From Dr. Roger Pielke Senior, one more paper saying what we’ve been reporting on since 2007 – Arctic sea ice extent is a significant function of wind and currents, not just temperature.
In 2007, when I was but a wee blogger, I wrote:
A science blogger named Tamino, in a post he made here, challenged me to “explain it or shut up” related to the loss of northern hemisphere Arctic ice this season which he claimed was …” undeniable, that it’s not natural variation” in contrast to the southern hemisphere Antarctic setting a new record for ice extent. While I suspect that sea ice is not his specialty, nor is it mine, I will bring some things to the attention of my readers available from literature.
Just last Monday, NASA was quietly issuing a press release explaining why Arctic sea ice loss was so great this year. (h/t Douglas Hoyt).
Full story: Arctic Sea ice loss – “it’s the wind” says NASA
In fact, in 2009, in further factual explanation for Tamino’s demand that I “explain it or shut up”, I did another post that showed a movie of wind pushing the ice out of the Arctic. See Watching the 2007 historic low sea ice flow out of the Arctic Sea What is interesting about this video is that you can watch sea ice being flushed out of the Arctic sea and pushed along Greenland’s east coast, where it then finds its way into warmer waters and melts.
Fast forward to today, now we have a peer reviewed paper on the issue. And, guess what, in this new paper they quantify it with a nice graph. It seems wind driven export of sea ice has been on the rise.
Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. writes:
New Paper “Recent Wind Driven High Sea Ice Export In The Fram Strait Contributes To Arctic Sea Ice Decline” By Smedsrud Et Al 2011
In response to the post
Peter Williamson alerted us to a related paper that highlights the major role of regional circulation patterns on climate (this time for the Arctic). The paper is
Smedsrud, L. H., Sirevaag, A., Kloster, K., Sorteberg, A., and Sandven, S.: Recent wind driven high sea ice export in the Fram Strait contributes to Arctic sea ice decline, The Cryosphere Discuss., 5, 1311-1334, doi:10.5194/tcd-5-1311-2011, 2011
Arctic sea ice area decrease has been visible for two decades, and continues at a steady rate. Apart from melting, the southward drift through Fram Strait is the main loss. We present high resolution sea ice drift across 79° N from 2004 to 2010. The ice drift is based on radar satellite data and correspond well with variability in local geostrophic wind. The underlying current contributes with a constant southward speed close to 5 cm s−1, and drives about 33 % of the ice export. We use geostrophic winds derived from reanalysis data to calculate the Fram Strait ice area export back to 1957, finding that the sea ice area export recently is about 25 % larger than during the 1960′s. The increase in ice export occurred mostly during winter and is directly connected to higher southward ice drift velocities, due to stronger geostrophic winds. The increase in ice drift is large enough to counteract a decrease in ice concentration of the exported sea ice. Using storm tracking we link changes in geostrophic winds to more intense Nordic Sea low pressure systems. Annual sea ice export likely has a significant influence on the summer sea ice variability and we find low values in the 60′s, the late 80′s and 90′s, and particularly high values during 2005–2008. The study highlight the possible role of variability in ice export as an explanatory factor for understanding the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice the last decades.
The full paper is open access, and available here (PDF)
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Sure, it’s wind…obviously with changes in wind patterns and wind magnitude that are due to climate change.
In other words, “it’s worse than we thought!”
Another daft question (I seem to be full of them today), but why is the “geostrophic wind” stronger now than previously?
Nils-Axel Mörner gives his projection for a coming Solar Minima and new “Little Ice Age”
ARCTIC ENVIRONMENT BY THE MIDDLE OF THIS CENTURY ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT VOLUME 22 No. 3 2011
Note especially the changes in Arctic flow patterns going from a solar maximum to solar minimum in Figure 2 and Figure 7, that correlate with the “little ice age” in Europe.
Of course the wind will blow icebergs around.
