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magnamentis

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1850 on: January 10, 2017, 09:18:46 PM »
while it will mostly depend on the weather in summer, something tells me the tale that we could be in for really bad surprise this year. it will take a huge turnaround for it to not happen, i mean that what more and more people in this forum and others start to see coming. i mean whenever we start to cumulate all the ingredients (factors) already in place, things like thickness, water temps, air temps, albedo to come, wave action, wind action, state of the thin ice (crushed, not homogeneous) humidity, etc. etc. etc. i cannot help it but think that we're in for something very serious on the bad side.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2017, 09:24:51 PM by magnamentis »

theoldinsane

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1851 on: January 10, 2017, 09:32:01 PM »
NeilT mentioned Baltic Sea in his post above. I do not have now any exact info about ice hereabouts, but as a boat owner I have sort of keen interest on when ice comes and goes... generally the ice has been coming later, melting earlier and having less are in last 10 years or so. Last time that the Gulf of Finland had full ice coverage was sometime in the start of 2000's - and that only to Hanko level...

I'm trying to find some data from Finnish Meteorological Institute about ice cover, etc - at least the data is not easily found on their site...

In English from SMHI:

http://www.smhi.se/en/climate/climate-indicators/climate-indicators-sea-ice-1.91485

Much more here if you can read Swedish (I think you can):

http://www.smhi.se/klimatdata/oceanografi/havsis


bbr2314

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1852 on: January 10, 2017, 09:53:27 PM »
Up to D7 now... fairly remarkable consistency for so far out.


seaicesailor

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1853 on: January 10, 2017, 11:58:00 PM »
Up to D7 now... fairly remarkable consistency for so far out.


It's kind of incredible, kind of spooky in fact that it is only 7 days now. So strong, well centered and affecting the whole Arctic
The ensembles show a lot of uncertainty yet....
 mybe it dumps the mother of all snowfalls
« Last Edit: January 11, 2017, 12:05:28 AM by seaicesailor »

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1854 on: January 11, 2017, 12:01:19 AM »

In English from SMHI:

http://www.smhi.se/en/climate/climate-indicators/climate-indicators-sea-ice-1.91485

Much more here if you can read Swedish (I think you can):

http://www.smhi.se/klimatdata/oceanografi/havsis

I'd love to see that for 2016 and I guess we'll have to wait till spring 2018 before we get the 2017 winter stats.

Cryoshpere today seems to be offline but I did not that we haven't had much ice in the Baltic at this time of year since 2003.  With 2007 being conspicuous by a total absence of Baltic ice up North.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1855 on: January 11, 2017, 12:21:12 AM »
Re: Baltic ice.


Great resource in http://baltice.org/.

Quote
Baltice.org is a single access point to reliable and up to date information related to winter navigation in the Baltic Sea area. This site gathers information and instructions from icebreaking authorities from all the Baltic Sea countries.

The aim of the site is to extend the knowledge of winter navigation and prevailing conditions in the area during ice season.
si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1856 on: January 11, 2017, 05:46:13 AM »

It's kind of incredible, kind of spooky in fact that it is only 7 days now. So strong, well centered and affecting the whole Arctic
The ensembles show a lot of uncertainty yet....
 mybe it dumps the mother of all snowfalls
[/quote]

Just in time for the inauguration, maybe someone will get the message.

A-Team

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1857 on: January 11, 2017, 12:32:02 PM »
Quote
jda: The coming storms are prompting HYCOM to predict a significant surge of ice export out of the Fram.  We may see over 100,000 KM2 of MYI exit in the next week.  That doesn't include ice chewn up when it gets pushed into the hot zone just north of Svalbard.
Right, the future isn't what it used to be.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/06/future-not-used/

Looking now at the options for actually measuring Fram export during this putative massive event, other than waiting 20 months for a paywalled journal article, the best option seems to be watching a Sentinel-1AB flux gate (transect) from northeastern Greenland across to Franz Josef.

Here the DMI Greenland image collections for Morris Jesup or better Nord are very convenient but do not extend far enough to the northeast. The Sentinel images could be laboriously collected and tiled from ESA or PolarView but huge file sizes put that out of reach.

