Measurements from ESA’s CryoSat satellite show that the volume of Arctic sea ice has significantly increased this past autumn.
The volume of ice measured this autumn is about 50% higher compared to last year. In October 2013, CryoSat measured about 9000 cubic km of sea ice – a notable increase compared to 6000 cubic km in October 2012.
See animation:
Over the last few decades, satellites have shown a downward trend in the area of Arctic Ocean covered by ice. However, the actual volume of sea ice has proven difficult to determine because it moves around and so its thickness can change.
CryoSat was designed to measure sea-ice thickness across the entire Arctic Ocean, and has allowed scientists, for the first time, to monitor the overall change in volume accurately.
About 90% of the increase is due to growth of multiyear ice – which survives through more than one summer without melting – with only 10% growth of first year ice. Thick, multiyear ice indicates healthy Arctic sea-ice cover.
This year’s multiyear ice is now on average about 20%, or around 30 cm, thicker than last year.
“One of the things we’d noticed in our data was that the volume of ice year-to-year was not varying anything like as much as the ice extent – at least in 2010, 2011 and 2012,” said Rachel Tilling from the UK’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, who led the study.
“We didn’t expect the greater ice extent left at the end of this summer’s melt to be reflected in the volume. But it has been, and the reason is related to the amount of multiyear ice in the Arctic.”
While this increase in ice volume is welcome news, it does not indicate a reversal in the long-term trend.
“It’s estimated that there was around 20 000 cubic kilometres of Arctic sea ice each October in the early 1980s, and so today’s minimum still ranks among the lowest of the past 30 years,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd from University College London, a co-author of the study.
The findings from a team of UK researchers at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling were presented last week at the American Geophysical Union’s autumn meeting in San Francisco, California.
“We are very pleased that we were able to present these results in time for the conference despite some technical problems we had with the satellite in October, which are now completely solved,” said Tommaso Parrinello, ESA’s CryoSat Mission Manager.
In October, CryoSat’s difficulties with its power system threatened the continuous supply of data, but normal operations resumed just over a week later.
With the seasonal freeze-up now underway, CryoSat will continue its routine measurement of sea ice. Over the coming months, the data will reveal just how much this summer’s increase has affected winter ice volumes.
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Source: European Space Agency
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/CryoSat/Arctic_sea_ice_up_from_record_low
For more data, see the WUWT Sea ice Reference page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
h/t to WUWT reader Larry Kirk
“It’s estimated that there was around 20 000 cubic kilometres of Arctic sea ice each October in the early 1980s, and so today’s minimum still ranks among the lowest of the past 30 years,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd from University College London, a co-author of the study.
Right. He compares guesstimates against actual observations. Why doesn’t he try estimating how much sea ice there was in each October of the 1920s and 1930s?
Katherine, that’s ‘science’ now!
Been checking Arctic ice every day at:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/cgi-bin/seaice-monitor.cgi
and noted many records of DECREASED ice. Today showed a loss of 441 square kilometres and yesterday only recorded an increase of 101 square kilometres. Average daily increase is usually around 50,000 square kilometres. Air temperatures are well below freezing and little to no sun so what is limiting the normal growth? In the link above is a pointer to Arctic winds and It looks to me whenever strong winds blow towards the ice the new ice is pushed back in top of the previous ice.
Just my layman’s conclusion but nice to now read about current Arctic sea ice volumes.
Thank you, Anthony.
Oh my – now what? As we all know there is no ice. All the models said so. The global warming fanatics said the Arctic is ice free and they have the models to prove their point. This will never do.
As background, Cryosat-2 was launched and finally commissioned in 2010 (after Cryosat-1 failed on launch in 2005), and so far has produced 4 years of comparable sea-ice volume data to October 2013.
To my way of thinking this is the first and only reliable Arctic sea ice VOLUME data we have ever had (aside from 3 months of comparable, though less extensive satellite synthetic aperture radar coverage from the ill-fated Seasat in 1978).
Any previous sea ice AREA data (even that supplemented by very localised airborne or surface thickness measurements in computer models, as in the PIOMAS model), is irrelevant by comparison.