The more the ice melts the more it brakes up and the more it can move away from the center
creating more surface area
and there by a positive feedback loop
keep up your good work
jim …
brakes up ??? well, I get your point but how does this ice melt in water that is below freezing ? just curious ?
I looked back at the older 2007 post. great post and I stumbled upon a question for those surface temperature color coded maps. How can anyone possibly show a temperature deviation from the mean for the polar regions? We can’t possibly have enough temperature data from these areas to have developed a scientifically significant mean? After all, they are both huge.
Can anyone shed some light on this?
The ocean currents also play a huge role. Even with zero wind water enters from the west and eventually exits in the east. The ice goes along for the ride at a rate of (If i recall correctly) over 2 miles per day.
The most useless metric discussed in GW blogs is “multi-year ice” followed closely by “ice thickness. Multi-year ice is simply ice that got caught up in a circular ocean current (there are several in the arctic). In the dead of winter an ice flow can crack at the North Pole exposing fresh ocean which will freeze at a rate of several inches per day. But since the ice on the surface isolates the ocean from the cold arctic air the rate of new ice buildup quickly declines. Thicker ice is ice that is caught up in circular ocean flow. And “thicker” means a few feet thicker than average not 2X -3X average.
It seems the general public (encouraged by dishonest “scientists”) assumes the ice just sits in the arctic and accumulates. As several multi-month films show this is simply incorrect. Ice in the arctic is on an ocean current conveyor belt that makes a joke of the focus on multi-year ice as a metric of global temperature.
Heh, I remember making a request for such a study in a comment here on WUWT.
WUWT is influential and read everywhere.
I seem to be commenting a lot today, however, much of this info is related to ice, a Canadian staple. Wind and drifting ice is normal news in my part of the world. Moreover, wind creates waves and sea direction creating a double hit on breaking up ice. Anyone remotely familiar with the long history of Newfoundland sealing is intimately familiar with the power of wind driven ice, the countless deaths related to wind/ice/and current is legendary in the eastern part of Canada. Until you’ve seem the power of five hundred miles of wind driven ice most have no knowledge of the mass and power behind this phenomena. Trust me you very quickly learn to fear that power – you aught to see that power hit land and begin piling up. That power can tear ice to shreds going back the opposite way and pile both above and beneath sometimes reaching down to the ocean floor itself as the only way to stop that mass.
“Arctic sea ice area decrease has been visible for two decades, and continues at a steady rate.”
Thought that part should be said again for all of your readers who claim the Artic has not been losing ice.
I don’t really know what is going on up there.
However it seems to me that the winter ice is not freezing as solid as it has in the past.
Nobody is debating that the amount of ice in the arctic is less than it was in the past.
The underling point of this blog is to have a reasoned discussion concerning how or why things are changing in out climate at faster rates than in times past.
Human activity is greater now than at any other time in our history. There are more of us.
In the last one hundred years the single change on this planet is our population.
Also the global per capita expenditure of energy is increasing. It is a simple thermodynamic relationship,
put more stuff in a given space and let it be more energetic. The result we be a temperature increase.
Simple cause and effect studies point towards humans as the change generators.
The studies chronicled in this blog and others are busy with details.
We are Nero.
And like Nero it is out of our hands.
my self I’m having
another cup of coffee
and a another piece of pie
jim
I am a bit startled at the idea that this wind theory is a new revelation. In my article carried here’historic variations in arctic ice’ I cited various books from the 1820’s onwards that came about as a great age of exploration opened up as the Arctic ice melted.
The Royal Society clearly identified warm currents and wind as two of the biggest factors for the observed lack of ice and commented on “the large fields of ice which drift southwards in March and April from the polar sea’ and of ‘Great stretches of open water.’
