes treated as a viscous plastic which works well enough in describing ice pack motion at very low resolution but underlying this at higher resolution are rips in the fabric that are important heat vents but more difficult to model. [/size]
A 4.5 km resolution Arctic Ocean simulation with the globalmulti-resolution model FESOM1.4
Q Wang et al 24 July 2017
https://www.geosci-model-dev-discuss.net/gmd-2017-136/gmd-2017-136.pdf
Scaling Properties of Arctic Sea Ice Deformation in a High-Resolution Viscous-Plastic Sea Ice Model and in Satellite Observations
N Hutter et al 8 January 2018
Sea ice models with the traditional viscous-plastic (VP) rheology and very small horizontal grid spacing can resolve leads and deformation rates localized along Linear Kinematic Features (LKF). In a 1-km pan-Arctic sea ice-ocean simulation, the small scale sea-ice deformations are evaluated with a scaling analysis in relation to satellite observations in the Central Arctic.... The agreement of the spatial scaling with satellite observations challenges previous results with VP models at coarser resolution, which did not reproduce the observed scaling. The temporal scaling analysis shows that the VP model, as configured in this 1-km simulation, does not fully resolve the intermittency of sea ice deformation that is observed in satellite data.
The thermal conductivity of snow is highly variable, just one among all the other variables quoted by A-Team. Given the paucity of data (rightly often bemoaned by A-Team) those teams doing the modelling are right on the edge of doability. But more credit to them for giving it a go.The Beaufort Sea study I referenced elsewhere came up with an averaged value of about .33, which generalized effect of drifting, compaction, etc.
Dawn at Little Diomede yesterday (arrow). WorldView will be showing some of the Chukchi soon in its visible and IR channels. That may be soot in the lower left and center, third image.Indeed, returning with effectively no ice in the Bering to keep albedo high and prevent heat uptake.
It is important to note that NSIDC changed their averaging method this year such that the monthly mean sea ice extent is now the average of all the daily sea ice extent values rather than the sea ice extent derived from the monthly average sea ice concentration. As a result, sea ice extents are slightly lower than before (i.e. 2016 extent previously was 4.70 and now is 4.51 million square kilometers).
This year, the observed mean extent for the month of September was 4.80 million square kilometers with the new averaging method compared to 4.87 million square kilometers using the old method. This represents a September sea ice extent that was 1.6 million square kilometers below the average September extent for 1981–2010, but 1.23 million square kilometers above the record low in September 2012 and 300,000 square kilometers above that in 2016.
not light and fluffy. It’s hard and compactedMeaning little trapped air to provide insulation. It sounds like the corners of hexagonal plate snowflakes have broken off, leaving rounded cores that pack much tighter.
may see exceptionally early opening of Bering strait and Chukchi as early as late March with knock-on consequences for ESS and Beaufort.Quite plausible. For mid-January, the peripheral freeze season seems weak (except for the central Laptev-ESS). The Beaufort still shows extensive regions of thin ice, though by tracking individual CAA floes frozen into its matrix, we know cold air at a fixed position there sees a rapidly moving target to thicken.
One has to wonder how the volume being exported over the last 50 days compares to that newly created (and retained) by ice thickening.Your Kara ice intrusion animation speaks to that. It's new ice which is displacing 2nd year+ ice in the CAB, quite definitively.
Kara ice intrusion volume being exported over the last 50 days?The intrusion is not picked up by SMOS ice thinness or AMSR2 concentration but it's seen clearly (at much improved detail) in Sentinel-1AB. Overlaying a rescaled lat lon grid from Panoply and using an online grid cell calculator, the intrusion area works out to about 40,000 km^2. UH SMOS has a fairly large pole hole here but is showing the ice being displaced averaging maybe 1.4 m in thickness. So that would be roughly 56 cubic km of export. That would be 3.8% of wipneus' 2017-12-31 PIOMAS volume of 14,418. The event isn't over (see one day change of 8 km below) so it might worth doing this more carefully when it is.