Fortunately Roberto Saldo over at DTU has put together a very extensive set of Envisat and Sentinel-1AB mosaics in a convenient projection and 1 km scale. Access to his published research and mosaic archives, along with today's use in a 21 day Lincoln Sea animation, can be found over at  Piomas forum.
http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,119.msg98822.html#msg98822

The attached .txt file works out the urls from 20 Dec to 31 Jan 17 and provides multi-years as well. ImageJ will open, stack, crop, and animate lists like this of remote urls. They are 6 MB each so a whole freezing season is fairly manageable except for getting it down to forum-admissible size.

Rather than full cross-correlation of all persistent ice features (ie export tracking by determination of velocity vectors), it's probably easier to monitor the effects of the impending storm with a 2D+1T Delaunay/Voronoi tesselation.

That is, we have enough fixed rocks and identifiable floes/leads to triangulate the region of interest with a dozen points of so. From carpentry we know triangles are rigid (cannot be deformed). So by tracking point displacement and changes in triangle side lengths, we get a measure of both export and compressional deformation. Theorems say this gives optimal accuracy with minimal effort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaunay_triangulation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram

CPOM Cryosat regional ice thickness overlays on these Sentinels, as shown at the Piomas post above, would convert area export to volume export. Daily Piomas has not yet surfaced for December so storm data wouldn't be available until mid-February. Hycom would offer a thickness forecast already.

The storm hasn't hit yet but the last 21 days give some idea of the export background and allows some persistent features to be identified. The ice is taking a somewhat devious route as it exits (bottom right of animation), an additive mixture of Transpolar Drift and push from the wind.

The lower Hycom covers the same date range but goes out to the 17th. It has an internal pause on today's date, the 11th. The AMSR2/SMOS do not show enough internal detail to quantitate Fram export but significantly augment S-1AB on the thin ice and its edge.
« Last Edit: January 11, 2017, 02:22:56 PM by A-Team »

binntho

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1858 on: January 11, 2017, 12:40:26 PM »
Wow! That looks like a veritable river of ice going past North-Greenland and out through Fram. Thanks for your great work, A-Team, as always!
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1859 on: January 11, 2017, 01:12:12 PM »
Quote
Wow! That looks like a veritable river of ice going past North-Greenland and out through Fram. Thanks for your great work, A-Team, as always!

And looking at the central CAB doesn't give anyone any comfort.  That is a pretty thin CAB.
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magnamentis

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1860 on: January 11, 2017, 01:33:37 PM »
Up to D7 now... fairly remarkable consistency for so far out.

The ensembles show a lot of uncertainty yet....
 mybe it dumps the mother of all snowfalls

as per reanalizer the precipitation will be moderate but who knows

A-Team

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1861 on: January 11, 2017, 03:00:31 PM »
Not seeing anything below 950 hPa and 28.1 m/s winds (101 km/hr, 55 knot, 63 mph) on windytv's ecmwf for Tuesday Jan 17th. The Barents remains barely above freezing in this forecast but the rest and southern CAB is fairly cold.
« Last Edit: January 11, 2017, 03:09:53 PM by A-Team »

Csnavywx

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1862 on: January 11, 2017, 03:04:56 PM »
If that does end up being a 950ish low as the Euro suggests, then the pressure gradient between it and the Greenland high would probably be good enough for some 60+ knot surface winds in the export region. This is hinted at on the last run as it produces a 80+ knot low level jet along and north of Greenland at 850mb.

As for the precip -- I would expect some decent widespread snowfall with that kind of warm advection, frontogenesis and deformation going on -- wherever boundary layer temps can stay below freezing anyways.

Csnavywx

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1863 on: January 11, 2017, 03:09:28 PM »
Not seeing anything below 950 hPa and 28.1 m/s winds (101 km/hr, 55 knot, 63 mph) on windytv's ecmwf for Tuesday Jan 17th.

Well, there you go. Cold air advection-driven momentum transfer and precip loading (if any is present in the cold conveyor belt region) should be more than enough for 60+ knot winds and 70+ knot gusts.

A day or so of that and it'll be off to the races export-wise.

FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1864 on: January 11, 2017, 05:18:46 PM »
It looks like that extreme development on the north west tip of Greenland connects with the wave guide all the way up to 10mb in the stratosphere. The GFS isn't making the left turn of the low towards the pole like the ECMWF but it is tracking a strong short wave around Greenland which causes the development of deep low pressure. The GFS is a little faster but it's the same wave.


FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1865 on: January 11, 2017, 05:28:34 PM »
An elongate ridge at the base of the stratosphere snakes its way up from the subtropical Atlantic to the north pole in the 132 hour GFS forecast of the potential vorticity field. This involves a huge amount of subtropical Atlantic heat that has risen up and pushed up the base of the stratosphere. At the lower levels, however, the cold air is pouring off the north slope of Greenland whipping up extreme winds.

This will be something to watch over the next week. Wow.

FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1866 on: January 11, 2017, 05:39:42 PM »
The intrusion of extremely warm air into the Arctic will displace the Siberian high towards northern Europe. East winds will blow air from Russia into western Europe causing an extreme cold air outbreak to reach the shores of France, Spain and Portugal. This could cause saline near surface waters to mix with middle layer waters, leading to a shift in ocean currents off the European coast similar to 2005.

This is getting very interesting.


FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1867 on: January 11, 2017, 07:33:37 PM »
12Z ECMWF continues to develop the intense low at the pole in 6 days. I tracked the wave back to a sharp impulse associated with cold Arctic air moving south in north western Canada - today. The wave is real, but it's still too early to predict exactly how it will evolve 6 days out.

Latest ECMWF model run just in thinks to Levi Cowan at Tropicaltidbits.com.

Lord M Vader

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1868 on: January 11, 2017, 08:06:53 PM »
941 hpa is an impressive number. The big question is if and how much damage such a intense low would do to the sea ice.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1869 on: January 11, 2017, 10:28:03 PM »
941 hpa is an impressive number. The big question is if and how much damage such a intense low would do to the sea ice.
This pack?  That widespread?

It will tear it to shreds.
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Ice Shieldz

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1870 on: January 12, 2017, 12:54:55 AM »
By day 6 (Tuesday the 17th) the ECMWF has the cyclone at peak strength centered roughly on the north pole (see below).  Given the peak winds, around 50 mph & covering a sizable area, we would expect lots of damage as jdallen mentions.

Rather than be conducive for fram export, this cyclone seems likely to compact the pack more toward the direction the pole whilst causing lots of mechanical damage.  I imagine there would be decent melting from upwelling too with the winds blowing over a pack so thin and fractured.

FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1871 on: January 12, 2017, 02:28:42 AM »
Cyclones generally cause divergence and upwelling along the storm track. High pressure areas typically cause convergence towards the center of the high. Why would this situation be different from the norm?

I would expect severe damage of the ice pack near the north pole if this forecast verifies. And I would expect wave action to destroy the leading edge of the ice in the Barents sea.  We've already seen multiple episodes of ice retreat on the Atlantic side in the Barents and Kara seas. I think it's going to happen one more time.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1872 on: January 12, 2017, 02:42:31 AM »
Fish, with this low coming from more over Greenland the winds are against Fram export, and if we had a thicker more intact pack the high winds blowing over the center of the CAB would not have nearly as much effect.  I know it's obvious to you and others, so forgive me if i'm overstating things.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1873 on: January 12, 2017, 03:04:32 AM »
I would suggest that the current ECMWF run has only @ 24 hours in the next 10 days not conducive to Fram export . Only as it crosses from Greenland to the Pole are winds briefly against the flow . Even that is likely to be a damaging experience for the ice .
 Will we ever see another over-ice trek to the pole ?  Welcome to a new era :)
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Lord M Vader

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1874 on: January 12, 2017, 07:47:30 AM »
00z GFS run is more or less catastrophic for the sea ice.

jdallen

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1875 on: January 12, 2017, 07:52:53 AM »
OK, here's a quick-and-dirty preview of coming attractions.

I've taken the current HYCOM thickness map and circled the areas correspond to the highest winds in the map posted by Ice Shields in #1870 above.

The winds on the eastern hemisphere side will tear into the thinnest most vulnerable parts of (what passes for) the pack in the CAB.  I'm expecting they may (once again) obliterate the ices around FJL, disrupt the refreeze in the Kara, and tear open sizeable leads if not outright holes in the CAB adjacent to the Laptev.

On the western side, the winds will pound the major portion of the last remaining MYI piled up against the CAA and NW Greenland.  The primary effect here will be to grind any remaining semblance of a coherent pack into a bowl of ice cubes.  There won't be any melting, but there won't be any thickening either, which is almost as bad. 

The general movement will probably aid the general push towards the Fram, and potentially has the character of turning the whole central Arctic basin into one, gigantic gyre.