So its taken us 200 years to catch up with the on the spot observations of our ancestors
tonyb
JIm
Might I remind you – 29% of Earth is land mass. Of that 29% humans occupy less than 1% of that area. Of the remaining 28% about 40% is pure wilderness. 14% is true desert and 15% has desert like characteristics. 9% is Antarctica. Most of the remaining 22% are agricultural areas. There may be other areas with a human footprint of some kind but it is insignificant in any relation to global warming.
It matters not what only the Arctic Ice Cap is doing. What matters is how the world’s total inventory of ice is changing; is it decreasing, stable or increasing? To look only at the Arctic is as short sighted as looking off the coast of North Carolina to project global sea level change.
It also matters not that some glaciers are melting. Since we are at the end of the present Interglacial, all glaciers should be melting. That’s what glaciers do during Interglacials. In that any glaciers are growing – and way too many are – should be considered disturbing.
How long will it take for “consensus” science to acknowledge that the Landscheidt Grand Solar Minimum (totally predictable from celestial mechanics) is underway, shortages of food and fuel are in the wings, and no amount of warming from CO2 is going to save us?
I seem to recall Dr. Meier noting another study here a year or so ago that also concluded that 2007 was around 30% wind-driven. So I’m not sure this is all that new, tho still nice to have.
But a related important question, is to what degree is this increase in wind-driven export of ice essentially a “positive feedback” of heat-driven ice thining? To me, it seems quite likely that thinning of ice, and increase of so-called “rotten ice”, makes it significantly easier for wind to play an increased part in exporting ice south.
@ur momisugly TonyB – kinda like how we’ve know that CO2 is a significant GHG.
Tyndall set out to find whether there was in fact any gas in the atmosphere that could trap heat rays. In 1859, his careful laboratory work identified several gases that did just that. The most important was simple water vapor (H2O). Also effective was carbon dioxide (CO2), although in the atmosphere the gas is only a few parts in ten thousand. Just as a sheet of paper will block more light than an entire pool of clear water, so the trace of CO2 altered the balance of heat radiation through the entire atmosphere.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm
Note that the paper does not yet appear to have passed through the full open review process used by The Cryosphere.
It’s about time! Actually, Arctic sea ice extent is declining due to the combined effects of wind and icebreakers full of climate scientists, looking desperately for their next grant….
I read this post on Dr. Pielke’s blog with some interest. While I found the “it’s the wind” argument compelling, without comparing it to historic data, the wind argument itself really proved nothing. Since wind driven ice loss could have been the case also when ice was at recent decadal maximums, it could have been other factors responsible for the “record” declines. One needs to compare wind driven losses for the past and the present in order to get a handle on whether this is a factor in declines, or whether it is just a constant that does not change what causes minimums and maximums.
This paper gives credence to the theory that the minimums may be a result of wind, and not temperature (atmospheric or water). Very good read.
I have my own theory of fluctuations in Arctic ice, which is mine. So what follows is MY theory. By me. (ahem) My Theory of What Causes Fluctuations in Arctic Ice, by me, TrueNorthist. And it is as follows. First, the ice gets reeeeeeeaaally thick when it is cold, and gets reeeeeeeaaaallly thin, when it gets warm again. And then the wind blows it away. OK. So I added that last bit a minute ago. Still, pretty amazing. Thank you.
😉
Great article.
Moderate Republican
Might I remind you the approximate CO2 in the atmosphere is 380 PARTS PER MILLION. Scientists traditionally write 0.038% as 0.000380.
Taken from James A. Peden: Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (IR) in only three narrow bands of frequencies, which correspond to wavelengths of 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers (µm), respectively. The percentage absorption of all three lines combined can be very generously estimated at about 8% of the whole IR spectrum, which means that 92% of the “heat” passes right through without being absorbed by CO2. In reality, the two smaller peaks don’t account for much, since they lie in an energy range that is much smaller than the where the 15 micron peak sits – so 4% or 5% might be closer to reality. If the entire atmosphere were composed of nothing but CO2, i.e., was pure CO2 and nothing else, it would still only be able to absorb no more than 8% of the heat radiating from the earth.