Suddenly a really cold spell in the northern Bering Sea and into the Chukchi ?From the looks of it, not really.
Suddenly a really cold spell in the northern Bering Sea and into the Chukchi ?From the looks of it, not really.
The satellites show a far amount of anchored pack ice along the Bering shore of Alaska, which explains some of the"blue", but actually mostly the image suggests mostly normal to warm temps over the Bering.
Interior AK looks colder, but not over the water.
The Chukchi looks slightly cooler, but doesn't exactly look like a cold snap.
The GFS forecast has relatively cold conditions developing for a few daysover an area in the Basin south of a line from the ESS to the Mackenzie delta, as well as really cold in Alaska. But by about 60 hrs in the cold is being pushed out into the North Pacific, bypassing the Bering Sea, and by 120 hrs its all gone from everywhere but Alaska , pushed out by warm cloudy air from the Atlantic side which is anomolously warm all week.
The huge cold airmass that has developed over Siberia has also almost totally avoided going over any sea ice area, and is about to head south
Climate Reanalyzer is now also offering Forum-supported mp4 videos of their forecasts...It just keeps getting better!
QuoteClimate Reanalyzer is now also offering Forum-supported mp4 videos of their forecasts...It just keeps getting better!
Here is a pair of high resolution Sentinel-1B separated in time by only 12 hours. It shows the lower tongue of that Kara ice intrusion. Note the ice rearranging itself like a jigsaw puzzle.
Very elastic pack. lot of shatter linesThese irregular shear lines are not elastic deformations as those terms are defined at english language wiki or used in classical 19th century continuum mechanics. This ice is brittle. Features like embedded MYI floes are not changing shape. What we are seeing is more like a crystal dislocation or diffusely distributed earthquake strike-slip faulting than a Glen's law smooth deformation of ice deep under Jakobshavn.
Arctic ice pack is not a lump - the energy, dynamic, movement, even in 100 days are amazingEndlessly fascinating to watch! We may be seeing an increase in ice mobility this January, as expected from the increasingly FYI composition of the ice pack and continuing thinness in the Beaufort-Chukchi.
That's not a problem because Disneys version is outdated, Santa sacked all of us dwarfs in the 90s and moved to Rovaniemi, Finland.
https://santaclausoffice.com/story-santa-claus-office/ (https://santaclausoffice.com/story-santa-claus-office/)
Even the Danes gave up on their claim, that Santa lives on Greenland, in December.
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/udland/groenlands-turistorganisation-opgiver-julemanden-finland-maa-gerne-faa-ham (https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/udland/groenlands-turistorganisation-opgiver-julemanden-finland-maa-gerne-faa-ham)
Gerontocrat: exactly! The 5-day average is better as it removes daily variations. But daily numbers are of interest too :)
Waaay back when I first got interested in climate chaneg science I recall the following as proof of global warming when caused by an intensifying greenhouse effect.
- the nights will warm faster than the days
- the winters will warm faster than the summers
- the poles will warm faster than the equatorial regions
But then I got fascinated by the dramatic sea-ice decline of 2007 and 2012 and forgot about those fundamental proofs.
In my opinion a record hot summer temperate is more exciting but less significant than a record warm winter. So I am thinking that these record low winter extents may be more significant than record low summer extents. Not nearly as exciting - sure - there won't be any headlines in the NY Times. But I am now follwoing these winter extents with the same fascination I used to follow the summer extents.
Waaay back when I first got interested in climate chaneg science I recall the following as proof of global warming when caused by an intensifying greenhouse effect.
- the nights will warm faster than the days
- the winters will warm faster than the summers
- the poles will warm faster than the equatorial regions
But then I got fascinated by the dramatic sea-ice decline of 2007 and 2012 and forgot about those fundamental proofs.
In my opinion a record hot summer temperate is more exciting but less significant than a record warm winter. So I am thinking that these record low winter extents may be more significant than record low summer extents. Not nearly as exciting - sure - there won't be any headlines in the NY Times. But I am now follwoing these winter extents with the same fascination I used to follow the summer extents.
