By Steven Goddard
Break out the Speedos and Bikinis. Springtime has finally arrived in the Arctic!
Temperatures have risen about 15C, and are now averaging a balmy -15C (5F) north of latitude 80N – with sunshine 24 hours a day. Under those conditions, you can get frostbite and a tan at the same time.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
But despite the balmy weather, NORSEX ice area continues to run above the 1979-2006 mean – as it has for the entire month of April.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_area.png
Since the melt season started, the Arctic has lost about one million km2 of sea ice. Below is a composite graph showing all of the popular (NSIDC, JAXA, NORSEX, DMI) extent measurements, superimposed on the NSIDC mean and two standard deviation region. The thin blue line is NSIDC extent from 2009. Note that all measurements have been nudging up against the mean line – for the entire month of April.
Disclaimer: All maps below are taken from NSIDC maps, and modified by the “breathtakingly ignorant” writers at WUWT.
During the last three weeks ice has melted mainly at lower latitudes, as seen below in red. Areas in green have actually increased in extent, due to drift. Ice is probably still getting thicker in much of the Arctic, because temperatures remain well below freezing.
The map below shows changes over the past week.
And the map below shows changes since the same date in 2007. Green indicates ice growth.
The next map shows current areas of deficient ice (relative to the median) in red, and excess ice in green. The total amount of excess minus deficient ice is close to zero. In other words – Arctic ice extent is normal.
The Arctic Oscillation remains negative, so circulation is clockwise – as seen below in the buoy drift map. This pattern is keeping older, thicker ice from the Canadian side inside the Arctic Basin, and bodes well for another summer of increased ice thickness and extent – relative to the record melt of 2007.
http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/maps_daily_track-map.html
People counting on bad news from the Arctic to keep their agenda alive are staring at a long, (rhetorically) cold summer……. The good news is that they can keep raising the red flags about Montana glaciers, if the Arctic refuses to melt.
It has now been over 41 years since the New York Times headlined “Expert Says Arctic Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea.” triggering the Arctic Death Spiral. After 41 years of dangerous and increasing melt, ice area is again above normal.
My failure to understand this is surely a sign of “breathtaking ignorance.” But don’t call me Shirley.
Well, that’s good news for me.
Antarctic Sea Ice Extent and Area are both above average again:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png
And right now, despite all the gains in the Arctic Ice, the brutally cold winter, the unmasked METAR fubar of hottest ever months on record, the Goldman-Sachs stlye ClimateGate emails, Al Gores fading website rankings, the faked Hockey Sticks, etc….
Reid & Co. are shoving the Climate Bill onto the Senate floor just as fast as they can.
Excuse: They want to give the committees time to work out immigration.
Right. And this balmy El Nino has another Winter-type Low Pressure system over the top of California.
You keep showing that there is ice in the Baltic Sea south of the Danish islands. That is not and cannot be true at this time of year.
Great job Steve. Excellent maps! Very interesting.
By carefully ignoring all red areas, I believe I can, with genuine “breathtaking ignorance,” predict that at the current rate of growth ice will cover the earth by 2035… or was it 2350. Close enough.
In any case, if this trend continues it will be better for polar bears than for the people wearing polar bear suits.
Leif,
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_extent.png
Dear Shirley –
As Monsieur Sandler said over at Huffpo, “You are polluting the blogosphere.”
Can’t you understand that your problem is that you have failed to open your mind?
Who needs to look at 40-year averages when we all know that the Arctic is in a “DEATH SPIRAL”?
😉 😉 😉
I’m…breathless. LOL.
If you lot at WUWT are supposedly ‘breathtakingly ignorant’ then how dumb does that make most so-called mainstream ‘science journalists’ look?
Just an observation.
All temperatures released by government agencies out of the EU and America are now suspect. Totally compromised. Having said that, it does appear that it is all about current and wind as far as the Arctic is concerned presently. That minor temperature rises have little effect. Good call by A. Watts early on.
rbateman, I hear ya on the localized weather. It is still middle of winter temps and rain pattern currently. Lows in the 40’s and Highs in the 50’s with an inch of rain on any given day. I am planning a new trip to Sacratomato, to thaw out. I might have to become a seasonal coastal dweller. I am missing my valley heat this spring.
Normal! – yikes – scary stuff that.
My failure to understand this is surely a sign of “breathtaking ignorance.” But don’t call me Shirley.
….. Well, all together, that is obvious….;-)
It’s also interesting to compare the NSIDC map to that from IARC-JAXA:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/cgi-bin/seaice-monitor.cgi?lang=e
Quite a few differences between the two; no ice near Denmark and Hudson Bay appears to be breaking up.
