There has been a great deal of speculation about the possibility that the arctic sea ice could, at the worst case, melt entirely, or more realistic, possibly break the record sea ice melt set last year.
Judge for yourself. This photo with 1 kilometer/pixel resolution was taken yesterday July 12th at 17:05 UTC:
Click for full size image – link to original source image is here
Note that the image above has been rotated, and the annotation for date/time added to make it easier to present here. There is some cloud cover, but if you look carefully, you can determine what is cloud cover and what is sea ice.
Here is the area covered by the AQUA/MODIS satellite on this photo:
The North Pole is visible in the satellite image, and I’ve marked it on the image with a “N” and crosshair.
Now compare to a similar photo from ten days ago:
Image rotated- click for source image.
I’d say we have a ways to go yet before the sea ice melts completely.
wow – eidard thinks he can impress people by mixing pretension, sanctimony, and faux superiority. Nice. Who needs logical arguments when they’re so good at showing off their holier-than-thou attitude?
No one is allowed to say anything at all about this until September, or maybe the next September. Maybe. The great and powerful Eidard has spoken!!! Wonder if HE’LL have the “integrity” to show up in September. Somehow I doubt it.
Let’s try and avoid a who’s pretentious/who’s honest battle please. I’ll admit eideard probably stepped over the line, but I’m moderating with a light touch here.
The Terra and Aqua MODIS satellites are great, mainly because they deliver actual pictures (ie. they are not software-generated from radar with the software written by some global warming advocate.)
The downside to real pictures is that clouds can get in the way and they can’t be taken at night (ie. there are no MODIS sat pictures of Antarctica right now which is in 24 hour darkness – I wonder if that makes it cold at the Poles in the winter?)
The more we have these other instruments like MODIS and the lower troposphere satellite temps, the less likely the global warming advocates will try to get away with adjusting the CURRENT data.
But they will try to adjust the historical data, like this adjustment to the historical sea ice data undertaken by the NSIDC in January 2007. Shocking adjustment for which no explanation was ever given.
http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/2918/anomalykm3.gif
As bad as the characterizaton of the north pole is in the media, its nothing compared to what’s going on at the south pole. The sea ice at the south pole is running a million square kilometers above average and one side of the antartic peninsula is melting more than normal and its the press is all about an ice shelf crumbling. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
Link to comparative ice coverings for Jul 10 2007 and Jul 10 2008 ( I how this link works)
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=07&fd=10&fy=2007&sm=07&sd=10&sy=2008
eideard,
Do drop by and see what happens in September or whatever. The ice status was bloged in an objective manner despite your implications. If you read more, you’ll see that the site’s creator IS skeptical of AGW hype but not ideologically married to an outcome. Nature is exciting and may confound all who read here yet. Stay tuned.
I’m sure you guys are already familiar with the crysophere site. Here is the comparison to last year.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=07&fd=12&fy=2007&sm=07&sd=12&sy=2008
Funny thing .. I’ve been following this site for the last year .. pretty much daily. Seems the ice melt isn’t going as planned, so the webmasters of the site have decided to monkey with it. But .. they didn’t monkey with the NH ice graph anomoly … which still shows that the NH ice is growing .. not melting. Click on the “tale of the tape” graph, and compare what is happening this year compared to last year.
Another excellent entry Anthony. I look forward to the experts eating crow (although I know they won’t). So far, according to Steve McIntyre, there’s more ice right now on this date in the Arctic than any year since 2004.
B.D.: “Raw satellite images”. I like it!
As you are well aware Anthony and perhaps many people who visit this site – but just a heads up: One has to be careful when looking at visible satellite imagery – it can be easy to confuse ice with cloud, particularly low cloud cover due to very similar albedos and in this picture it looks like there may be considerable cloud cover. Tom in Florida gave a very nice link. Also Environment Canada’s ice centre site gives a limited picture of sea ice coverage and departures from normal:
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/App/WsvPageDsp.cfm?ID=1&Lang=eng
I think he was confusing anomalies with extent.
Radar imagery should take care of any cloud coverage question.
Maybe Al’s AIT styrofoam is melting ?
