What the Buoys are telling

[woodstea]

Wow! I've been watching this daily, then I take a short vacation away from a computer and all hell breaks loose. Thanks to everyone for posting the pictures as these changes took place!

I notice that ITP89 has not reported status since 13:31 UTC today. I wonder if that's going to be the last one.

[RoxTheGeologist]

Wow... I didn't expect that ice to just disappear! It must have been extraordinarily thin.

[solartim27]

That's another gone away.  Looked like it might've got trapped and lingered for a while.
Edit:  Had to make it a gif, amazing what 8 hours will do:

[oren]

Simply amazing. I am in awe.

[Andreas T]

Wow... I didn't expect that ice to just disappear! It must have been extraordinarily thin.

some of that ice has disappeared from view but the amazement should not be so great.
The thickness of the ice is clearly uneven as can be seen by the varying hight above the water. The deformation soon after deployment formed some ridges and some cracks. Snowdrifts protected some areas more than others so that some areas were letting more sunlight enter the ice than others. Now places of strong bottom melt have melted through and given way and the floe is disintegrating.
There is too much cloud in yesterdays satellite images to see how the floe as a whole looks but I have pointed to some darker (thinner) areas visible from that altitude so I expect disintegration on a larger scale. As discussed elsewhere the increased mobility of the smaller pieces is likely to enhance melting even while temperatures (which have risen back to 0^o now) will drop as we move towards september.
Although  the thinning of the ice from below, which wasn't visible for a long while, has produced sudden results it is still a slow and gradual process.

[seaicesailor]

To note also that the ice in front that looks a separate floe (not the small one at the right rotating like crazy) is in reality part of the floe where the camera sits. It stays still in the pictures.
To me this was a nice demo of divergence, all the horizon clearing up and the buoys departing, rather than sudden melting, but it is just a point of view (literally speaking).

[epiphyte]

None of the ice around this buoy has had more than 5cm freeboard in weeks, and most of that is snow.

Poof.

[Jim Hunt]

And now this morning (UTC)

[epiphyte]

And now this morning (UTC)

Don't blink!

[sesyf]

Somehow looks similar to smaller scale stuff in local boat harbour - you see ice there and it's clearly changing color, thinning, there is some open water here and there, and when it all goes it disappears very rapidly, many times in a day or so (I'm usually working at boat every day in spring...). I'm sort of afraid that something similar in lafge scale could happen in the arctic...

[seaicesailor]

None of the ice around this buoy has had more than 5cm freeboard in weeks, and most of that is snow.

Poof.

There is no proof of this. The floe was breaking up, the buoy was going away, divergent drift. The ice must be out there, only out of the camera range. Did the buoys melt too?
This ice will probably survive a few days more.

[S.Pansa]

There is no proof of this. The floe was breaking up, the buoy was going away, divergent drift. The ice must be out there, only out of the camera range. Did the buoys melt too?
This ice will probably survive a few days more.

Hm? Drift yes - but why only divergent? Does the ice not just diverge from the center of the storm? So if it was only divergent dirft than the camera spot should have been right in the center of the cyclon, for all the time? Furthermore the camera / the ice flow isn't fixed so it could easily change it's position relative to the wind & flow directions, or couldn't it?.
I am sure I am missing something obvious here.

But to me it looks as if there was quite some melting going on there as well (see following pics)

[seaicesailor]

There is no proof of this. The floe was breaking up, the buoy was going away, divergent drift. The ice must be out there, only out of the camera range. Did the buoys melt too?
This ice will probably survive a few days more.

Hm? Drift yes - but why only divergent? Does the ice not just diverge from the center of the storm? So if it was only divergent dirft than the camera spot should have been right in the center of the cyclon, for all the time? Furthermore the camera / the ice flow isn't fixed so it could easily change it's position relative to the wind & flow directions, or couldn't it?.
I am sure I am missing something obvious here.

But to me it looks as if there was quite some melting going on there as well (see following pics)

Sure there is melt but not over an hour disappearance  :-)
 I don't question the ice is thin but still...
I meant divergent because other times you can see the same floes close to each other for days. The Mr. Wilson scene was pretty impressive

[Andreas T]

S. Pansa: Those images illustrate nicely why it is not plausible to think that the "disappeared" ice has melted in situ. The floe edge near the camera has not changed in the three hours (got a bit closer  this morning) and the part which is seen in the centre also has changed very little. What has changed a lot is ice that was in the distance where the edge of the floe was until yessterday morning. some of this had already moved earlier.
So if melting is so strong that wholle sections of the floe dissolve in an hour, why is there no sign of it on the ice which still sits in front of the camera?
If you watch worldview images of icefloes clicking back and forth through several days or watch Jay W's animations or the Obuoy videos, there are penty of examples where ice moves in a localized way  diverging in one place and converging elsewhere, your point about the storm centre is a very poorly constructed strawman. The satellite images I copied upthread have shown a large expanse (in terms of the camera view) of open water next to the floe. This is what we are looking at now. if the floe turns or the wind changes I expect some of that loose ice to come into view again. It is of course melting in the meantime and will eventually be gone. How soon and whether some ice in that vicinity will last until it gets too cold for further melting remains to be seen.