And over the next few weeks, as the extent varies, I expect we’ll hear about every time the 2010 line intersects any other year’s line, as though it means anything concerning the ‘health’ of the Arctic ice.
Leif, Tell that to the NSIDC; Steve is just reporting what they’re saying.
If you have data that shows otherwise, I’m sure others will be interested.
I don’t know where nsdic has it’s informations from, but at present there IS no ice in the Danish waters. Honest.
Does this mean I can’t book a Holland America cruse through the Northwest Passage again this year?
Perhaps this call for a little humor or better yet song
From the late Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers, called Northwest Passage. (Rogers was killed in a 1983 aviation tragedy.) This is part of his take on it. just think of a standard sea chantey sung A cappella.
Northwest Passage.
“Ah! for just one time — I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line — through a land so wide and savage
And make a Northwest Passage, to the sea.
Westward from the Davis Straight ’tis there ’twas said to lie
The sea route to the Orient for which so many died;
Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones
And a long forgotten lonely cairn of stones.
Ah! for just one time — I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line — through a land so wide and savage
And make a Northwest Passage, to the sea.
Three centuries thereafter, I take passage over land
In the footsteps of brave Kelso, where his “sea of flowers” began
Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again
This tardiest explorer, driving hard across the plain….”
On the local news today, The following bit of really scarey information, “- (Reuters) – In what looks to be another sign the Arctic is heating up quickly, British explorers in Canada’s Far North reported on Tuesday that they had been hit by a three-minute rain shower over the weekend. The rain fell on the team’s ice base off Ellef Rignes island, about 3,900 km (2,420 miles) north of the Canadian capital, Ottawa. “It’s definitely a shocker … the general feeling within the polar community is that rainfall in the high Canadian Arctic in April is a freak event,” said Pen Hadow, the team’s expedition director.
“Scientists would tell us that we can expect increasingly to experience these sorts of outcomes as the climate warms,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview from London. The Arctic is heating up three times more quickly than the rest of the Earth. Scientists link the higher temperatures to the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming. Hadow said a Canadian scientific camp about 145 km west of the ice base had been hit by rain at the same time. The base off Elles Rignes is supplying a three-member team out on the ice another 1,100 km further north. The trio is studying the impact of increased carbon dioxide absorption by the sea, which could make the water more acidic. Experts say the thick multiyear ice covering the Arctic Ocean has effectively vanished, which could make it easier to open up polar shipping routes. U.S. data shows the 2009 ice cover was the third-lowest on record, after 2007 and 2008. ”
My goodness, do not these idiots read !. The ice has not vanished – as the nice graphic on this WUWT site shows, and as for acidic seawater – my mind boggles.
Leif and MB,
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
I’ve never been there so depend on our scientists for observations. Can you provide us with any kind of links or pictures to back that up or even better links to Scandinavian or Icelandic observation data/history??
Also, are you saying there is NEVER (or almost never) ice there historically this time of year or are you claiming that there could not be ice there this time of year in the last 1 or 5, 10 years??
Leif and MB.
you do realise that your statements falsify a lot of satellite data do you not??
Leif and mb – presumably you can look out the window and see there is no sea ice. So what the heck is NSDIC up to?
Can we trust ANYTHING these people put out?
Kuhnkat, here are some interesting webcam shots from the Arctic, courtesy of NOAA:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np.html
Be sure to look at the scary 2007 polar ice-cap melt! I don’t think we are going to see that repeated in 2010, but I could be wrong. It will depend upon winds and currents.
Nice webcam and weatherreport of Longyearbyen, Svalbard (Spitsbergen)
http://www.svein-nordahl.com/webcamlyb-01.htm
Still looks pretty cold to me.
Looks ‘average’ to me, but don’t call me Shirley.
Certainly not in the middle of any so-called “hockey stick” or any of that AGW nonsense.
But looking at the map, when all that open water between Greenland and Norway fills in with ice (if the sunspots stay non-existent), then wake me up for the movie, Ice Station Zebra.
Oops, that Alistair MacLean, not Shirley MacLaine.
Like I said, don’t call me Shirley.
Maybe the AGW scientists should audition for a three stooges movie re-make, I understand there’s a try-out for the role of Larry, Curly or Moe…
The title: The Three Stooges go to Copenhagen…
The caption to the first picture of this post reads:
“Climate change activists Lesley Butler and Rob Bell ‘sunbathe’ on the edge of a frozen fjord in the Norwegian Arctic town of Longyearbyen”
So the webcam I mentioned earlier is pretty much in the same place.