Waaay back when I first got interested in climate chaneg science I recall the following as proof of global warming when caused by an intensifying greenhouse effect.
- the nights will warm faster than the days
- the winters will warm faster than the summers
- the poles will warm faster than the equatorial regions
But then I got fascinated by the dramatic sea-ice decline of 2007 and 2012 and forgot about those fundamental proofs.
In my opinion a record hot summer temperate is more exciting but less significant than a record warm winter. So I am thinking that these record low winter extents may be more significant than record low summer extents. Not nearly as exciting - sure - there won't be any headlines in the NY Times. But I am now follwoing these winter extents with the same fascination I used to follow the summer extents.
you name it, not much else to add, should be bookmarked and posted on each page once the summer discussions about minimal are in full swing ;)
Waaay back when I first got interested in climate chaneg science I recall the following as proof of global warming when caused by an intensifying greenhouse effect.
- the nights will warm faster than the days
- the winters will warm faster than the summers
- the poles will warm faster than the equatorial regions
But then I got fascinated by the dramatic sea-ice decline of 2007 and 2012 and forgot about those fundamental proofs.
In my opinion a record hot summer temperate is more exciting but less significant than a record warm winter. So I am thinking that these record low winter extents may be more significant than record low summer extents. Not nearly as exciting - sure - there won't be any headlines in the NY Times. But I am now follwoing these winter extents with the same fascination I used to follow the summer extents.
you name it, not much else to add, should be bookmarked and posted on each page once the summer discussions about minimal are in full swing ;)
Does seem that for those of us here this time of year he is preaching to the choir.
I can only add that all of this is because the major greenhouse gas is H2O.
At least if we do get more clouds it should reduce the impact of lost albedo from ice, right? (Although I've no idea of how the nkmbers stack up on this)
Temperatures north of 80 degree have gone up and it seems like they are staying at higher levels for the next 5 - 7 days.
Temperatures north of 80 degree have gone up and it seems like they are staying at higher levels for the next 5 - 7 days. Image: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.phpI wonder if this year's temperatures may be the mirror image of 2016/2017's - "coolish" early and warm late rather than warm early and "coolish" late.
Looking at latest forecast for the N80 area shows a steady drop in temperatures and by Monday it will be a lot lower than currently (first image) as high pressure takes control
an unprecedentedly strong Arctic extratropical cyclone in the 10 day range.That would set things in motion again but how? There's been minimal correlation between depicted near-surface GFS winds and ice feature displacements for the last couple of months. It would be feasible to morph Ascat images ten days out but better guidance is needed. (Actually it would work better to reconstruct the effective force of winds retrospectively: from observed ice movement.)
In 1924, oceanographer Vladimir Wiese studied the drift of Georgy Brusilov's ill-fated Russian ship Svyataya Anna when she was trapped on the pack ice of the Kara Sea. Vize detected an odd deviation of the path of the ship's drift caused by certain variations of the patterns of sea and ice currents. He deemed that the deviation was caused by the presence of an undiscovered island whose coordinates he was able to calculate with precision thanks to the availability of the successive positions of the St. Anna during its drift. The data of the drift had been supplied by navigator Valerian Albanov, one of the only two survivors of the St. Anna.
Finally, the island was discovered on 13 August 1930 by a Soviet expedition led by Otto Schmidt aboard the Icebreaker Sedov under Captain Vladimir Voronin. The island was named after Professor Vize of the Soviet Arctic Institute who was at the time aboard the Sedov and who was able to set foot on the island whose existence he had predicted. wiki
The search for intra-terrestrial intelligent life has largely been futile.In my view, meteorology-driven 'coupled' models are dead wrong about the end stages of Arctic sea ice loss and disastrously optimistic on its timing, as are upper-bound trenders. Discussion of an ice-free Arctic is commonly avoided using undefined terms like 'seasonally' ice-free' or first ice-free 'summer', then qualified by a non-existent 'consensus' for a million sq km of ice still left in September. The kicker is invariably a picture of that last ice hugging the shores of the CAA.