Some other folks have suggested the storm may have the added effect of pushing some of the lens of fresher water out of the CAB through both the Fram and channels of the CAA.  I'm not so sure of this, as the volume and time required to actually mobilize it is pretty huge.  However, what *will* occur, because of the much more mobile ocean surface, frozen or not, will be mixing from depth caused by ekman pumping, and the general disruption of the top 100M or so of ocean resulting from wind, movement and potentially waves.

The frosting on the cake, so to speak, will be the huge volumes of heat and moisture this train of storms is going to drag into the CAB with it.  In short, after stirring up the ice cubes, the storm will dump 10s of centimeters of snow across the top surface of the disturbed ice, which, after being subjected to high (greater than -10C) temperatures, will then afterwards be insulated against the return of colder temperatures.

You know, I'm finding it hard to think of ways the conditions could be worse for strengthening and expanding the pack; I'm down to freak hurricanes and asteroid strikes pretty much.

The 10mb circulation posted earlier is also very telling; it showed exactly the red-carpet path that's been set up to shunt subtropical heat and moisture past Greenland straight into the Barents.

We desperately need persistent high pressure to get set up in the CAB and reestablish the polar vortex.  Unfortunately, it really doesn't look like that's going to happen any time in the next two weeks - the key part of the refreeze that we needed to have conditions recover to rebuild the pack.

I may need to revise my projections down.
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budmantis

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1876 on: January 12, 2017, 08:08:09 AM »
Thanks for your detailed and descriptive post JD.

Looking at the ice from 80 degrees to the pole, I find it alarming that at least 3/8's or more of that area is covered only by one meter thick or less ice in mid-January!

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1877 on: January 12, 2017, 12:48:30 PM »
Very interesting to follow your discussions.  8)

I´m also watching the developements with earthview. And the
calculation for 16th Jan. is looking really impressive. What a
meandering wave pushing into the North...
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2017/01/16/0900Z/wind/isobaric/250hPa/orthographic=-18.52,44.36,303/loc=70.878,89.846

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A-Team

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1878 on: January 12, 2017, 01:24:04 PM »
Quote
A day or so of that and it'll be off to the races export-wise.
Indeed, motion has picked up the last two days (to 11 Jan shown in DTU mosaics). Note tracked features closer to the Greenland shore (orange, bottom) are moving somewhat faster but converging towards Fram export with more erratic poleward and eastward ice in the Transpolar Drift zone (upper part of image. The shape-changing green triangle measures deformation of the ice, it is not quite moving as a rigid body.

The second animation shows raw Sentinel mosaic on the left and a triple enhancement (global and local contrast, false color brightening) on the right. For precision tracking, 2x-3x the resolution would work better but at the expense of 4x-9x file size for the time series.

Enhancements are rarely done on satellite imagery because so much effort went in to making the reflectance accurately quantitative from the radar perspective. Here though we are only interested in picture quality and feature discrimination so the imagery is treated as though it were taken in the visible.

The still image shows how one of the triangles has shifted its vertices (drift start: 20 Dec; drift stop 11 Jan), changed the length of its sides, but somehow kept about the same area (red box), conservation over 22 days suggesting deformational plasticity but inconsequential ridging.

The Cayley-Menger determinant is standing by in the event the storm really comes about and a time series of many such simplexes needs to be evaluated. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HeronsFormula.html
« Last Edit: January 12, 2017, 06:52:46 PM by A-Team »

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1879 on: January 12, 2017, 04:55:20 PM »
When is this storm, and its impact on the ice, expected to peak?

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1880 on: January 12, 2017, 06:22:20 PM »
When is this storm, and its impact on the ice, expected to peak?
From previous posts, in about 120 hours +/- a few.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1881 on: January 12, 2017, 06:48:07 PM »
JD thank you for the informative post.
<snip>

The winds on the eastern hemisphere side will tear into the thinnest most vulnerable parts of (what passes for) the pack in the CAB.  I'm expecting they may (once again) obliterate the ices around FJL, disrupt the refreeze in the Kara, and tear open sizeable leads if not outright holes in the CAB adjacent to the Laptev.

<snip>
The large part of 0.5m to 1.5m thick ice you've circled on the east hemisphere side, would that be susceptible to forming pressure ridges or some other variant on that theme?

With sustained high winds would we not see Large areas of open water?