[ghoti]

We'll have to wait for the movie update but previous Obuoy melt videos have shown lots of spinning and rapidly changing views. The azimuth data for this one however suggests it has only rotated around a third of a circle. We'll see eventually.

[S.Pansa]

So if melting is so strong that wholle sections of the floe dissolve in an hour, why is there no sign of it on the ice which still sits in front of the camera?

Well, it might be that I need some new glasses - but I can definetely see some changes to the flow edges from melting.
Some near the camera in circle 1  - and even more in the circle number 2. To my eyes this looks like the same floe but with quite different edges 4 hours later.

[abraca]

Some near the camera in circle 1  - and even more in the circle number 2. To my eyes this looks like the same floe but with quite different edges 4 hours later.

Hello, this is my first post here. I'd like to present you a 27h difference between buoy 14 images. The floe which the camera is on is really stationary in the images (you can compare these two little highs on the upper left of the floe), so any changes I'd consider a result of melting. The image contains only parts that "disappeared" in 27h:

[Lord M Vader]

According to Brian Brettschneider via Twitter, a bouy measured a MSLP at 966,5 hpa during this GAC. See the tweet at: https://twitter.com/Climatologist49/status/765599419999760384

[magnamentis]

That's another gone away.  Looked like it might've got trapped and lingered for a while.
Edit:  Had to make it a gif, amazing what 8 hours will do:

even though i had to stop stressing the topic, here is where everyone can see what i and a few were talking about all year "poof" due to thinness and/or fragmentation. it was obvious IMO but a first of the kind on that scale this year which made it the old battle between the open eye and "costumbres"

say, if we had 20 buoys this year ( hypothetically ) we would have seen that between 15 and 18 times IMO in different locations.

[woodstea]

No update from O-Buoy 14 since about 1600 UTC or so. Hmm...

I do notice that ITP89 reported status earlier today. I had thought it was finished some days ago.

[woodstea]

False alarm -- data and camera are up to date now from O-Buoy 14.

[Andreas T]

Apologies to S. Pansa, if that was the melting you were talking about, I agree. From the way you seemed to disagree with seaicesailor, I thought you were making the same mistake as abraca and were attributing all changes to melt.

There are still some observations to be made, in the image posted by woodstea there are small fragments of ice visible floating next to the floe edge. I wonder whether this is a close up view of what Tor spotted some time ago in a photo from Healy

From the Arctic West Summer 2016 "Weekly Blog", specifically, from the July 24 post:
.......

A recent Healy webcam shows some totally wet ice on the edge of a large floe: [edit: click for larger image]

See my June 25 post (above) for various Healy-related links.

This could be a sign of the kind of disintegration seen in the still from Obuoy12 last year in the bottom right corner. This is from enlarging brine inclusions melting holes out of the ice. Sea ice is more porous than ice cubes from the freezer.

Another thing visible in the latest photo (apart from reappearance of ice, is foop the reverse of poof?  ) is the ice edge lifting slightly showing undercutting by water melting ice which has stopped melting on the top surface. It also shows tilting of the flow, seen by change of the "roll" parameter, a sign that the buoy now sits on a much smaller floe than that seen in the satellite images I posted earlier.

[ghoti]

Also note that the mast in the lower right of the photo is sitting higher than it was in the photo from 4 hours earlier (above). It might be close to floating free and away from the floe the camera is on.

[solartim27]

Also note that the mast in the lower right of the photo is sitting higher than it was in the photo from 4 hours earlier (above). It might be close to floating free and away from the floe the camera is on.

The horizon changed as well, so 14 has moved

[budmantis]

That's another gone away.  Looked like it might've got trapped and lingered for a while.
Edit:  Had to make it a gif, amazing what 8 hours will do:

even though i had to stop stressing the topic, here is where everyone can see what i and a few were talking about all year "poof" due to thinness and/or fragmentation. it was obvious IMO but a first of the kind on that scale this year which made it the old battle between the open eye and "costumbres"

I agree the ice is thin and fragmented, but whether the ice goes "poof" depends in large part on weather conditions. Unless you have ESP you had no way of knowing in advance that there would be a GAC2016. There's no doubt that the melt this summer would have brought a new record had the weather conditions been like they were during the summer of 2007.

[ghoti]

The Obuoy 14 movie has been updated!

http://obuoy.datatransport.org/monitor#buoy14/movie

Jump to the last 30 seconds to see the action of the last 3 days or so.

[Buddy]

Jump to the last 30 seconds to see the action of the last 3 days or so.

Abra cadabra......POOF.

[woodstea]

O-Buoy 14 lost another friend.

[Darvince]

I see the waves are starting to pick up around OBuoy-14 as the ice floes are melted away..

[jplotinus]

The coordinates from Obouy 14 video are problematic, I think. The ' and the " (min, sec) designation is reversed; and the location on google maps places it in the Laptev. That can't be right, can it?