Discussion of an ice-free Arctic is commonly avoided using undefined terms like 'seasonally' ice-free' or first ice-free 'summer', then qualified by a non-existent 'consensus' for a million sq km of ice still left in September. The kicker is invariably a picture of that last ice hugging the shores of the CAA.
The 156 day mp4 below shows how that would work. Note that with the main ice pack gone, what is the physical mechanism confining last ice to the CAA: the ice is not landfast (grounded), it lifts off poleward with a southern breeze, and ratchets out in prodigous volume through the Beaufort, McClure, Martin, Peary, Nares, and Fram. It won't be coming back either because waves across long fetches of open water will irrevocably mix incoming warm portal water.
QuoteThe search for intra-terrestrial intelligent life has largely been futile.In my view, meteorology-driven 'coupled' models are dead wrong about the end stages of Arctic sea ice loss and disastrously optimistic on its timing
Would you hazard a guess on the likely timing?
Seems like more open water over Bering Sea (Worldview Jan 29 vs Jan 28).
Seems like more open water over Bering Sea (Worldview Jan 29 vs Jan 28).
while i agree i assume you are aware that the most part is clouds while indeed the shape below is showing less ice. just wanted to make sure that first glance does not mislead anyone (blue against gray is not ice against ice free ) sorry if that was clear but i had to take a close look to be sure what's showing ;)
Seems like more open water over Bering Sea (Worldview Jan 29 vs Jan 28).Most of that Bering extent looks like slash, and probably barely able to keep up with the bottom melt from water that's 2-3C, combined with steadily increasing heat uptake from insolation. It won't have a chance to thicken, and will vanish quickly once the net heat exchange becomes positive rather than negative.
However that isn't a physically stable state, any more than a pencil thrown out the window coming to rest on its point. We can look forward instead to what is called a stochastic excursional ratchet.
The guys doing these models need to see your animations to properly understand that sea-ice is not static, and build the Arctic (and Antarctic ) movement into their models.
The sea ice models already have ice movement built into their models.
If so, then are you also saying that A-Team was wrong in saying that the ice north of Greenland and the CA will not persist in the way the NASA model predicts ? (A-Team says, I think, that NASA does not take (sufficient) account of that that ice is not land fast and if bounded by open ocean to the north would be sent north by southerly winds, then be destroyed by wave action / ocean melt / ocean currents, and would not reform)
The guys doing these models need to see your animations to properly understand that sea-ice is not static, and build the Arctic (and Antarctic ) movement into their models.
The sea ice models already have ice movement built into their models.
Good rule of science - if an amateur, even a gifted one, discovers something, there is a high chance it has already been discovered by the experts, and careful checking should be done before claiming that the experts are not already aware.
Did we not see a great thickness of ice melt out ,in situ, to the north of Greenland in August 2012?If so, then are you also saying that A-Team was wrong in saying that the ice north of Greenland and the CA will not persist in the way the NASA model predicts ? (A-Team says, I think, that NASA does not take (sufficient) account of that that ice is not land fast and if bounded by open ocean to the north would be sent north by southerly winds, then be destroyed by wave action / ocean melt / ocean currents, and would not reform)
The guys doing these models need to see your animations to properly understand that sea-ice is not static, and build the Arctic (and Antarctic ) movement into their models.
The sea ice models already have ice movement built into their models.
Good rule of science - if an amateur, even a gifted one, discovers something, there is a high chance it has already been discovered by the experts, and careful checking should be done before claiming that the experts are not already aware.
GFS and ECWMF have been giving a signal for an unprecedentedly strong Arctic extratropical cyclone in the 10 day range. The signal is lost in ensemble blends due to variability, but control runs and a fair bit of ensemble members are showing this behavior.
The sea ice models already have ice movement built into their models.