Wave action could really get going. 

Pressure ridges to form sail area.

Does the top 100m of ocean water have enough heat in it to do significant melting?

A-Team

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1882 on: January 12, 2017, 07:12:03 PM »
Quote
I'm expecting they may (once again) obliterate the ices around FJL
Great prognosticating by jd in #1875! From today's preliminary Sentinel scene: minimal thickness ice that will melt before ever getting to the Barents or making it out the Fram. It is ice like this that makes statistics-gathering problematic, in terms of comparing this year to past exports.

Paddy

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1883 on: January 12, 2017, 07:46:49 PM »
When is this storm, and its impact on the ice, expected to peak?
From previous posts, in about 120 hours +/- a few.

Thank you!

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1884 on: January 12, 2017, 08:51:24 PM »
JD thank you for the informative post.
<snip>

The winds on the eastern hemisphere side will tear into the thinnest most vulnerable parts of (what passes for) the pack in the CAB.  I'm expecting they may (once again) obliterate the ices around FJL, disrupt the refreeze in the Kara, and tear open sizeable leads if not outright holes in the CAB adjacent to the Laptev.

<snip>
The large part of 0.5m to 1.5m thick ice you've circled on the east hemisphere side, would that be susceptible to forming pressure ridges or some other variant on that theme?

With sustained high winds would we not see Large areas of open water?

Wave action could really get going. 

Pressure ridges to form sail area.

Does the top 100m of ocean water have enough heat in it to do significant melting?
Some great questions (re: pressure ridges, open water and melting).

The answers I think lie in understanding the total enthalpy available, current ice and surface temperatures and the physical chemistry of water.

Rule of thumb: freezing 1CC of ice releases enough heat to raise 80CC of H2O one degree C.  The reverse is similarly true; it's the buffering engine which drives Arctic climate.

So, if we look at a few buoy profiles, how much energy  we have well, depends.  Here's one example from the Wood's hole tethered profilers:

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=136957

It can vary, a lot, and unfortunately, the whole system of bouy deployment has been strangled, so the best insight we have is a couple of years old, and may not reflect what temperatures are actually there.

If SST's are an indication, there's a lot of heat fairly in that top 100M or so - with temperatures between -0.5 and -1.0C. If you could apply that heat to the surface (unlikely)  you have enough heat to melt about 1.25M of ice.  So my conclusion here is, based on the older data we have, there is enough heat to melt ice, but not so much that given current conditions that it will reduce the ice.  When you go deeper, there's a LOT more heat available, as temperatures rise to 3-4C above freezing.  Below 200M is where the real monster lurks.

To your other point - ridging - we have a different problem.  Once again, our data has become limited because the ice mass balance program hasn't been putting bouys out to replace then ones which die or get flushed out of the Arctic.  The factor I'm considering is the how the mechanical strength of ice changes with decreasing temperture.  When you get ice down to below -20C, it gets hard... VERY hard.  It's that factor along with thicker ice - 2+M thick - which built the pack as we understood it.  The ice we have now is nothing like that, and has a small fraction of the tensile and compressional strength that colder ice does.

So, how will this affect ridging?  I'm not sure.  I am confident that ridges that would form will not be as durable, and are likely to disintegrate quickly once pressure is taken off of them.  I'm also confident that the force that can be applied is significantly reduced, as floe size and strength is much reduced.  In short, in a collision, flows will be more likely to buckle on much smaller scales and disintegrate, rather than pile ice up.
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bbr2314

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1885 on: January 12, 2017, 10:29:30 PM »
I am becoming quite concerned over something that may have imminent impact or not,

In the latest HYCOM SST charts it is apparent that the pool of cold water off Greenland is now choking off the NATL's warm input into the East Greenland Current. This pool has progressed slightly North and West since HYCOM records began on an annual basis and I do not believe this to be coincidental (though perhaps it is).

2014 is the last year on-center but the trend extends back through 2012. The area specifically in question is directly SE of the tip of Greenland and has seen a gradual decrease in temps that have occurred in a seemingly exactly staggered way year over year.





It seems a few things have happened over the past few years.

One major factor is the Gulf Stream is now clearly going *way* north of where it used to over the central North Atlantic.

This perhaps has pushed what can be delivered S into a narrower area, provoking relative cooling.

The alternative is that there is simply more cold freshwater entering the NATL and combined with the northward drift of the AGW-charged Gulf Stream, it ends up piling up most in that specific area.