It is sea ice volume that we need to measure, and sea ice volume alone that counts, as changes in ice volume are directly related to the quantity latent heat taken up from or given out to the surrounding ocean and atmosphere. And it is the heat accumulation in or loss from the overall ocean/atmosphere system that this whole ‘global warming’ controversy is concerned with, not ice area, temperature or any other similar red herring.
The only real questions are: “Is there more heat building up in the system or is there not?” and “Either way, is this phenomenon entirely natural or significantly due to human activity?”
I have no opinion either way myself, because I have yet to see any incontrovertible evidence that answers either of these questions.
However, I do appreciate good data when I see it, and this data is very good indeed.
Cryosat-2 is a brilliant effort by the ESA: a very high-latitude polar orbiting satellite, with instrumentation that is specifically designed to collect a very high vertical resolution radar altimetric map of the ice surface, and also to record and correct for any overlying unconsolidated snow cover. In the case of the free-floating Arctic polar ice cap, the resulting volume of ice above sea level can then be very easily converted into a volume measurement of the entire floating Arctic ice cap.
Sadly, the Cryosat-2 mission is only designed to run for a couple of years more. If we’d actually had this this sort of data for the past 30 years, or even since the failed launch of its original predecessor Cryosat-1 in 2005, we would now know a great deal more about what is actually going on with regard to the Arctic Ice. It is real data and the results for once are scientifically credible. Hopefully this will be the first of a continual series of similar systems.
Weather not climate.
The Arctic sea-ice trend is down. But it might be about to pause.
The Antarctic sea-ice trend is up.. There’s no sign of an impending pause.
Let’s wait and see.
Yeah, but……but…
Innit weather….?
God, is it worse than we thought?
“..Thick, multiyear ice indicates healthy Arctic sea-ice cover….”
What’s so ‘healthy’ about lots of ice in the Arctic? I don’t think that any figure is particularly ‘healthy’. Unless someone can tell me how much ice there ‘ought’ to be, and why that’s the ‘right’ number…
“… Thick, multiyear ice indicates healthy Arctic sea-ice cover.”
What I don’t understand is why a lot of ice up there is “healthy”. Suppose that all the ice did melt one summer. So what?
I don’t expect that the sea ice in the Arctic will go down much more, but rather I expect it to increase dramatically over the next few years; but no one has ever explained to my satisfaction why a reduction in sea ice cover would be a bad thing.
Anyone here care to educate me on that?
TIA.
‘While this increase in ice volume is welcome news, it does not indicate a reversal in the long-term trend.’
Not yet but a few more years and you will have to change your tune 😉
What people forget is that Increasing Arctic sea ice is not inconsistent with AGW.
Remember the “Nobel Laureate” Trenberth has told us that the heat is hidding in the deep ocean and will soon bubble up, no doubt will melt all the sea ice.
How much money has ESA spent on this CryoSat Sattelite program? And was it really necessary spending all that cash when co-author of the study, professor Andrew Shepherd, apparently is able to provide the same information without sattelite measurements? (sarc)
Wow – that Arctic inversion is showing its teeth!
Based on that trend, much of North America might be covered in ice in a few thousand years, and brown and black bear populations might suffer due to their being unable to get to their prey because of too much ice. So perhaps we should increase global warming to save the black and brown bears. #Sarc.
If this satellite can measure how deep Alaskan lakes are freezing away from the Barrow area, it ought to be asked to do so, to counter the study reported in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/04/claim-dramatic-thinning-of-arctic-lake-ice-cuts-winter-ice-season-by-24-days/
Of course they didn’t. They believed the darker oceans absorb more heat leading to death spiral, amplification feedback loops. PS according to DMI it was the coldest central Arctic since 1958 too. http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
It is possible that this is just zombie ice.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/09/arctic-death-spiral-actually-more-like-zombie-ice/
Professor Peter Wadhams must be wetting his pants. This will teach him, just 1 and 2 more years to go.
“It’s estimated that there was around 20 000 cubic kilometres of Arctic sea ice each October in the early 1980s, and so today’s minimum still ranks among the lowest of the past 30 years,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd from University College London, a co-author of the study.