But perhaps not the acceleration (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011JC007110/full) of said movement. ;)
GFS and ECWMF have been giving a signal for an unprecedentedly strong Arctic extratropical cyclone in the 10 day range. The signal is lost in ensemble blends due to variability, but control runs and a fair bit of ensemble members are showing this behavior.
In today's ECMWF I'm seeing a low pressure system building over Greenland about now (rather than the high that usually figures there), then heading to the pole on Sunday around 960 hPa and on to the Beaufort by Wednesday next wee
Is 960 hPa unprecedented? In Iqaluit we've had a few storms blow by at 970 hPa, about one a month this fall/winter.
The sea ice models already have ice movement built into their models.
But perhaps not the acceleration (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011JC007110/full) of said movement. ;)
How did you derive that answer, Neven?
The sea ice models already have ice movement built into their models.
But perhaps not the acceleration (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011JC007110/full) of said movement. ;)
How did you derive that answer, Neven?
Meanwhile, the unusually high temperatures over Siberia will slide northeastward, toward Alaska and the Pacific side of the Arctic. Once there, it may impede the buildup of winter ice cover, which has been hovering at or near all-time lows for this time of year.
Some computer model simulations sweep an unusually warm air masses across a broad swath of the Arctic Ocean during the next 2 weeks, from the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the Far North. These warm pulses could ensure that Arctic sea ice sets another record low winter maximum.
The sea ice models already have ice movement built into their models.
But perhaps not the acceleration (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011JC007110/full) of said movement. ;)
We can look forward instead to what is called a stochastic excursional ratchet.
It is irreversible, short of finding a way to reduce total system enthalpy.We can look forward instead to what is called a stochastic excursional ratchet.
@A-Team... Just to clarify for those of us running along next to the train, here. You're implying that it's irreversible?
Lincoln Sea Nares. More fast ice letting go?
That in itself is not unusual. The Nares has been open all winter several times over the last couple of decades, if I recall correctly.Lincoln Sea Nares. More fast ice letting go?
And it is February and Nares has not stopped flowing. Maybe open through the entire winter?
Lincoln Sea Nares. More fast ice letting go?
Lincoln Sea Nares Export from 2017-12-24 to 2018-1-24. One tracked section of ice traveled approximately 115 miles (185km) in 31 days. Furthest travel in one day was approximately 12 miles (19.3km).
The models this evening are indicating that the main storm centre will track up the Fram Strait late Sunday/Monday and then grind to a halt somewhere between the Pole and Severnaya Zemlya on Tuesday and slowly fill.After this storm new one is already coming sometime between Thursday and Saturday. Of course it's bit too far, but worth to keep an eye on.
Great to see people coming out of hibernation for this event!
Climate re-analyser: impressive temperature anomalyWhoa, that is an anomalous anomaly. (I had trouble reading the scale so color-picked the extremes, pooled, and re-colored them as yellow.) The Ny-Ålesund weather station is a little off to the south but it has excellent records (and a daily sonde).
QuoteClimate re-analyser: impressive temperature anomalyWhoa, that is an anomalous anomaly.
... ; ice features in the peri-polar region have been stable with no decisive trend in direction (ie the 'TransPolar Drift' is a non-starter ...
need some new thoughts on how the Arctic Sea Ice driftsIn part because the Bering Strait still has a high sill of 53m at current sea level, relatively little Pacific water, none deep, enters the Arctic Ocean relative to inflows of Atlantic Waters which contribute ~10x the volume. Since the volume of the AO is not increasing, an equal volume exits after circulating (for years) as bathymetric boundary currents. These are hundreds of meters below the surface and do not transport ice whose motion sums wind-driven and near-surface currents.
Oh, Transpolar Drift has stopped working?!? Front cover story!As mentioned, TPDrifters never post evidence supporting their views, though nothing could be easier. It seems for recent years, there isn't any. They just keep repeating what they were taught long ago in school, even in the face of conflicting current data.
