As many readers know, the predictions for record low sea ice minimums in 2008 were not met, and 2008 ended up about 9% higher than in 2007 at the end of the season. See the report here.
Now in looking at AMSR-E satellite data, the red line on the graph below, one can see that the recovery is at a significantly faster rate than in recent years.
Click for larger image
I’m not one to read much into this, as to do so would be to make the same mistake as was done earlier this year when the NSIDC melt trend led one researcher there to conclude that we’d see an “ice free north pole”.
This graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, I published with annotations on July 14th 2008, which was oft cited back in early June with the phrase “if this trend continues…”.
Image from July 14th, 2008. Click for larger image – annotation added
So we will watch and wait to see if the current recovery continues at the same trend as shown by AMSR-E satellite data today, or gets softened. It is rather interesting to see this increased ice extent increase in September when both UAH and GISS reported warmer global temperature anomalies, including the northern hemisphere, for September.
h/t to Magnus
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It will be days before the main stream media reports this, if ever. Happy for the Polar Bears!
[…] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/09/sea-ice-extent-recovering-quickly […]
what is interesting is the steep shape of the 2008 curve compared to the other years which are more wide in form. Can it keep up this path I wonder?
Watching ice melt was fun. Watching it re-freeze has to be equally fun.
So, I’ve invited people to place bets about the value of the Nov1-7, 2008 average in comments in this post. The winner gets brownies (provided they live in the lower 48. Other rules apply.)
The baby ice is making a rapid comeback. Although the extent of sea ice did plunge to quite a low level it did so much later than last year is is recovering much earlier. So the open water area-days by the end of the year will be significantly lower.
You know, it just occured to me to flip the graph upside down. I do believe that would pretty well match up with the way sea water warms during the summer in the north. Having spent much of my teen summers at Misquamicut and Watch Hill Rhode Island, I can tell you that the water there is always warmest in late August and September. Perhaps that is the reason the sea ice is at it’s lowest in those months. Warmer water, less ice.
yes you are right, the sea ice is growing faster than I haver ever seen. From what I can see now, looks like we are gonna have a real tough artic winter
The Arctic is losing heat very efficiently.
Think about what is occurring – massive amounts of water are changing over to ice by losing heat to the air and by radiation – more heat per unit of mass of water than that required to heat the water to near boiling.
I wonder what the theoretical highest slope of that curve could be?
Speaking of ice… Montana may be in for a pretty good snow storm:
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/warnings.php?wfo=byz&zone=MTZ032&pil=XXXWSWBYZ&productType=Winter+Storm+Watch
Well, if it keeps going at this rate it will have fully recovered in early November. Then it can spread over Canada and Siberia… 🙂
Pure speculation.
@Austin.
If the Arctic is losing heat – does that heat pass through the troposphere on the way out… hence recent satellite measures being higher for September?
WRT the MSM: My guess would be that it will never be reported, except in the context of “Man made CO2 induced Global Chaos has caused the Arctic ice to grow catastrophically!!! – Penguins and Polar Bears starve as the ice freezes faster than they can move!!! – CO2 causes FREAK ice at North Pole!!! – Scary ice at North Pole indicates CO2 Tipping point is imminent… mandatory shutdown of COAL is now necessary!!!…:
etc, etc,…
From your animation last week
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/03/winds-are-dominant-cause-of-greenland-and-west-antarctic-ice-sheet-losses/
it seems apparent that most of the oldest multi-year ice is lost when it gets pushed southward along the east coast of Greenland. I believe that NSIDC also said that the amount of first year ice that survived this year’s melt was a record high amount. This should help to begin to replenish, over the next few years, multi-year ice, assuming this trend persists. The current NSIDC graph is also showing rapid increase in sea ice extent. Should be interesting to see how this year’s freeze compares to last year’s event.
There’s almost more activity and changes apparent in the Arctic than on the sun’s surface.
Given the ice build-up, has anyone heard how that band/gaggle of British artists is making out on their quest to see the melting Arctic? It seems to me they should be well on their way to Northern Greenland by now.
