Here is a 01-16 Nov update to the Atlantic-facing ice front encompassing the huge cyclone of 13 Nov 16 and many days of strong poleward wind carrying warm moist air from the south. Massive melt, just like before.
Next up: the St Anna Trough incursion will be gone with another couple of days of this wind, water, and air temperature. That's only a beginning of the long-term effects of this storm.
Open water in the high resolution AMSR2 animations is recolored mauve, 100% concentration sea ice green. The palette on the UHH product allows any combination of concentration ranges to be brought out.
It's a clever one because it uses equal perceptual luminosities (0.21 red + 0.72 green + 0.07 blue) and consequently drops down to equal grays upon applying 'desaturase' in gimp. Is one of the many AMRS2 products more accurate? -- they all look about the same on ice edge and all are affected by passing atmospheric artifacts.
People here seem to have
zero interest in what the scientific community does. Actually quite a few very recent articles speak to winter conditions earlier in this cycle and their significance to melt season and Arctic amplification.
It's probably better to digest these first, especially the data-driven ones, before wandering off into the speculative arena?
I located the L Boisvert paper tied to the Nasa visualization of the gigantic storm of 27 Dec 15, which had very similar effects to what we are seeing below. Her work with the AIRS instrument on Aqua is providing a lot of good data on evaporation, water, clouds, radiative feedback and so forth, highly recommended.
Possibly we can replicate those methods and analyze the Nov 13th storm ourselves. The AIRS data is not one of the Aqua channels provided at WorldView, so as a backup I wrote to see if she had a left-over script that could be run on the current storm.
The Impact of the Extreme Winter 2015/16 Arctic Cyclone on the Barents–Kara Seas
Linette N. Boisvert and Alek A. Petty Julienne C. Stroeve
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/MWR-D-16-0234.1 Atmospheric data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) were used to study an extreme warm and humid air mass transported over the Barents–Kara Seas region by an Arctic cyclone at the end of December 2015. Temperature and humidity in the region was ~10°C (>3σ above the 2003–14 mean) warmer and ~1.4 g kg−1 (>4σ above the 2003–14 mean) wetter than normal during the peak of this event.
This anomalous air mass resulted in a large and positive flux of energy into the surface via the residual of the surface energy balance (SEB), compared to the weakly negative SEB from the surface to the atmosphere expected for that time of year.
The magnitude of the downwelling longwave radiation during the event was unprecedented compared to all other events detected by AIRS in December/January since 2003. An approximate budget scaling suggests that this anomalous SEB could have resulted in up to 10 cm of ice melt.
Thinning of the ice pack in the region was supported by remotely sensed and modeled estimates of ice thickness change. Understanding the impact of this anomalous air mass on a thinner, weakened sea ice state is imperative for understanding future sea ice–atmosphere interactions in a warming Arctic.
http://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/bio/linette.n.boisvertBoisvert, L. N., J. N. Lee, B. Noel, M. R. van den Broeke, and A. W. Nolin. 2016. "Using remotely sensed data from AIRS to estimate the vapor flux on the Greenland Ice Sheet: comparisons with observations and a regional climate model." Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, (Conditionally Accepted)
Boisvert, L. N., A. A. Petty, and J. C. Stroeve. 2016. "The Impact of the Extreme Winter 2015/16 Arctic Cyclone on the Barents–Kara Seas." Monthly Weather Review, [http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/MWR-D-16-0234.1]
Cullather, R. I., Y.-K. Lim, L. N. Boisvert, et al. 2016. "Analysis of the warmest Arctic winter, 2015-2016." Geophysical Research Letters, (In Press) [10.1002/2016GL071228]
Serreze, M., J. C. Stroeve, A. P. Barrett, and L. N. Boisvert. 2016. "Summer Atmospheric Circulation Anomalies over the Arctic Ocean and Their Influences on September Sea Ice Extent: A Cautionary Tale." Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, [10.1002/2016JD025161]
Boisvert, L. N., D. L. Wu, T. Vihma, and J. Susskind. 2015. "Verification of air/surface humidity differences from AIRS and ERA-Interim in support of turbulent flux estimation in the Arctic." J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 120 (3): 945–963 [10.1002/2014JD021666]
Boisvert, L. N., and J. C. Stroeve. 2015. "The Arctic is becoming warmer and wetter as revealed by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder." Geophys. Res. Lett., 42 (11): 4439-4446 [10.1002/2015GL063775]