Fram export area this fall, winter and spring will be dominated at the 85% level by export of the Kara Sea intrusion, ice that was formed there in late October (TMI or third month ice). Some FYI from the Laptev will also contribute, as it often has in recent years.
Not a single floe from the Beaufort-Chukchi-ESAS western sector is at risk of TPD transport out the Fram/Barents/Nares over the July 2017 to May 2018 time frame. Disagree? Show me the floe.
but how about these rubber duckies that made it from the Pacific to the Atlantic through the Arctic ocean? I'm not sure what we call it but there is some through flow from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
With all eyes on Rubber Quacks, (it took 8 years to cross from the Bering Strait to the Fram - not much of a transpolar drift), I had a look at the Pacific end. It seems above freezing in the Bering Sea and right up into the strait - warmish winds from the south. Not much new ice to form there, if any?I think the key right now won't be the effects on extent and area, rather what will happen to both net heat flow out of the water and general ice thickening over the next six weeks. It seems to me the timing of the vortex split couldn't be worse, as it will encourage the creation of strong spring storms on the Atlantic side that will drag both latent and direct heat into the basin.
Are there going to be ANY functioning webcams in the Arctic Ocean this year?
January of 2018 began and ended with satellite-era record lows in Arctic sea ice extent, resulting in a new record low for the month. Combined with low ice extent in the Antarctic, global sea ice extent is also at a record low.
The latest Arctic Sea Ice News:QuoteJanuary of 2018 began and ended with satellite-era record lows in Arctic sea ice extent, resulting in a new record low for the month. Combined with low ice extent in the Antarctic, global sea ice extent is also at a record low.
Thanks !Are there going to be ANY functioning webcams in the Arctic Ocean this year?
Maybe?
http://imb-crrel-dartmouth.org/imb.crrel/newdata.htm
Thanks !
i have serious doubts about sea ice volume. lows in area and extent almost permanently how should the volume be significantly higher it's permanently as warmer. we shall see massive changes/correction in piomas algorithms, too many times things don't look right.That view may be widely shared in the scientific community. Otherwise, why continue to pursue observational ice thickness, like Cryosat, Topaz, SMOS, and do all the field work? In my view, UH SMOS is the most accurate -- and most disturbing -- of the bunch (in its speciality, the thinner ice). However ice thickness may be heading to a hybrid product that integrates Cryosat, Piomas, and SMOS.
The plunge in sea ice concentration poleward ... we'll have to wait and see if those hold up as AMSR2 can display a lot temporary weather artifacts (eg when the center of a cyclone passes over).
It's still looking distinctly dodgy on the latest AMSR2 updateThere are both conserved ice features and weather artifacts on the AMSR2 3.125 km over the last three days of the storm, in addition to lee polynyas around the islands and lift-off north of SZ. (The mp4 shows heal-and-seal plus passing weather effects for the last 160 days.)
See also T Lavergne's sea ice drift animationThose are hosted at OSI SAF; Lavergne's five sea ice motion papers are listed at the bottom link below. They're 48-hour interval ice drift products posted from 2016 to the present. The scaling is 3x literal displacement, purple arrows are nearest neighbor interpolation; the hollow-core arrows seem to denote scale-exceeding. Oceans are colored as closed ice, open ice (good idea) and open water.
Unfortunately, I can't do images on my computer right now, but take a look at Climate Reanalyzer. The Arctic is ground zero for an absolute blowtorch starting within the next few days!!!!
What would be the impact of this on the arctic ?If your link connects with Neven's post above, this non-expert guess is while Europe (and Northern Canada ?) freezes the Arctic warms - a lot, (especially on Atlantic half ?). But wait for the guys who really know.
https://watchers.news/2018/02/08/warnings-issued-as-sudden-stratospheric-warming-threatens-europe-with-big-freeze/
What would be the impact of this on the arctic ?
https://watchers.news/2018/02/08/warnings-issued-as-sudden-stratospheric-warming-threatens-europe-with-big-freeze/
Hopefully we see an abatement in the 7-Day trend of heat invading more of the central pack. However with the PV split, the odds of that kind of heat invasion increase.
