Barkin’s attention has drifted towards the hydrosphere & the atmosphere in his more recent work. I’m hopeful that he will carry on with that theme, but I suspect he is running into some very formidable mathematics as he strives to overcome unrealistic conventional assumptions. I need to find some time to go back through his papers and make some notes — if/when I manage to do so I’ll probably share here at WUWT.

Thanks for sharing the notes Chris. I will be pondering your suggestions about sea ice. I look forward to exchanging further notes in future.

Sidorenkov’s book:

http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-3527408754.html

The price is a bit steep for me, but I will order it from my public library.
Another book to read for a historic view from 30 years ago might be:

The Earth’s Variable Rotation: Geophysical Causes and Consequences By Kurt Lambeck

As for Barkin, I’ve read “UNITY OF RHYTHMS OF EARTH ROTATION, GRAVITY AND GEODESY VARIATIONS: THEIR NATURE AND INVERSION PHENOMENON”, he has papers on many aspects of planetology – have you any specific recommendations?

In the few works I have read, neither of the above authors seem to count sea ice, as opposed to the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet variations, as being a major player in the shift of rigid mass from pole to pole and thus the inertia of the rotating earth. See fig 1 here:

http://syrte.obspm.fr/journees2004/PDF/Sidorenkov.pdf

The difference between the observed and theoretical curves again shows the pattern we discussed above.

There is however a move away from core-mantle-lithosphere differentials (which are not directly measurable) to surface hydrosphere-cryosphere-atmosphere interactions (which are becoming more so) affecting the rate of the earth’s rotation.

Walter Munk has long commented on the role of the moon in tidal friction and braking of the earth’s rotation, and has also reversed the timeline back to when the moon was orbiting as close to the earth as physically possible, near the Roche limit, shortly after the moon’s formation. The tides would have been formidable, and the heating effect of the tidal friction is an excellent replacement for the lack of insolation from a “dim young sun”. See:

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1968QJRAS…9..352M&data_type=PDF_HIGH&whole_paper=YES&type=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf

However there is something wrong with the calculation – about 2billion years of history is missing. Could that be accounted for by losing a liquid ocean to either a vapour hothouse or Ice snowball?

Enough of gravity for now.

One more effect of sea-ice caps is the temperature of the overlying atmosphere, and thus the composition of gases, and the overall density of the polar atmosphere. Under the coldest conditions over the Antarctic (and probably over the Arctic in winter), there is almost no water vapour nor carbon dioxide – no greenhouse effect, and there is also the ozone hole, so there is effectively no restriction on OLR, and no heating of the atmosphere by infrared.

The ozone hole also represents a local increase in TSI, in the form of short-wave UV reaching the surface. This may just be reflected by snow and ice, but must be absorbed by the southern ocean.

Chris Knight ” http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU2008/10515/EGU2008-A-10515.pdf?PHPSESSID= “

Interesting notes in there about LOD-AAM contrast patterns …more questions arise. I’ve never calculated absolute AAM from scratch, but if non-directional moduli are involved, that could be a clue about the El Nino vs. La Nina difference.

Have you read Barkin? Please update us if/when you find the new Sidorenkov work – thanks.

Read all about it!

I believe Nikolay Sidorenkov’s monograph “The Interaction Between Earth’s Rotation and Geophysical Processes” has now been published. I must order a copy from the library.

If his claims are confirmed, I see a Nobel Prize on the horizon. Prediction using the ACI (shifts in atmospheric circulation from zonal to meridional patterns) for cyclicity in Ocean fish stocks in Russia have been published. There is obviously some rivalry here: Klyashtorin and Lyubushin do not credit Sidorenkov with a reference:

http://alexeylyubushin.narod.ru/Climate_Changes_and_Fish_Productivity.pdf

Just thinking outside the box, I note that your observation that LOD leads AAM by one month was identified previously by Lehmann et al. (2008)

http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGU2008/10515/EGU2008-A-10515.pdf?PHPSESSID=

What if LOD lags AAM by eleven months?

Based on your comments, I suspect you may find the following papers interesting:

Sidorenkov, N.S. (2005). Physics of the Earth’s rotation instabilities. Astronomical and Astrophysical Transactions 24(5), 425-439.
http://images.astronet.ru/pubd/2008/09/28/0001230882/425-439.pdf

Zhou, Y.H.; Yan, X.H.; Ding, X.L.; Liao, X.H.; Zheng, D.W.; Liu, W.T.; Pan, J.Y.; Fang, M.Q.; & He, M.X. (2004). Excitation of non-atmospheric polar motion by the migration of the Pacific Warm Pool. Journal of Geodesy 78, 109-113.
http://202.127.29.4/yhzhou/ZhouYH_2004JG_PM_Warmpool.pdf
http://www.shao.ac.cn/yhzhou/ZhouYH_2004JG_PM_Warmpool.pdf (alternate)
[I think you'll recognize the pattern in the graph at the top of the 3rd page.]

