By Steve Goddard
Last month, a number of well known web sites and commenters were getting themselves worked up with comments like “Arctic ice dropping at the fastest rate in history” and “Arctic ice is dropping like a rock.” I advised repeatedly that prior to July, looking at the extent graphs is pointless.
July is here now, and the rate of ice extent decline has dropped dramatically over the last week. To put this in perspective, according to JAXA data, the June 28-July 4 rate is -53361 km²/day. In 2007 during the same period, ice was lost at -123104 km²/day.
In other words, 2007 was losing ice 2.31X faster than 2010.
This can be seen most dramatically in the DMI graph, which measures only higher concentration ice (30%.)
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Close up image below.
So why the dramatic difference in slope? One reason is that sea ice concentration is at the highest level in the satellite record. Compare below vs. 1980, when ice was considered very “healthy.” Current concentration is considerably higher.
Ice concentration is particularly important this time of year because the sun is relatively high in the sky. When the ice concentration is low, sun shines into the water in “Swiss Cheese” holes around the ice, warms it, and corrodes away the edges of the ice. This year, ice concentration has been close to 100% in most of the Arctic – which means very little sunlight is reaching the water in the Arctic Basin. As a result melt will occur more slowly than during low concentration years.
The videos below represent an exaggerated visualization of the process. The first video shows an idealized view of future Arctic Basin melt during 2010 – i.e. a single large circle of ice surrounded by water.
The next video shows what happens in years when the concentration is lower. The sun is heating the water between circles, and because of the smaller circles a much larger surface area of ice is exposed to warm water. Warmer water and more exposed surface area causes melt to proceed faster.
Conclusion : Cold temperatures, cloudy skies, favorable winds and high concentration ice – all point to continued slow melt over the next few days.
It won’t go below 2008 even 2006,then we watch the cooling..
Got Coal?…
” This year, ice concentration has been close to 100% in most of the Arctic – which means very little sunlight is reaching the water in the Arctic Basin”
ok, this can’t be good news for the Arctic krill
Lest all wait until July 25th. Then those who made predictions can fess up to being wrong, or crow about their predictive prowess. Until then (and maybe not until the middle of August) it’s all unknown. Gotta learn to live with a lot of that. I do, however enjoy watching the guessing and the angst. Sort of like watching a bad horror film from 1952.
Thanks for the oversimplified videos. It made the idea clear.
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Either those who are continually pushing the PIOMAS graph are pushing a wrong interpretation of it or the PIOMAS graph is just flatly wrong.
“All they have is talking points that the commentators regurgitate from the teleprompter written by their corporate overlords.”
The corporate overlords write this stuff? They surely aren’t dumb enough to make as many mistakes as there are in the news scripts. No, I think it’s just low-paid script writers with no incentive to be accurate. How else could both CNN and CBS (Katy Couric’s show, no less) be reporting that the A Whale can gobble up 21,000,000 gallons (500,000 bbls) of oil a day. Anyone with common sense would know that number is wrong. It implies that one ship could clean all the oil off of the Gulf’s surface in less than two weeks. But no, they just blindly use what they read somewhere and compound the errors.
6/18/10 PIOMAS graph, divergent to reality:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
PIOMAS web site:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/IceVolume.php
REPLY: Gee. That looks like a sensor failure more than a real drop. I’ve identified this before, but was told it “wasn’t worth blogging about” by NSIDC. – A
Amino Acids in Meteorites
The PIOMAS forecasts are already breaking down badly in the Beaufort Sea, Greenland Sea, Baffin Bay, and several other regions of the Arctic.
If PIPS is correct, PIOMAS is looking like a major train wreck, similar to last year.
>i>”That looks like a sensor failure,,,:
It’s dead Jim.
Looking at how thick the ice is – and the rate of decline, it looks like we`ve almost reached minimum. I wonder how the lying MFM (MSM) will report it, if we reach minimum earlier than ever – of course, they`ll ignore it.