[…] hypothesis and burying other scientists views, as well as other journalistic foibles? Well, Watts chimes in with photos of the Arctic and claims the melting better start soon if the fears of a watery grave for Santa Claus are to come […]
Early July is a bit early to see much change from winter.
Also, the two images are not comparable. The semi-circular object near the upper right of the top image is the strait between Ellesmere Island and Axel H. Island. In the bottom image, it is located just above the center of the and rotated 90 degrees clockwise. When you mentally rotate the top image, you can visualize the extent of overlap, which is what we need to compare the two images. And when we do, there is little change in the extent of sea ice, which is what you would expect for such a short time gap. We know nothing about the thickness of the ice from these images.
We really need to wait until the end of August to compare this year with last year. But even then we will learn little about climate change from comparing sea ice for the two years. Change over a few years do not count as climate change. (Change over 30 years might amount to a wiggle or a jiggle, but does not necessarily mean secular change.)
My understanding is that the total sea ice at the two poles has not changed much: as sea ice has declined in the Arctic, it has increased in the Antarctic.
It’s fun looking at the satellite images, but it’s not going to answer any of the big questions one way or the other.
Here’s the graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center showing the time of the peak ice four months ago {March 10}:
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/200804_Figure2.png
From that first image at the top of this post it looks to me like there’s large coverage of high albedo clouds, sure to lessen ice melt while present. Should be interesting to see how the melt proceeds to its average max in two months {Sep}.
Michael Hauber (16:07:35) :
The most aggressive prediction of an ice free Arctic I know of is in 2012. I think a more common prediction is about 2030?
I wanted to speak about the suggestion that no one has predicted an ice-free Arctic before 2012 and that 2030 is the more popular dire forecast. Leaving aside the overwhelming likelihood that we’re entering at least a moderate solar minimum for the next quarter century, with likely serious cooling effects via cosmic rays, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is flipping to its cool phase! Ice-free arctic by 2030? Try growing glaciers worldwide and no more than a few thimblefuls of open water in the summertime Arctic in 2030. If the solar minimum is meaningful, as I believe it will be, Antarctic sea ice should diminish, as low-level clouds have an anomolous warming effect down there.
Looks like a lot of ice to me. But not I’m not a former vice president, so what do I know?
Sure, Fred…but don’t miss the point that MANY AGWers and others were expecting this year to come close or even surpass last year in terms of Arctic ice loss. And of course, they saw this as a symptom of global warming and perhaps a “tipping point”. Those fears and predictions are not being realized.
Fred Colbourne,
I agree that the satellite image of polar ice means relatively little in providing evidence of climatic change. But does mean a lot to counter misinformation as recently appeared in the press, like so-and-so thinks that there is a 50% percent probability that the ice will disappear over the North Pole this year. It is like a meteorologist saying that there is a 50% probability of rain over the next 24 hours. What it means that he has absolutely no idea whether it is going to rain or not.
Years ago I read the results of a poll asking the state of the environment where those who were polled lived versus what the state of the environment elsewhere in the world….Generally they answered, great and improving “here” but truly horrid and worsening everywhere else.
That is unfortunately is the skewed perception MSM offers. I prefer an ice covered picture to their thousand words.
And its been a damned nice summer, a little cool but nice!
But what about the
childrenpenguins??!?…and in other news, still no sunspots…
Evan Jones writes:
Ice thickness is not irrelevant. but it is secondary. What really matters is area because that is what affects albedo.
Isn’t the temperature of the ice also important?
Wouldn’t a colder winter cause not only more ice but colder ice?
It seems to me that colder ice would at least delay the initial melt.
Is the power transfer due to albedo so different that other factors are secondary?
Not an expert, just wondering…
There is about 4 more weeks of melt left and the daily melt rate should decline later this week as sun angle begins to decline at an increasing rate. Ice cover hits minimum around August 15th, stays at about that low for about a month or so and then starts to increase about the middle of September.
We have probably already passed maximum daily melt rates for this year. The arctic seems a lot more cloudy than it was last year.
Leon, Here’s a more recent sea ice extent comparison:
Arctic Sea Ice Comparison