Yan, X.H.; Zhou, Y.H.; Pan, J.Y.; Zheng, D.W.; Fang, M.Q.; Liao, X.H.; He, M.X.; Liu, W.T.; & Ding, X.L. (2002). Pacific Warm Pool Excitation, Earth Rotation and El Nino Southern Oscillations. Geophysical Research Letters 29, 15685-15690.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002GeoRL..29u..27Y

Also, see the works of Yu.V. Barkin.

Most of the seasonal (pattern) and intraseasonal (noise) (as remarked in the Zhou et al paper on LOD, AAM and ENSO you quoted in an earlier post) is said there to be due to atmospheric interaction with the “solid earth” – The definition of which might include 100% sea ice, but probably not 15% concentration used for sea ice extent data.

On the other hand, even loosely packed ice at the poles is different from melted ice or water vapour in terms of its effect on the total angular momentum of the earth. The temperature of, and the latitude where the water is massed is also important regarding the velocity of the earth’s rotation.

The question is whether the ENSO and sea ice are the spinning ballerina’s arms, or is she dancing to the music of the spheres? (Or both?)

Chris, I dug around to find some Sea Ice time series. When I compare them with LOD I find that generally LOD leads by about a month. The factors affecting LOD (e.g. AAM) appear to go beyond just sea ice. This exchange has been helpful in sharpening holistic perception and developing new questions.

-
Polar Sea Ice Data:
http://polynya.gsfc.nasa.gov/seaice_datasets.html

Thanks for the notes – in particular the note about southern ice.

Chris Knight (14:33:28) “all this seasonal signal disappears when the anomalies are plotted”

mostly true, but not exactly – (there are assumptions built in, such as cyclostationarity and a lack of shared-variance with possibly-nonstationary & conditionally-periodic temporal modes – (hence, for example, the seasonal patterns one observes in anomaly-map videos))

The extreme variability is over land. This relates to water’s high heat-capacity (& thus relative temperature stability). A coastal location is (generally) cool in summer & warm in winter relative to a continental location (i.e. a place inland). NH has a lot of continental monitoring stations (with high variability, particularly in winter) contributing not only to the global average, but also (via circulation) to NH SSTs (which influence NH coastal sites). Keep in mind that Arctic ice works like a continent in this conceptual framework. (During the “big warming” at Spitsbergen ~1920-1940 there was less ice and hence the winters were more maritime and less continental — such dynamics are a huge factor in averages — Arctic ice is the ’shape-shifting continent’.)

Looking at the seasonal variation element in the length of day (LOD) analyses, and the global sea ice record at Cryosphere Today, gives the answer to the graph shape.

I guess the annual shape (big trough, peak, small trough, peak) is not due to temperature variation between north and south, so much as area of ocean exposed by melting ice, which then gains a monthly SST value, and contributes to the long term mean. There is much more southern sea ice than northern to disappear, leaving a large area of cool ocean.

What used to be persistent Arctic ice is now in a grey area as far as gridded temperatures are now concerned – it used to be perhaps thought of as land, and now it is sea, as Paul says – “a shape-shifting continent”, or alternatively, a shape shifting ocean.

Of course, all this seasonal signal disappears when the anomalies are plotted, only the trend and noise remains. The trend will of course change slope when the last few years of low northern sea ice cover SST measurements get included in the comparison baseline period, unless there is a convenient reason to “correct” for diminishing Arctic summertime ice cover.

Thanks for that link Bob – found this:

Wang, C.; Lee, S.-K.; & Mechoso, C.R. (2009). Inter-hemispheric influence of the Atlantic warm pool on the Southeastern Pacific. Journal of Climate, in press.
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/docs/Revision_Wang_etal_2009.pdf

“[...] the effect of the anomalous AWP is to strengthen the regional Hadley-type circulation from the AWP region to the SEP [...] may play a role in the initiation of a cool phase of ENSO.”

“Almost of all state-of-the-art coupled ocean-atmosphere models exhibit serious errors in the form of a severe warm bias in simulated SSTs over the SEP [...] Many state-of-the-art climate models suffer from serious climate drift in the annual cycle of atmosphere-ocean processes in the AWP region.”

There is no distinct pattern of warming in either graph but the average in the second graph is significantly (?) higher than in the first. Hence pointing to a step change in 1997/8 rather than to a pattern of consistent warming over the period 1981to 2009.