REPLY: Gee. That looks like a sensor failure more than a real drop. I’ve identified this before, but was told it “wasn’t worth blogging about” by NSIDC. – A
This is their graph from 5/24/10. It began a quick drop then.
http://climateinsiders.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/bpiomasicevolumeanomalycurrent.png?w=510&h=367
They had 25 days between graphs to catch that kind of thing. Maybe their computer model is just wrong? Or you could be right, it’s a sensor.
Steve,
Just a question: Why would you use the concentration data you did, and not this graph:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
or this graph:
http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_nic.png
or even, (god forgive me for putting this out there) this PIP 2.0 concentraion image:
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/icon.html.
Each of them shows something far different than you are describing.
Just curious about your motivations for using the low res and low fidelity image you did, as such an image will seriously detract from your ability to see the kind of details you need to state the sort thing you’re stating about concentration.
Also, the high resolution satellite images don’t support your contention:
http://ice-map.appspot.com/?map=Arc&sat=aqa&lvl=6&lat=74.571668&lon=-139.120367&yir=2010&day=186
It seems to show quite a bit of “un” concentrated ice right smack dab in the middle of the Beaufort Sea and heading over into the Arctic Basin itself. Exactly where the above references high resolution concentration maps says it is, even though your low resolution map shows a much smaller area of low concentration, I happen to trust the satellite images and the higher resolution maps a bit more.
Having said all this, I would agree that winds over the past few days have favored pushing the ice together a bit more, but the concentration is not nearly as high as you are painting it to be, and you and I both know that winds change very quickly, and the forecast for SST’s and air temps over the Arctic for the rest of the melt season would favor continued higher melt rates, despite this slow down this week.
http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/maproom/.Global/.Forecasts/.Temperature/
http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/maproom/.Global/.Forecasts/.SST/index.html?map.S.plotvalue=0000+1+Jun+2010&map.L.plotvalue=2.5&map.Y.units=degree_north&map.Y.plotlast=89.25845N&map.url=+SOURCES+.IRI+.FD+.SSTA_FCST+.ASST+.version02+S+%280000+1+Jun+2010%29+VALUE+a%3A+.sst+L+3+0.0+runningAverage+%2Fpointwidth+3+def+L+%282.5%29+VALUE+temp_anomaly_colors_gcm+%3Aa%3A+.T+L+3+0.0+runningAverage+%2Fpointwidth+3+def+L+%282.5%29+VALUE+%3Aa+X+Y+fig-+colors+%7C+thinzero+contours+thinnish+grey+land+plotlabel+-fig&map.domain=+%7B+%2FL+2.5+plotvalue+%2FS+605.+plotvalue+%7D&map.domainparam=+%2Fplotaxislength+600+psdef+%2Fplotborder+72+psdef&map.zoom=Click+for+Info&map.Y.plotfirst=89.25845S&map.X.plotfirst=30E&map.X.units=degree_east&map.X.modulus=360&map.X.plotlast=30E&redraw.x=8&redraw.y=20
But we’ll just have to wait a few more weeks to see if your high concentration projection matches your 40% increase in thickness projection as well, giving us the higher summer minimum than what I have been forecasting. (albeit either of our forecasts show there has been no “recovery” in Arctic Sea ice, and the 2008-2009 upward trend will have been broken.
Anyone wishing to guess what the final ice extent will be is welcome to come to the Lounge and put their favorite number forward. We don’t have many skeptical entries this year, so come on down.
Just for fun how about a competition to predict lowest ice extent this year with a special mention of the person getting closest to the actual per the above JAXA graph.
There would need to be a deadline for posting.
Anthony/Mods – any chance of a “minimum ice extent prediction post 2010” along these lines?
I don’t mean to rock the boat, but why wasn’t the concentration just as high previously that led to the large drop. I would think it should be the same for both, more or less.
Throughout April, May and the first 4 weeks(!) of June the 2010 decline was as fast or faster that 2007, now for a period of a week we’ve seen the 2010 rate of decline as slower than for the same period in 2007.
Better write a blog post about it.
Gee. That looks like a sensor failure more than a real drop.
Where have we seen that movie before?
intrade.com is still taking bets on min arctic ice extent. I’m looking for some of that R. Gates money. The bet is still running about 50:50. Is there a more active site? It’s very surprising to me that more people aren’t betting on very little ice, given the rhetoric that’s out there.