“it’s the wind”
The Russians have been saying that for ages.
It’s not a “simple physics” problem. See “The Unbearable Complexity of Climate” by Willis Eschenbach, here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/27/the-unbearable-complexity-of-climate-2/
As has been extensively discussed in various threads here in the past, there need be no “forcing” to cause warming (or cooling) to occur. Unforced warming is inherent in a chaotic system that is constantly chasing an ever-elusive equilibrium point–one that its chase itself disturbs.
As an example, the century-length upward and downward temperature surges of the past few thousand years occurred without any outside intervention. There is no reason to think that the upward surge of the past 150+ years, which is so far smaller than the MWP & the Roman Optimum, is unlike those prior unforced warmings.
Anthony posted my video’s here also. It is the wind effect that became so obvious in my videos as well and I can say without reservation that it solidified my opinions about sea ice. We could see the trend year after year and knew without severe corrections the melting was obvious. Then I plotted the daily data in the full length video published at WUWT. It became apparent that sea ice is simply ice, in the sea, affected little by air temps and greatly by ocean flow. That should be no surprise at all considering the energy content of each.
Of all things climate, sea ice decline due to AGW is in the top three of which I am most skeptical.
I posted this comment on the Cryosat thread just this morning, but it seems even more pertinent to this discussion
Dave Wendt says:
June 21, 2011 at 9:58 am
The fact that the large tongue of sea ice along the east coast of Greenland is composed almost entirely of the thickest and oldest ice tends to support the notion put forward in Rigor and Wallace 2004 that the prime driver of the Arctic sea ice decline was a paradigm shift in the surface circulation patterns of the Arctic
http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/research_seaiceageextent.html
“This animation of the age of sea ice shows:
1.) A large Beaufort Gyre which covers most of the Arctic Ocean during the 1980s, and a transpolar drift stream shifted towards the Eurasian Arctic. Older, thicker sea ice (white ice) covers about 80% of the Arctic Ocean up to 1988. The date is shown in the upper left corner.
2.) With the step to high-AO conditions in 1989, the Beaufort Gyre shrinks and is confined to the corner between Alaska and Canada. The Transpolar Drift Stream now sweeps across most of the Arctic Ocean, carrying most of the older, thicker sea ice out of the Arctic Ocean through Fram Strait (lower right). By 1990, only about 30% of the Arctic Ocean is covered by older thicker sea ice.
3.) During the high-AO years that follow (1991 and on), this younger thinner sea ice is shown to recirculated back to the Alaskan coast where extensive open water has been observed during summer.
The age of sea ice drifting towards the coast explains over 50% of the variance in summer sea ice extent (compared to less than 15% of the variance explained by the seasonal redistribution of sea ice, and advection of heat by summer winds).”
Here is an updated animation that Rigor made about a year and a half ago. The inclusion of the buoy drift tracks makes it fairly easy to see the dramatic change in the BG and the TPD in the late 80s. I have seen no reasonable argument that these circulation pattern changes are in any way related to anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
The strength and direction of prevailing winds can indeed accelerate the flow of ice out through the Fram, especially when they are reinforcing the prevailing surface currents as happened in 2007 but, if more than six decades living on the banks of the Mississippi River have taught me anything, it is that when push comes to shove current beats wind every time. The change in the direction of the Transpolar Drift Stream which occurred in 1989 from flowing mostly parallel to the Lomonosov Ridge to following the prime Meridian almost exactly, along with the accompanying changes in the radius of the Beaufort Gyre are able with the wind patterns described in this work to account for the vast majority of changes in Arctic sea ice which have been observed in the recent past..
In the continuing climate tragedy of declining Arctic sea ice the alarmists would like to cast CO2 in the role of Hamlet, but most evidence suggests CO2 is only fit to play Rosencranz or Guildenstern, or if reason and logic ever do prevail again its real perfect role as “poor Yorick”.