In any case this may soon have important side effects as it seems that the flow of relatively warm water East of Greenland's sea ice may soon shut off entirely south of the tip, which would perhaps allow the current to plunge directly south towards Labrador/etc as the sea ice to the west continues advancing. It appears that we are ahead of any other year on the southern Atlantic ice front at the moment.

Perhaps crucial to ^ is the below animation of Sea Surface Salinity. You can see that as the ice advances off of Quebec and Labrador, the associated fresher surface water throws off eddies that advance and interact with the same kind of phenomenon that originate off the tip of Greenland thanks to the East Greenland Current. It is obvious in the animation that some interference between these eddies has begun, I would imagine it intensifies as the sea ice continues expanding dramatically over the next few weeks. Very interesting to watch!




seaicesailor

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1886 on: January 12, 2017, 11:28:41 PM »
When is this storm, and its impact on the ice, expected to peak?
From previous posts, in about 120 hours +/- a few.
Yes, the low is predicted to appear over Fram straight on Monday and thereafter stay three days in the range 950-960 hPa. It will cause strong ice drift near Northern Greenland coasts. Hycom is also forecasting spectacular openings in the ice pack in Kara and Laptev (although this already has been happening for a few days). Large waves reaching the ice edge, first close to Fram then propagating into Barentsz sea (snapshot forecast Tuesday 00Z)
« Last Edit: January 13, 2017, 12:05:54 AM by seaicesailor »

jdallen

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1887 on: January 13, 2017, 12:02:23 AM »
I am becoming quite concerned over something that may have imminent impact or not,

In the latest HYCOM SST charts it is apparent that the pool of cold water off Greenland is now choking off the NATL's warm input into the East Greenland Current. This pool has progressed slightly North and West since HYCOM records began on an annual basis and I do not believe this to be coincidental (though perhaps it is).

2014 is the last year on-center but the trend extends back through 2012. The area specifically in question is directly SE of the tip of Greenland and has seen a gradual decrease in temps that have occurred in a seemingly exactly staggered way year over year.

Right now, looking at it, I think you are reading too much into the drop (which may be as little as 0.25C).  Further, the SSS plot doesn't appear to show significant fresh water pooling or redistribution.

We *will* see significant changes, particularly in Baffin Bay, as the Greenland cap melts.  I'm doubtful it will significantly cool northern hemisphere temperatures or weather in a significant way.  If we see a major permanent glacially contained lake build up, I might worry.

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Tigertown

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1888 on: January 13, 2017, 12:18:22 AM »
The thickest of the thick sea ice is on the way out. If you click(on their site, not this) on the reddish color about to turn the corner it reads out at about 4 meters. Another batch not far behind.
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Tigertown

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1889 on: January 13, 2017, 03:42:53 PM »
I just got finished looking at satellite images. I don't know where to start. The Okhotsk ice is almost all gone. From the Beaufort to the Chukchi, there are huge streaks of low concentration showing, damage from storms and waves and upwelling. There are actually several large leads developing in the ESS and Laptev. The remaining ice in Kara is getting thinned out, as well as that around FJL. Hudson Bay ice has been under attack for days now and is showing fatigue; it has never got to thicken up properly yet. The exported ice in the Labrador and Fram is starting to melt from wave action as it reaches the furthest points South, ruining it's effectiveness as a dam of sorts that would normally slow export. I guess it will all be alright though, as long as there is no big storms anytime soon.

www.polarview.aq/sic/arctic/
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1890 on: January 13, 2017, 05:05:55 PM »
Yes indeed, no reason to be overly concerned about a couple of days of 960 hPa bringing 103 km/hr winds acting and -3ºC surface air since the ice pack is already rather compromised, though the picture being painted today for Tuesday the 17th varies quite a bit between ec, gfs and nam.

Hycom is anticipating a remarkable surge of ice out the Chukchi, out the Fram, and up out of the Kara Sea.

Ice velocity and drift continue to present display issues. Here are 23 days ending 11 Jan 17 of rolling three day average displacement vectors from http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icedrift_anim/ This is already showing ice beginning to head south through the Bering Strait on 10-12 Jan 17.

Really the nice display is from ifremer cersat. The animation shows last spring, jumps of the summer melt pond problem and continues on to Dec 2nd. They won't be posting the rest of that month until 26 Jan 17. The image is reduced slightly from the initial generous size.