R. Gates says:
July 5, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Do you even bother to look at the images you refer to??
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/archive/retrievepic.html?filetype=Concentration&year=2010&month=7&day=3
The forecast for July 3rd was buried by the microwave imager’s real data.
You have convinced me that Steve is right, and the forecast model is lost.
5 July: UK Tele: Gerald Warner: As third Climategate report is published, even computer models turn against AGW alarmists
Many of you, I know, will find it almost impossible to sleep tonight: the climactic excitement attending tomorrow’s publication of Sir Muir Russell’s vindication – sorry, investigation – of the scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit is too pulse-quickening…
But the most startling development was partially revealed at the tail-end of Hulme’s remarks, when he warned that greater openness would not ensure an easier time for climate scientists in future. He said this was because a new generation of more sophisticated computer models is not reducing the uncertainties in predicting future climate, but rather the reverse. “This is not what the public and politicians expect, so handling and explaining this will be difficult.”
Too right it will. Despite the known proclivity of computer models to come up with the findings they have been programmed to produce, Hulme is conceding that more sophisticated versions are refusing to record the desired result, but in fact the reverse. If even the alarmists’ own tame technology, due to improved accuracy, is refusing to comply with their wish list of global warming symptoms, then the game is well and truly up…
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100046168/as-third-climategate-report-is-published-even-computer-models-turn-against-agw-alarmists/
R. Gates,
I just took a look at the map of the first link (the artic.atmos link), and compared it to the one in the article (from the University of Illinois). Although the colors are different relative to the concentration, and I was just looking at it visually, I don’t see a great difference.
The two areas in lighter pink in the U of I plot appear to be around 80% concentration. The artic.atmos shows something similar in my opinion. In the majority of the ‘darkest’ areas of the U of I plot, where it appears the concentrations are in the high 90s to 100%, the artic.atmos plot shows around 95 to 100%.
Yes, there are some other differences in various locations differences througout both plots that appear minor to me, but overall, I would judge them to be fairly close to each other.
Even comparing it to the IUP plot, much of the concentration is well over 905, with a lot between 95 adn 100%. Again, the are some differences, but I don’t think they are that great.
Thus, I think your comment about it being far different from what Steve is describing is VERY MISLEADING.
I would appreciate others doing the same and commenting. Please correct me if I am wrong. OR someone who can take the pictures and do ‘pixel’ counts to compare would be great.
Here’s a somewhat unusual proxy for recent winter temperatures in southern New Zealand:
http://www.odt.co.nz/regions/central-otago/114079/curlers-called-national-bonspiel
Check out the recent thick black-ice records.
R. Gates says:
July 5, 2010 at 8:18 pm
…albeit either of our forecasts show there has been no “recovery” in Arctic Sea ice, and the 2008-2009 upward trend will have been broken.
Talk about damage control…
I would think that you as much as anyone, as often as you have castigated the oversimplification of Arctic ice loss dynamics, would avoid making such a nebulous claim. How are you defining “recovery”? Certainly it’s not extent. Wouldn’t the amount of multi-year ice be a better gauge? Either way, I’d like to hear how you can make such a claim at this point in the season.
As for your “broken” trend, I shouldn’t even touch that one…
…but, c’mon! You know trends don’t work that way. No one credibly believes the slope of arctic ice or any other climate variable will stay constant from year to year. So a decrease from one year to the next does not necessarily “break” a trend. Perhaps you might get some traction if Arctic ice dropped below the 2007 minimum.
R Gates believes in AGW and that its expression is Arctic sea ice… despite blaming it on wind patterns. And wind patterns do not favor AGW over the past 50 years… But hey, keep coming pal…
Martin C says:
July 5, 2010 at 9:18 pm
R. Gates,
“I just took a look at the map of the first link (the artic.atmos link), and compared it to the one in the article (from the University of Illinois). Although the colors are different relative to the concentration, and I was just looking at it visually, I don’t see a great difference.”
VILLABOLO:
Why is Climate Insiders being used as a source for all these graphs when the Primary sources are so easily available?
Yea but how much oil, by mass…measured in Courics, can A Whale consume? Katie you are the record!