Well 30 years would be exactly half the cycle period noted in
M.G. Wyatt and J.A. Curry, “Role for Eurasian Arctic shelf sea ice in a secularly varying hemispheric climate signal during the 20th century,”
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/stadium-wave1.pdf
See Figs 7-10.
The best way to eyeball the ice-thickness is through the Navy map of thickness at http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticictnowcast.gif , and the best way to get to that map and many other maps, without having to click from site to site, is via Anthony’s “Sea Ice Page” on the right hand margin of this page. At times during the summer, despite other good posts, that page achieves the rank of one of the five “Top Posts” on this site, which shows both how interested people are, and how good that site is.
Cherk the Sea Ice Page out right now and you’ll see the ice over ten feet thick has increased since October. It has pushed towards the Alaska Coast, and the made a right turn and is curving in the Beaufort Gyre north of Bering Strait. There is definitely much more than there was a couple years ago. We’ll have to see how it withstands the summer melt, but one would assume it will last longer than thinner ice. It may crumble apart and produce a larger extent of broken up bergs.
At one point Hansen was saying the reason we didn’t see warming was because the heat was used up melting ice. The reverse is also true. Forming ice releases a lot of latent heat. A greater amount of thick ice will take a greater amount of heat to melt.
Mostly the increase is due to the fact the ice wasn’t flushed south through Fram Strait. Even during the past two weeks there was a spell when the winds blew the “wrong way” through Fram Strait, pushing ice back north rather than flushing it south. So what the poor Alarmists must do is compose a headline stating, “Global Warming Causes Winds To Blow The Wrong Way.”
Right now a more typical North Atlantic gale is pushing the mass of the held-back ice south through Fram Strait, and on Anthony’s Sea Ice Page you can see a map that shows the extent in Fram Strait is above normal, not due to melting or freezing, but due to winds and a big mass of ice.
A lot of the thicker ice is not that old, and is baby-ice that didn’t go south last summer and was shoved into the Beaufort Gyre and piled up. However right around now it is having it’s first birthday, so I guess we can officially graduate it and hand it a diploma and call it “multi-year.” (Any excuse for a party.)
Please note that even IF (not going to happen soon though) Arctic sea ice extent in September 2014 is at the 1979 level they will still inform us that the trend is still down. 😉 Then they will take a peak at volume, and if that is at 1979 levels they will still say………………
This cannot be happening.
April 2008. And their deadly serious about tipping points.
Has anybody asked these “experts” what went wrong?
Anybody?
Proof, if proof were needed, that alarmist claims are just hot air. And that’s another thing, it’s not hot air that melts ice but warm water. AMO going cooler.
markstoval says: February 5, 2014 at 1:39 am
“Anyone here care to educate me on that?”
Please watch ‘An inconvenient truth’, buy 500 carbon credits and don’t you ever dare to question the settled science anymore! Because warmth is bad, cold is good. People are a burden and the earth vulnerable. The climate sensitive and the weather extreme. Cooling is warming. The heat is hiding. The sun is irrelevant. The oceans, clouds and watervapor don’t matter and therefore are not to be spoken about. CO2 is a poison and manmade CO2 a killer.
So says the upside down, inside out, back to front Climate Religion.
A couple of commenters earlier on noted the word “healthy” referring to thick ice. “Healthy” is a heavily-laden value judgment, showing what the researchers think is what the situation should be. Why should it be? Whose decision is that? Is a cold Arctic better than a merely cool Arctic? Those are not scientific questions. No one knows–or can possibly know–what the ideal situation might be. There is no norm in such matters. While we can say–from research and experience–that the normal human body temperature is 98.6 F, and that normal vision is 20/20, no such statistic or research exists for large natural systems. Is Arctic weather behaving as it should? If not, how can one tell?
I would be content with a simple recitation of observed facts, including causes and effects where known and verifiable. Value judgments beyond such facts are irrelevant and misleading.
Good morning. Spam filter may have grabbed my last comment. Heavy snow just starting, here in southern New Hampshire.