And then there is this remarkable effort that has been providing us with the Sentinel mosaics but seeming not the rest of it yet.

Sentinel-1 provides ice drift observations for Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service
LT Pedersen, R Saldo DMI DTU

Sea ice drift information with an accuracy that allows also ice deformation (divergence, shear, vorticity) to be derived is being operationally generated in CMEMS.

The method is based on 2-dimensional digital cross correlation where subsections of 2 consecutive images (typically 12-36h apart) are compared and the ice displacement defined as the shift in location of images 1 that maximizes the cross correlation with image 2. The method is also known as Maximum Cross Correlation or MCC.

A dataset of daily ice drift vectors of both polar regions is now available covering the time period from 2007 to the present time. With the Launch of Sentinel-1B in 2016, daily coverage of most of the Arctic Ocean will become possible.

Already today approximately 10.000 Sentinel-1A image pairs are matched every month in the processing system.

The quality of the ice drift vectors are routinely verified against GPS locations of drift buoys and the RMS difference between the baseline product available through the CMEMS data portal and GPS drifters is ~500 meters per day. A significant part of this RMS difference can be ascribed to the different nature of a point measurement and an area measurement.

This accuracy is sufficient to support the generation of daily maps of ice divergence, shear and vorticity as the spatial derivatives of the ice drift field.The deformation fields are produced in the FP7 POLAR ICE project which develops methods for downstream distribution of ice related information to end-users in Polar Regions.

ftp://ftp.ifremer.fr/ifremer/cersat/products/gridded/psi-drift/quicklooks/arctic/merged-ascat-ssmi/30-days_missing_values_filled/2016/

http://lps16.esa.int/page_session169.php#2411p

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1891 on: January 13, 2017, 05:32:30 PM »
Quote
From the Beaufort to the Chukchi, there are huge streaks of low concentration showing
A few more observations: (1) UH AMSR2 image-averaging over 42 days ending 11 Jan 17 supports this to some extent, though the method cannot remove weather artifacts if they are stationary and persistent, and (2) ice swaths from Cryosat observe ice being exported out the Fram thicker than model products are indicating.

We've previously looked at the very large diagonal streak along the prime meridian. It appears dark on Sentinel-1AB (which means smooth surface) and likely represents a swath of rain or air melted surface snow (associated with 24 Dec 16) rather than younger ice (it would have showed earlier) or intervening atmospheric clouds or water vapor (atmospheric column is not persistent this long).

The third animation is just an update on the Beaufort, Chukchi, Bering Strait, and East Siberian Sea.. It runs form 01 Dec to 12 Jan 17 with Jan 2nd and Jan 3rd missing because of New Year's glitching. The four corners, CW from upper left, are Wrangel Island, Banks Island, Mackenzie River delta, and Bering Strait. The lower half is inverted; sometimes it helps to have both versions to compare.

This region has struggled to refreeze to its historic thickness this year with the worst still to come if this storm materializes to anything like its EC forecast. We may have already seen "peak winter' in this region -- the sun rises on Little Diomede on the 19th (ie WorldView images become available again).
« Last Edit: January 13, 2017, 06:06:08 PM by A-Team »

jdallen

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1892 on: January 13, 2017, 07:12:16 PM »
<snippage>
The third animation is just an update on the Beaufort, Chukchi, Bering Strait, and East Siberian Sea.. It runs form 01 Dec to 12 Jan 17 with Jan 2nd and Jan 3rd missing because of New Year's glitching. The four corners, CW from upper left, are Wrangel Island, Banks Island, Mackenzie River delta, and Bering Strait. The lower half is inverted; sometimes it helps to have both versions to compare.

This region has struggled to refreeze to its historic thickness this year with the worst still to come if this storm materializes to anything like its EC forecast. We may have already seen "peak winter' in this region -- the sun rises on Little Diomede on the 19th (ie WorldView images become available again).
Great animation as per usual.

In a similar vein, note that the sun rises in Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow) on the 22nd. I think people lose track of the fact that the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort (and portions of the ESS) are so much further south  than the peripheral seas on the Atlantic side. 

They will start seeing insolation over a month before the equinox arrives substantial enough to prevent freezing.  Under current conditions, with so much open water and low albedo, it may be enough to start active melt.
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1893 on: January 13, 2017, 07:43:25 PM »
(2) ice swaths from Cryosat observe ice being exported out the Fram thicker than model products are indicating.

