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Neven

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #600 on: January 12, 2018, 05:47:44 PM »
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.
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Tor Bejnar

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #601 on: January 12, 2018, 06:57:30 PM »
Yuha's Handbrake mp4 (Reply #597) works for me, too.  (Thanks, developers!)
Arctic ice is healthy for children and other living things because "we cannot negotiate with the melting point of ice"

gerontocrat

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #602 on: January 12, 2018, 07:19:31 PM »
Quote
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 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.

Thanks A-Team. At my age one needs all the reassurance one can get that the brain is still firing on a few neurons.

But it is necessary again to wait until early next month to get a feel for the direction of travel of volume where it matters - in the CAB, even if winter sea ice extent at the margins remains at a record low.
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FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #603 on: January 12, 2018, 07:23:37 PM »
By downloading I could watch the MP4 files on my Mac in Quicktime.

That video of the past year shows that there are no coherent large areas of old ice. It's like fragments of older rock in a breccia. Greenland and the CAA have no holdout areas. The last strongholds broke last summer as far as I can see.

Over the past year Pacific water has flowed into the Arctic ocean at an exceptionally high rate. I don't know if there are precise scientific measurements of the amounts but someone must have pretty good estimates. Alaska had a record warm December and the Bering sea inflow of Pacific water has continued into January.

We may have another cool cloudy summer and see no record low in September, but people should be paying attention to the shocking changes we have seen for the past 2 winters.

romett1

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #604 on: January 12, 2018, 07:41:25 PM »
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.


Here is Dec 28 - Jan 11 (Fram, Nares (some days are missing due to clouds)). Images: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/morrisjessup.uk.php
« Last Edit: January 12, 2018, 07:52:21 PM by romett1 »

gerontocrat

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #605 on: January 12, 2018, 07:45:50 PM »

Here is Dec 28 - Jan 11 (Fram, Nares (some days are missing due to clouds)). Images: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/morrisjessup.uk.php
Is it possible to slow the damn thing down. My eyes feel like they've been strobed !
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A-Team

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #606 on: January 12, 2018, 07:48:13 PM »
Quote
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.

That has to be having some effect on thickness variation over short scales, shear strength, deformation, rafting, ridging, keeling, landfast dislodgement, and ice pack mobility. I don't immediately see how to put a trend number on it though.

Maybe turn our backyard wildlife cam on a screen animation? It has motion detection capability and only takes a shot when change exceeds a tunable threshold. Probably could emulate that by Gimp differencing histograms on an Ascat series though weather makes them noisy.

romett1

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #607 on: January 12, 2018, 07:54:35 PM »

Here is Dec 28 - Jan 11 (Fram, Nares (some days are missing due to clouds)). Images: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/morrisjessup.uk.php
Is it possible to slow the damn thing down. My eyes feel like they've been strobed !
I agree, made it 10 times slower.

Yuha

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #608 on: January 12, 2018, 08:01:31 PM »
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.

Thanks, Neven!

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.

FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #609 on: January 12, 2018, 09:08:15 PM »
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

Last summer's cyclonic conditions favored westerly winds and low sea surface heights in the ESS. That increased Pacific water inflow through the Bering strait. This winter's storms moving into the Arctic ocean from the Pacific have also increased inflow which has been driven by strong southerly winds. This weather has also weakened the Beaufort gyre.

That implies that cold fresh water in the Beaufort gyre has been flowing through the CAA and Nares towards the Labrador sea as the gyre weakened and released stored fresh water.

Neven

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #610 on: January 13, 2018, 12:32:29 AM »
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.

Works for me.   :)

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

Rebecca Woodgate from the PSC would probably have info on this. I've had some contact with her back in 2012, asking whether ocean heat flux through Bering had been comparable to 2007, but no luck. I guess we'll have to wait 2-3 years until it's published in a paper.  ;)

Edit: that paper you link to, is actually co-authored by Woodgate. Sorry for replying without checking first.
« Last Edit: January 13, 2018, 12:39:03 AM by Neven »
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RunningChristo

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #611 on: January 13, 2018, 10:14:37 AM »
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!