[Andreas T]

the longitude is west not east which puts it in the Beaufort. See buoy track in "overview" which can be zoomed. Until very recently ITP89 could be used for location http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=148096 click on: "The raw GPS buoy location data are available in an ASCII file: itp89rawlocs.dat"
those are hourly lat/lon positions by numbered day of year, today is 231.

[Jim Hunt]

O-Buoy 14 now seems to be floating free on a choppy sea:

[solartim27]

Any one prone to sea sickness?  Now would these be defined as swells or waves?

[Tor Bejnar]

How about
1) salt spray on the lens and
2) as the buoy is floating 'free', what is in front of the camera each hour changes readily.

[woodstea]

Looking at the GPS tab on the O-Buoy 14 page I see that the buoy has been moving eastward fairly rapidly -- perhaps four to five degrees in the last week. Winds should continue to push it eastward for at least the next several days, so I expect that it will be moving into an area of more compacted ice closer to the McClure Strait.

[magnamentis]

Looking at the GPS tab on the O-Buoy 14 page I see that the buoy has been moving eastward fairly rapidly -- perhaps four to five degrees in the last week. Winds should continue to push it eastward for at least the next several days, so I expect that it will be moving into an area of more compacted ice closer to the McClure Strait.

except that upon arrival that ice could be gone :-)

[BornFromTheVoid]

Could be wet snow on the lens too. It was snowing shortly before the images started going blurry.

[Tor Bejnar]

Could be wet snow on the lens too. It was snowing shortly before the images started going blurry.

Ahhh. That would make sense, too.

[woodstea]

Looking at the GPS tab on the O-Buoy 14 page I see that the buoy has been moving eastward fairly rapidly -- perhaps four to five degrees in the last week. Winds should continue to push it eastward for at least the next several days, so I expect that it will be moving into an area of more compacted ice closer to the McClure Strait.

except that upon arrival that ice could be gone :-)

True enough. My thinking is that on the east side of this area the ice is running up against Banks and Prince Patrick Islands, which would help create a compacted mass that would be more persistent. I'm a little worried that the buoy is going to be beaten to a pulp in the midst of that.

[magnamentis]

sure, i forgot to explicitly mention that i concur, that's what the smily should indicate, sorry.

i totally agree with everything, just that the possibility is there. if those storms in successive order
become all true we're in for a historical event even more than we already are. i as well predict a very late low due to all the heat in the waters that will cover that much of area, even though that won't happen if the weather around mid september will be calm.

further i believe that these storms are by no means a coincidence. we have very cold icy area and very warm seas with humid air surrounding it which to my understanding is something like generator for stormy weather, just was not happening that high up north when that area was more or less solidly covered. of course the weathermen around here can tell better then me, just brainstorming a bit.

[Andreas T]

this looks like ice which has been in a mincer. I hope we get a satellite view of this area soon to see how much of the ice is in that state.

[solartim27]

A half hour update, a lot has changed in that time, is it spinning around?

[seaicesailor]

Boom

[woodstea]

If the numbers on the azimuth graph (GPS tab) mean the direction that the camera or some other instrument is facing, I'd say no. They're changing but not rapidly.

My guess is that wind and wave activity are responsible.

[Andreas T]

A half hour update, a lot has changed in that time, is it spinning around?

not according to azimuth data and sun direction on ice floes
Note how roll shows freedom of movement by the buoy

[Watching_from_Canberra]

Camera seems to be updating every 15 minutes now?

I wonder why azimuth would be relatively stable?  I would have thought if it's floating free it would spin around freely.  Maybe a weather vane effect?

[Darvince]

I wonder why azimuth would be relatively stable?  I would have thought if it's floating free it would spin around freely.  Maybe a weather vane effect?

I would think that they probably designed it with the idea that it would eventually break free from the ice and so designed it so that it will not rotate freely.

[solartim27]

Who built the snow fort in the third image?  5 hour time span.

On the GPS page the azimuth reading is stepping around quite a bit recently, so there is some rotation.  I imagine it's logged hourly, or even every 2, hard to say from the graph, and I figure most rotation is from ice impact.

I can't get over the change from open seas to the middle of a pretty vast, although chunky, field of ice.  I wonder which is moving faster, the recent speeds of 1 m/s is just above 2 miles per hour
Edit:  Had to do a gif

[ghoti]

The movie has been updated again and it shows lots of rotation. The movie frames are tough to step through using the slider but the compass shows the camera facing everything from east through north.

The dramatic changes in ice concentration in the images are due to changes in the camera orientation. There is open water to one side and crushed ice to the other.

[Andreas T]

I marked an approximate position with a circle which is unfortunately under clouds, but the pattern of nearby areas gives a clue to what we can expect surrounding Obuoy14. The wind is "herding" broken up icefloes into these tendrils of brash ice. Something which frequently can be seen where wind is blowing ice away from an ice edge. Here it was an area of loose pack which has seen melting, the ice concentration has gone down without noticeable increase in area further east, which shows that pattern. The alternating patches of open water and bands of concentrated ice would have the grinding effect we see in the images I think where ice is crushed against ice despite an overall low concentration.