In March and April the CFSv2 model predicts enhanced subsidence over the far north Pacific. This forecast is consistent with the known effects of La Niña, perhaps enhanced by the event in the stratosphere.I will hasten to add... both 2007 and 2012 were either in or on the slopes of a La Nina.
This forecast subsidence pattern would not help sea ice thickening.
Chilly across Nunavut for the past few days — some new daily record lows. That’ll thicken up the pressed garlic, along with a bunch of ice that will melt regardless.It will, and unfortunately at this point a few days - even a few weeks - of record lows won't thicken the ice as much as we need. Most of that ice is already 2-ish Meters thick, which means there's fairly considerable lag in the heat transfer. Temps need to go down and stay down at around -30/40C for things to improve.
Anyone interested in reading more on SSWs, here's an ASIB guest blog post from 2013, written by Randall Gates: Sudden Stratospheric Warming Causes & Effects (http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2013/04/sudden-stratospheric-warmings-causes-effects.html)
The Chukchi and Barents seas continue their anomalous warmth that we've seen relatively persistently through out the freezing season.Looks like melting season and not freezing - Pacific side Feb 6 - Feb 8. Indeed, current models show warmth until at least Feb 19 over Bering and Chukchi.
Retreat in the Bering does not surprise me, not one little bit. There's plenty of heat just below the surface, which itself for the most part is near or above 0C. Add in rising amounts of insolation, and the slash ice that is standing in for "pack" will vanish quite readily.The Chukchi and Barents seas continue their anomalous warmth that we've seen relatively persistently through out the freezing season.Looks like melting season and not freezing - Pacific side Feb 6 - Feb 8. Indeed, current models show warmth until at least Feb 19 over Bering and Chukchi.
Wondering how much of the persistence of 2 meter atmospheric heat is tied to the fact that the waters are so much warmer? I'm not talking about how the lack of sea ice relates to larger synoptics that deliver atmospheric heat, but rather how the net effect of warmer water (even under the ice) locally contributes to persistent atmospheric heat anomalies?My reflex answer was "Yes", but thinking about it, I'm not so sure.
Wondering how much of the persistence of 2 meter atmospheric heat is tied to the fact that the waters are so much warmer? I'm not talking about how the lack of sea ice relates to larger synoptics that deliver atmospheric heat, but rather how the net effect of warmer water (even under the ice) locally contributes to persistent atmospheric heat anomalies?My reflex answer was "Yes", but thinking about it, I'm not so sure.
Where you have open water, I think the answer is somewhat yes, as the dynamic exchange with atmosphere will buffer temperatures via the huge reservoir of heat available in ocean generally. There the factor is less to do with anything about higher water temperatures and much related to the simple fact there is open water.
Where ice is present, not so much, as ice seriously impedes heat flow.
Wondering how much of the persistence of 2 meter atmospheric heat is tied to the fact that the waters are so much warmer? I'm not talking about how the lack of sea ice relates to larger synoptics that deliver atmospheric heat, but rather how the net effect of warmer water (even under the ice) locally contributes to persistent atmospheric heat anomalies?My reflex answer was "Yes", but thinking about it, I'm not so sure.
Where you have open water, I think the answer is somewhat yes, as the dynamic exchange with atmosphere will buffer temperatures via the huge reservior of heat available in ocean generally. There the factor is less to do with anything about higher water temperatures and much related to the simple fact there is open water.
Where ice is present, not so much, as ice seriously impedes heat flow.
Thomas Lavergne's 48-hour sea ice drift products are hosted at OSI SAF https://tinyurl.com/y8bsc24mThe montage below shows 156 days of those from early Sept up to Feb 9th. The storms show up very clearly as dark blotches (from the longer black velocity vectors being consolidated by the 14x downscaling). The mp4 goes through these days one at a time. Less than 3% are traditional 'Beaufort Gyre&