Is the steep rise an indicator of the 12 month plus lag between ENSO events and peak Arctic response? It would be tough to tell with all the other factors that impact the Arctic.
I think the large summer melting this year was due to record thin ice from the summer 2007 (*), but now we are in a cooling phase where we had 6 year record in large Arctic ice extent between late January and May. I guess we’ll not have a much warmer earth within a year, and thus baby ice will recover toward 1979-2000 average extent.
Poor media… oh not!
–
(*) Not a 1000 year old record, but since 1979 and quite likely since the 16th or 15th century…(?)
I suspect that the MSM is going to stop calling for coal-fired power plants to be shut down as soon as it is realized how bad this Northern winter is likely to be.
Last winter/spring the ice coverage was the second highest (or so) in the past 10 years. The rapid melting was apparently due to the thin ice. But apparently all that thin ice has not melted this year. I guess this is how the ice coverage get’s bigger every year!
The extend of the recovery is better visualized on this graph of post 117:
http://solarcycle24com.proboards106.com/index.cgi?board=globalwarming&action=display&thread=12&page=13#2373
It shows essentially the first derivative where you can see the minimum and the recent recovery.
Looking at the very cold NCEP forecast for the next two weeks, it is safe to expect that the rapid pace of ice growth will be maintained.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp2.html
O/T
Speaking of hockey sticks…
Looks like WUWT had a very good day yesterday, trafficwise, at least according to quantcast:
http://www.quantcast.com/profile/traffic-compare?domain0=realclimate.org&domain1=wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com&domain2=wattsupwiththat.com&domain3=climatecrisis.net&domain4=
The graph shows similar behavior in the other traces, i.e. a “rapid” increase in October and then a shoulder in early November followed by a lower growth rate into December. But then again I maybe the only one that is seeing this.
@Leon:
At first I wondered if Mann was working at Quantcast, but then I saw that Slashdot picked up the Sudan Asteroid post and has referred about 8K page views since yesterday.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/08/1829240
Global warming produces record sea ice increase.
This just demonstrates how climate is such a complex matter that only peer-reviewed and licensed climatologists and climate modellers can know the truth; all others are mere mortals who live in the ignorance of their own, personal, evidence and reason space, rather than within the comprehension of the great truth.
Sorry for the rhetorical sarcasm, but I am really, really, getting pissed-off by all this global warming crap which is not at all self-evident, or evident to the populace at large. The disconenct between the elite and the “elited” is approaching Tsarist proportions.
Looks like the “experts” were wrong about the “newer”, “thinner” ice melting more quickly than the “older”, “thicker” ice. The statement below from NSIDC is very profound……it states that the “newer”, “thinner” ice didn’t melt as quickly as expected because it has been colder this year. And to think that I couldn’t figure that one out by myself……I’m not even a “climatologist”……Wow, maybe I should be eligible for a Nobel Prize.
High retention of first-year ice
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the 2008 melt season was the higher-than-average retention of first-year sea ice (see earlier entries, including April 7). Relatively thin first-year ice is more prone to melting out completely than older, thicker ice. However, more of this year’s first-year ice survived the melt season than is typical. Sea ice age maps from Sheldon Drobot, our colleague at the University of Colorado at Boulder, show that much more first-year ice survived in 2008 than in 2007. This is one of the reasons that 2008 did not break last year’s record-low minimum.
REYKJAVIK, Iceland – Iceland suspended trading on its stock exchange for two days and took control of the country’s largest bank — the third to be placed under its protective umbrella — on Thursday as it grappled with a banking crisis that is threatening to engulf the entire country.
See, Global Warming has caused Iceland to almost go under…..can we bail them out?
Sorry, cut off the last bit of my comment accidentally. The NSIDC statement continued with this pearl of wisdom.
“One cause of the high first-year ice survival rate was that this summer was cooler than in 2007. Lower temperatures slowed the melt rate in the early part of the season. While conditions in August favored rapid ice loss, they were not enough to make up for this early-season “cushion.”