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...
My fancy for ice & glaciers started in 1995:-).

oren

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #612 on: January 13, 2018, 02:56:09 PM »
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!

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...
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.

A-Team

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #613 on: January 13, 2018, 04:21:11 PM »
Quote
actual temp. With heavy rainfall. Surreal
The freezing season is not going so well off Alaska either, 1st image and animation.

Quote
Rebecca Woodgate from the PSC would have info on this
Actually that paper, to the extent it deals with summers 2014-16, is somewhat passé given the rate of change in the Arctic.

More to the point is Woodgate's summer 2017 rent-a-cruise mooring retrievals. This is actually a detailed fascinating trip log that shows the dicey nature of oceanographic research. An entire year can be wasted because of biofouling of a seabed cable release mechanism, snagging of lines by passing trawlers, high seas during narrow operating windows, and malfunctions in data recorders.

Even though 3 Chukchi moorings make for a very sparse sample for 9 million sq km, they still represents a huge expensive effort. Actual daily data at depth is imperative though as only the ocean surface can be directly accessible to satellite. Profiling buoys don't hold their position nor operate for long. Beyond that, you are looking at long long runs of ungrounded model theories.

A big breakthrough though has come with new autonomous buoyancy gliders that can operate up and down a sawtooth depth range over a huge distances for six months or more untended, then surface and beam up their data like a satellite swath only with an extra dimension. (There's one down in the AO now but it hasn't yet reported.)

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/HLD/Bstrait/BeringStrait2017CruiseReport_Norseman2_22ndJuly2017witheventlog.pdf

"Key Preliminary results. As discussed below (p.67), the mooring data show some remarkable changes this year:

(i) a remarkably warm June 2017 (~ 3°C warmer than climatology);

(ii) remarkably early arrival of warm water in the strait in spring/summer 2017 (in hourly data, ~ 15 days earlier than in any prior recorded year and ~ 1 month earlier than the average)

(iii) very late departure of warm waters from the strait in late 2016 (in hourly data, more than 20 days later than any prior recorded year)

(iv) anomalously fresh waters in winter (~1 psu lower in winter, ~0.5 psu lower in the annual mean)

(v) a record maximum freshwater flux in 2016, of ~ 3500km3/yr (relative to 34.8 psu)

(vi) record high northward flows in fall 2016 (in 30-day smoothed data).

Key Statistics: 3 moorings recovered, 3 moorings deployed, 342 CTD casts on 19 CTD lines"

Meanwhile, on the thin ice front:

Warm Winter, Thin Ice?
Julienne Stroeve et al  review: 04 Jan 2018
https://www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/tc-2017-287/tc-2017-287.pdf free fulll

Winter 2016/2017 saw record warmth over the Arctic Ocean, leading to the least amount of freezing degree days north of 70° N since at least 1979. The impact of this warmth was evaluated using model simulations from the Los Alamos sea-ice model (CICE) and CryoSat-2 thickness estimates from three different data providers.

While CICE simulations show a broad region of anomalously thin ice in April 2017 relative to the 2011–2017 mean, analysis of three CryoSat-2 products show more limited regions with thin ice and do not always agree with each other, both in magnitude and direction of thickness anomalies.

CICE is further used to diagnose feedback processes driving the observed anomalies, showing 11–13 cm reduced thermodynamic ice growth over the Arctic domain used in this study compared to the 2011–2017 mean, and dynamical contributions of +1 to +4 cm.

Finally, CICE model simulations from 1985–2017 indicate the negative feedback relationship between ice growth and winter air temperatures may be starting to weaken, showing decreased winter ice growth since 2012 as winter air temperatures have increased and the freeze-up has been further delayed.
« Last Edit: January 13, 2018, 06:54:18 PM by A-Team »

oren

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #614 on: January 13, 2018, 04:26:06 PM »
Thank you A-Team, very interesting, especially the warm water departure and arrival timings.

FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #615 on: January 13, 2018, 07:49:51 PM »
Yes, A-Team the Arctic is changing so rapidly that a paper submitted for publication is already getting long in the tooth.  Weather maps, sea surface height maps and sea ice concentration maps indicate that the inflow of Pacific water to the Arctic this fall and early winter is the highest ever measured. Southerly winds have been extreme as storm after storm has pushed up from the Pacific into the east Siberian sea. In December ice may be pushed through the Bering Strait, but there's close to zero heat content in the water. This December there was close to no ice and the water still had residual heat as it flowed into the Arctic. This is a first, as far as I know. I await the publication of inflow data for 2017-2018 to verify what I have been observing by looking at on-line maps and data sets.

The attached image for 23December17 shows an intense sea surface height gradient in the Bering sea driving Pacific water into the Arctic ocean. The extreme weather that caused this gradient also set off the chain of weather events that brought brutal cold to the U.S. east coast.


FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #616 on: January 13, 2018, 08:45:39 PM »
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.

Alexander555

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #617 on: January 13, 2018, 09:01:38 PM »
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.

I have been reading a few rapports that indicate that sea is also warming at deeper levels. I would say that this has an impact in several ways. Can you say something more about that ?

Jim Hunt

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #618 on: January 13, 2018, 09:50:45 PM »
There are currently two cyclones off Greenland causing some giant waves in the Fram Strait:

http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2018/01/the-january-2018-fram-strait-cyclones/

Amongst other things they've also generated severe weather warnings for both rain and avalanches on Svalbard.

This is in the middle of January.
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FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #619 on: January 13, 2018, 10:22:50 PM »
The Mercator Ocean model has very anomalous excess heat still present at 100m depth in the Chukchi sea. Deeper, the Beaufort gyre has been displaced towards Canada and warm salty water has moved into the west side of the gyre from the Atlantic along the Siberian shelf.

Heat has moved into the Arctic ocean from both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Last years cyclonic conditions favored deep Atlantic water inflow. The southerly winds in the Bering sea favored shallow (there is no deep) inflow from the Pacific.

The Jet Stream for December was really screwed up. It was intense on the east coasts of Asia and north America, but then weakened and tracked far north of normal in both the Pacific and Atlantic. This is probably the effect of a combination of La Niña, very warm waters on the east coasts of both continents (warming oceans) and a general weakening of the westerlies associated with a warming climate.

Note that with global warming the thermal contrast on the east coasts of Asia and N. America will stay strong while the contrasts weaken over the mid ocean. This will tend to create a jet stream that looks like it did this December.

It will also lead to ridiculously warm wet intense storms moving from the Atlantic towards the Arctic like the one hitting Svalbard now.


FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #620 on: January 13, 2018, 10:42:17 PM »
There has been a considerable tightening of the subpolar gyre in the Labrador and Greenland seas. That indicates warm salty Gulf Stream water is spinning around and sinking on the shelf margins of Labrador and the south tip of Greenland. It may indicate more water heading towards the Arctic over the next few years. It's also the energy source for the intense storms coming over the next few days.

Jim Hunt

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #621 on: January 13, 2018, 11:22:28 PM »
Via Axel Schweiger on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/AxelSchweiger/status/952082493175316482

Quote
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.

http://psc.apl.uw.edu/psc-loses-one-of-our-founders-alan-thorndike/

Quote
Alan Thorndike died on Jan 8, 2018  from an aggressive pneumonia.  He was 72 years old.

RIP Alan.
« Last Edit: January 13, 2018, 11:37:58 PM by Jim Hunt »
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A-Team

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #622 on: January 14, 2018, 02:32:09 PM »
Last year saw all these Atlantic clones bring warm wet weather up into the Arctic, accompanied by presumptions that this might be the new normal for the New Arctic. However 2017/18 so far is not going along with this idea.

The significance of these storms for the 2016/17 winter are reviewed in Stroeve 2018 using CryoSat2 and the above-mentioned ice thickness distribution fields.