The Cryosat image seems to show ice of above-average thickness in and around Fram Strait. I wonder if this could be partly due to compressive forces squeezing out some of the thinnest ice. That is an effect that would surely occur to a greater extent when ice is thinner and weaker. If ice is being compressed before export the effective area of export would be larger than what we can see looking at Fram Strait itself.

magnamentis

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1894 on: January 13, 2017, 08:28:29 PM »
(2) ice swaths from Cryosat observe ice being exported out the Fram thicker than model products are indicating.

The Cryosat image seems to show ice of above-average thickness in and around Fram Strait. I wonder if this could be partly due to compressive forces squeezing out some of the thinnest ice. That is an effect that would surely occur to a greater extent when ice is thinner and weaker. If ice is being compressed before export the effective area of export would be larger than what we can see looking at Fram Strait itself.

that's the ice that was previously situated along the CAA and has been transported and will soon be exported south to melt.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1895 on: January 13, 2017, 09:05:34 PM »
Could we actually see a 'surge' in extent, on the Atlantic side of the basin, as a ripped up pack is pushed out into open waters?

I can imagine some folk running with a story like that.........

It will be very informative to see just how the ice front 'acts' over the period of the storm?

Will an extended N.A.D. /Gulf stream do to the ice what a Chinook wind does to the snow?
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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1896 on: January 13, 2017, 09:18:58 PM »
Over on the blog I posted this short animation showing the ECMWF forecast for day 4-7 (storm forecast to be 959-959-961-969 hPa):

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magnamentis

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1897 on: January 13, 2017, 09:23:14 PM »
Could we actually see a 'surge' in extent, on the Atlantic side of the basin, as a ripped up pack is pushed out into open waters?

I can imagine some folk running with a story like that.........

It will be very informative to see just how the ice front 'acts' over the period of the storm?

Will an extended N.A.D. /Gulf stream do to the ice what a Chinook wind does to the snow?

considering last year's behaviour, water temps, air temps as well as the state of the ice i would assume that it will simply disintegrate (melt out) exactly as it did last year when we had that kind of killing ground for the ice where it simply disappeared as soon as it has reached there.

of course i can't predict such behaviour since things can change but that's currently what i expect to happen from data that are publicly available.
« Last Edit: January 13, 2017, 09:48:40 PM by magnamentis »

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1898 on: January 13, 2017, 10:36:47 PM »

The graph is inspired by ktonine who posted graphs with thickness estimates before me. Let me know if you want some changes or improvements.


Nice work. Think I would prefer version with start as 1 Sept rather than starting on 1 Jan, and so maybe have the anomalies graph start at 1 Sept?

It might be a bad idea to clutter it up too much. Showing range from following what happened in previous years with lowest and highest FDD from last data to end of season might be an interesting extra. Perhaps if you are able to show numeric values for this (and for season to date and previous lowest on record for the date) rather than extra lines on chart which would/could clutter it up. (Or maybe if you cannot display data, and the graph is 274 days wide then maybe a line from the low range value on day 276 to the high range value on day 277 could indicate that range.

Hope you can follow what I am suggesting from that.

I've already written the code for the seasonal anomaly graph, but I forgot to enable it after testing. On my website I repositioned all graphs. Freezing-Season graphs are now shown first and individual years below.

Your second suggestion is doable, but would need quite a few of extra steps. Right now I just add 2017 values to the last 2016 value. This is a fixed point and easy to do. If I want to show whats possible in the future I have to adjust the last measured point and the starting point of my future projection every day. 2017 will probably be warmest on record anyway so you can just project less FDD then last year.

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Re: The 2016/2017 freezing season
« Reply #1899 on: January 14, 2017, 05:54:05 AM »
I have been trying to visualize what a nine meter wave would look like, as these are expected and maybe some larger in the Barents on the 16th and 17th, maybe longer. Nine meters is about thirty feet for those of us more familiar with those terms, and the best thing I can think to compare is the height of a small utility pole. Water in the Barents ranges in temperatures, but right in the center of the warmest current, in the center of expected wave activity as well, the water is about 6.5 or so Celsius and runs deep. How much of this water gets dispersed will play a role in the amount of damage that is to be done to the sea ice.

Approx. 20 to 25 ft wave.
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