Thorndike's influential work on this dates back to 1975 per gScholar search:

Quote
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.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2018, 03:03:58 PM by A-Team »

Alexander555

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #623 on: January 14, 2018, 03:04:31 PM »
What are the boldest predictions for an ice free arctic ? A couple days ice free.

Avalonian

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #624 on: January 14, 2018, 03:51:06 PM »
What are the boldest predictions for an ice free arctic ? A couple days ice free.

My impression is that many people here (me included) believe that it's possible for any year from now on to become nominally ice-free; it just needs the 'perfect' combination of weather patterns. Even a repeat of 2007 might do it with the current state of the ice. When will it happen, though? We'd be guessing. As A-Team's just pointed out, our expectations of new consistent patterns keep getting flummoxed; at the moment, zero-day just isn't predictable, especially with the apparent negative feedback effect of cloudy summers.

gerontocrat

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #625 on: January 14, 2018, 04:39:57 PM »
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.

BUT, we can say that since 2012 (the record low year),

- CO2 ppm has gone up by about 13 (= about another 4.5 % above pre-industrial levels), and will continue to significantly for a good few years yet (even in the best-case scenario), which means:-

- the oceans have not only got warmer but will continue to get warmer
(see image below and https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/ ),

- Global air temperatures are up significantly and will continue to rise for a good few years yet.

So, over time, there is only one way for sea ice - down. That has to be the long-term trend.

And one year there will be ideal conditions for melt - and that is far as I will go.
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Alexander555

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #626 on: January 14, 2018, 05:41:08 PM »
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.

Dharma Rupa

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #627 on: January 14, 2018, 06:13:40 PM »
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.

A-Team

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #628 on: January 14, 2018, 06:26:37 PM »
Quote
Allowed file types: gif, jpg, mpg, pdf, png, txt, jpeg, mp4, m4v, mov, avi
Build it and they will come!

Just some cross-posted images from a longer more technical post on issues in making a  simultaneous titanic 9-year daily ASCAT movie coming to a forum near you soon(?)

https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,1259.msg138784.html#msg138784




Alexander555

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #629 on: January 14, 2018, 07:09:25 PM »
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.

Maybe, but lets take the gulf stream as an example. And just tell it if i'm wrong. I take the gulf stream because i think it's a circulation. But probably you will have the same influence at many places in some way. 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. It's already warmer than normal. So probably it will also exit the gulf of Mexico warmer than it normaly is. So it will take more time to cool it down. So if you would take a point in the north, lets say where the temperature on average is 5° C. Than this point will probably move a little further north. You see what i want to say, there will just be more heat in the north. So in general i would think that these cold burst will get smaller in the long term. Maybe with some short term volatility.

A-Team

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #630 on: January 14, 2018, 07:21:02 PM »
Quote
it's possible for any year from now on to become nominally ice-free
It 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.

The upswings don't much affect the trend nor lead to recovery but the downswings can be enough, when the trend has brought things low enough, for numbers to hit zero from which no recovery is possible. (There'll be an open wind fetch of 3395 km from Little Diomede to Longyearbyen.)

So while we're already getting significant regional effects from our current position on the trend line, I wouldn't be surprised to see an effectively complete blowout over the Sept 2018-2020 time frame.

However the loss of multi-year ice is preceding more rapidly than anyone envisioned (by export and translocation to kill zones), moving us on a parallel track, distinct from bad weather blow-ins and blow-outs, to essentially all FYI which already has consequences fairly similar to no ice.

So 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).

Note nothing we post here affects the ice outcomes one way or another ... previous words of wisdom from Oren.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2018, 07:42:17 PM by A-Team »

Dharma Rupa

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #631 on: January 14, 2018, 08:13:22 PM »
...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....

The cycle time for Atlantic Deepwater is on the order of thousands of years, and yes, in a few thousand years the water will come back to haunt us yet again, and the +.01 degree added warmth will cause havoc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #632 on: January 14, 2018, 08:49:59 PM »
According to Environment Canada the southernmost of the two cyclones off Greenland was down to a MSLP of 942 hPa at 12:00 UTC:

http://GreatWhiteCon.info/2018/01/the-january-2018-fram-strait-cyclones/#Jan-14

Amongst other things it's sending a nice big swell over to us here in SW England. The west coast of Ireland is forecast to be 30 feet at 19 seconds overnight on Tuesday!
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Tor Bejnar

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #633 on: January 14, 2018, 10:08:00 PM »
...
Note nothing we post here affects the ice outcomes one way or another ... previous words of wisdom from Oren.
What??!!  Are you guys saying all our 'hot air' has no effect?
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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #634 on: January 14, 2018, 10:44:49 PM »
Quote
it's possible for any year from now on to become nominally ice-free
So 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).



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)?

jdallen

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #635 on: January 14, 2018, 10:48:39 PM »
According to Environment Canada the southernmost of the two cyclones off Greenland was down to a MSLP of 942 hPa at 12:00 UTC:
<snippage>
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.

On the Pacific side the trough(s) are not quite as persistent, but are sending consistent flow into the Bering and Alaska proper, but with some transport of heat across to the Beaufort and Chukchi.  Between waves, heat and rain, we may actually see serious decreases in extent in the Barents between Svalbard and FJL.  Even though the "cyclone cannon" of 2016 and 2017 has slowed it's rate of fire, what we have now is plenty troublesome.

The counter-flow appears to be across the CAA into the Canadian shield on one side, and across Eastern Siberia on the other.  I anticipate another Arctic break out across the Eastern US, and eastern China and Japan may find themselves unusually chilly as well.

I expect we'll see little to no net increase in extent on either side of the Arctic basin proper, but modest increase in extent in the Baffin and Labrador seas, the Greenland sea (driven mostly by Fram export, and the Sea of Okhotsk.  Unfortunately, none of the increases here will be useful for overall ice health.

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.
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aperson

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #636 on: January 14, 2018, 11:00:09 PM »
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.

I think it's important to note that this can be a poor metric when looking at the Arctic as a whole since what's going on at 80-90N may be pretty different from what's going on at 70-80N. FDD has fared reasonably well because we're mostly seeing strong EPO and NAO dipoles which result in low pressure centers near Alaska and Iceland. This causes air to advect from the Canadian side to the Siberian side and vice-versa, which keeps the center of the Arctic reasonably insulated compared to the surrounding region. It's also a reason that the anomalously cold regions are appearing on the Canadian and Siberian sides this year.
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Neven

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #637 on: January 14, 2018, 11:22:20 PM »
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:
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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #638 on: January 14, 2018, 11:23:48 PM »
PS Stay on topic, folks. No speculations or long-winded philosophies about long-term trends, models, Gulf Stream or our 'hot air'.
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aperson

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #639 on: January 14, 2018, 11:30:28 PM »
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)?

In the spirit of staying on topic with this thread, I'll try to stick with teleconnections that have appeared this season. One of the major drivers of SIE stalls this season has been an enhanced East-Pacific ridge. This results in subtropical heat and moisture being advected up through the PNW or Canada instead of a strong zonal jet flow crossing over California.

This sort of behavior is tied to the heavy -EPO trend we have seen throughout December and parts of January, our anomalously low Bering/Chukchi SIE, and the drought/wildfire favoring mesoscale pattern over southern California. Essentially, ice cover along the Pacific and Atlantic sides "pushes" the jet stream further out. When ice is anomalously low, then the temperature gradient to drive the polar jet decreases and Rossby wavebreaks over the Pacific and Atlantic become increasingly likely.

The following reference discusses this phenomenon in the East Pacific:

Future loss of Arctic sea-ice cover could drive a substantial decrease in California’s rainfall: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01907-4
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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #640 on: January 14, 2018, 11:31:41 PM »
i don't think that anyone here believes he can alter development or in other words, write ice-history. what we do ist to learn to best read what's going on and there is nothing wrong to develop a best possible interpretation of what's going on. the sooner and the ore people know and are convinced about what going to happen the more people can prepare themselves and/or do something to reduce the possible consequences.

guessing and erring is like learning by doing and nothing is wrong with it while stating the obvious is sound nice and smart while it's nothing but that, the obvious and therefore is not a genuine achievement.

BTW i see one cyclonic front after another beating the arctic from both, the atlantic as well as the pacific side. at least i get this impression while following temp anomaly maps and wind maps.

if it's correct that all those storm fronts contain heat and humidity i cannot entirely understand who we can say that this pattern does not apply to this season. to me it looks very very similar like last season except that it's worse because both sides get battered while last year it was mostly the atlantic side.

i might overlook something like so often ;) but the i'm eagerly looking forward to all the replies that show me what that might be.

Neven

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #641 on: January 14, 2018, 11:35:20 PM »
According to Environment Canada the southernmost of the two cyclones off Greenland was down to a MSLP of 942 hPa at 12:00 UTC:

940 hPa now! With Iceland almost perfectly in the eye of the storm.

PS @ Magnamentis, my impression is that there's much less storms coming in all the way into the Arctic via the Atlantic this year, and thus much less snow as well as last year (Pacific I don't know).
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subgeometer

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #642 on: January 15, 2018, 01:16:46 AM »
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:

GFS reanalysis maps from climate reanalyser - http://cci-reanalyzer.org/reanalysis/daily_maps/ -  give a value for daily temperature anomaly in the Arctic circle - that's a potential source for an FDD chart but one that maybe misleading because its really just the Arctic Ocean that is of interest. Extreme cold in northern Siberia and/or Canada can offset warm anomalies over the ice. If there was a way of masking out the surrounding landmasses and the north Atlantic that would be great

FishOutofWater

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #643 on: January 15, 2018, 01:45:25 AM »
Neven, this year to date has had strong flow into the Arctic from the Pacific and less in the Atlantic. The repeated Arctic outbreaks into the American east coast finally cranked up the storms in the Atlantic.  These deep north Atlantic lows will kick off a wave train in the jet stream, shifting the long wave pattern. Siberia will get colder than normal and high pressure will build in over the ESS.

A-Team's multiyear sequence reminded me that freezing season can get started late, like it did in January 2013 and still lead to recovery. The ice pack was in horrible shape after summer 2012 but it recovered. This year, however does not look like January 2013 when there was a strong sudden stratospheric warming followed by intense high pressure over the pole for the month of February. That huge dome of high pressure over the Arctic ocean in cold dark February was key to sea ice recovery because enormous amounts of heat radiated out to space under clear skies. The cloudy conditions we are seeing now are not good for recovery.

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #644 on: January 15, 2018, 07:55:23 AM »
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.
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El Cid

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #645 on: January 15, 2018, 08:23:35 AM »
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

bbr2314

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #646 on: January 15, 2018, 08:36:19 AM »
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.

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.

meddoc

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #647 on: January 15, 2018, 11:13:09 AM »

...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.

El Cid

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #648 on: January 15, 2018, 12:12:21 PM »
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.

You might think that it is incorrect and you might be right, the Arctic is a mystery :).

However, as far as I remember, last summer's story of the arctic was exactly what I said: more open water during the previous freezing season led to more snowfalls in the Arctic, which created good insulation on the ice which made it very difficult to melt that ice during the summer. That is how we avoided new record lows last summer despite record ice extent/volume minimums during the 2016-17 winter season, after which many people thought that there would be a complete collapse.

That is why I believe that for the Arctic ice EU and USA snowcover does not matter much (although it does matter for NH winter weather),  what matters is how much snow is insulating the ice in the Arctic.

Gray-Wolf

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Re: The 2017/2018 freezing season
« Reply #649 on: January 15, 2018, 04:19:54 PM »
Last winter ( well early autumn?) saw W. Siberia receive it's winter total over the month of October. In the early noughties it was discovered that when a snow patch melts out it impacts up to 1,500km away so the snow over W.Siberia probably had a lot to do with the slow melt on the Atlantic side of the basin?
Not so this year.
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