10/14/2008 7,064,219 square kilometers
10/14/2007 5,487,656 square kilometers
A difference of: 1,576,563 square kilometers, now in fairness, 2008 was a leap year, so to avoid that criticism, the value of 6,857,188 square kilometers can be used which is the 10/13/08 value, for a difference of 1,369,532 sq km. Still not too shabby at 24.9 %. The one day gain between 10/13/08 and 10/14/08 of 3.8% is also quite impressive.
You can download the source data in an Excel file at the IARC-JAXA website, which plots satellite derived sea-ice extent:
Watch the red line as it progresses. So far we are back to above 2005 levels, and 28.7% (or 24.9% depending on how you want to look at it) ahead of last year at this time. That’s quite a jump, basically a 3x gain, since the minimum of 9% over 2007 set on September 16th. Read about that here.
Go nature!
There is no mention of this on the National Snow and Ice Data Center sea ice news webpage, which has been trumpeting every loss and low for the past two years…not a peep. You’d think this would be big news. Perhaps the embarrassment of not having an ice free north pole in 2008, which was sparked by press comments made by Dr. Mark Serreze there and speculation on their own website, has made them unresponsive in this case.
From May 5th, 2008:
“Taken together, an assessment of the available evidence, detailed below, points to another extreme September sea ice minimum. Could the North Pole be ice free this melt season? Given that this region is currently covered with first-year ice, that seems quite possible. “
See the original story here: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/050508.html
What I like about the IARC-JAXA website is that they simply report the data, they don’t try to interpret it, editorialize it, or make press releases on it. They just present the data. Here is their top-down pole view:
Click for a larger image.
h/t to Tom Nelson
Sponsored IT training links:
We offer 100% successes guarantee for real exam using expert 220-702 notes, 642-902 video demos and 70-642 practice exam.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Hmm. Maybe there really is a 12- to 13-month lag between ENSO events and Arctic response.
Some good news. Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC has nearly completed his second round of questions, and has promised to deliver them in the next couple of days.
An interesting thing to note is that multi-year ice going in to the 2009 melt season will probably be close to 200% of what it was at the start of the 2008 melt season.
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20080924_Figure3.jpg
Looking at the map on the right side (2008) the purple-red ice more or less represents where 2008 multi-year ice started. Assuming that a lot of ice doesn’t drift out into the North Atlantic this winter (probably a safe assumption) the blue-red represents the multi-year ice for next year. More than double the current amount.
As Dr. Meier explains it, the reason that 2008 started out with so much thin ice was because of a strong trans-polar drift during the 2007-2008 winter – which melted much of the older and thicker ice after the official melt season had come to a close.
Mark Serreze’ prediction of an ice free north pole was based on a lack of multi-year ice, so it will be interesting to see if NSIDC tones down the rhetoric a bit moving forwards.
Well, I guess we can expect a data modifiation program real soon now. That will fix this problem.
Can someone point towards the “full” data file?
There’s a file for the data in the AMSR-E graph, but it only goes back to the start of that graph – 2002. But we’re regaled about “lowest (or second-lowest) ice in history,” so where’s the longer term data, exactly?
REPLY: 2002 is when the satellite was launched, so that is the limit to this data set. – Anthony
[…] Watts up with That). It seems the global warming activists have yet another problem on their hands: that darn […]
Combine that with a strongly positive Arctic Oscillation, one can expect a rapid refreeze.
Anybody taking bets on when the 2008 value exceeds the 1979-2000 average?
OK, I have not run a Fourier Transform, but simply eyeballing I am now going out on a limb and calling it undershoot. How far with the signal shift go?
How far WILL the signal shift go …
“2002 is when the satellite was launched”
So…
We can truthfully say we’re closer to the highest-ice-ever-on-this-date (about 1 million km*km) than we are to the lowest-ice-on-date (more like 1.6 km*km by eyeball).
[…] old fashioned cold winter. To kick things off, the sea ice in the arctic is growing rapidy. From wattsupwiththat.com: Arctic sea ice now 28.7% higher than this date last year – still […]
Phillip Bratby:
“Anybody taking bets on when the 2008 value exceeds the 1979-2000 average?”
do you think it can really happen?
I guess frezzing ice is a good thing to prove those AGW people wrong, but I am concerend that it may be a rather cold ski season this year.
Maybe that sun spot will give us some help.
Remember Lewis Pugh the kayak man
http://polardefenseproject.org/blog/
I periodically check his polar defense blog, but it seems only the ‘bad news’ is posted. Note the last post is dated 12th September 2008. Nothing new on his website either
http://www.lewispugh.com/
No plans for next year yet.
I hope this is not another one of those Temporal Teleconnection thingys where future physical phenomena and processes affect past physical phenomena and processes.
Guess the “canary in the coal mine” that supposedly “proved global warming was happening” now proves that global warming has stopped.
Anthony,
OT
You promised us and AIRS airing that has not materialized.
I would really like people’s opinion of the animations
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/
where the waves of CO2 become maximum in spring and over land masses. The press release talks of industrial pollution, but that should be more or less constant (heating in winter air conditioning in summer, industries running all year round).
REPLY: There was this post on the release of the paper, but I have done nothing since. I am juggling several projects so I haven’t done as much in-depth work lately. – Anthony
Andrea:
Eyeballing it, if it remains the same extent above the 2007 line, then it will cross the 1997-2000 line within a month.
“I guess frezzing ice is a good thing to prove those AGW people wrong”
You forget that more ice is a sign of AGW. /sarcasm
When it crosses the line, can we use the word “unprecedented” or is that Trademarked by the AGW team?
To Allan S. Blue – where’s the full dataset?
If you want to spend some time poking around this NSIDC ftp site, there is historical daily numbers going back back to 1972.
Just be aware there have been changes in methodologies so the numbers don’t match up very well with today. [Although you’d think the NSIDC could use these to come up with an homogeneous dataset and they might make these daily numbers available to the public – I found this ftp site by accident, it is not linked to by the NSIDC.]
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/seaice/polar-stereo/trends-climatologies/
My personal theory for the rapid refreezing is that last year’s massive melt-off got rid of most of the soot and ash that has been building up in the arctic ice over the past decades mainly due to China’s growth. So now the albedo is back to normal and the growth of the ice is showing the worldwide drop in temperatures we have been experiencing since the sun got quiet.
Obviously, based on these beliefs, I have no choice but to conclude I am in the pay of Big Oil. Now where did I put that Exxon check?
Go Baby Ice!
What’s the graph look like for ANTarctic ice which was at record maximum levels last year? Are we seeing matching behavior?
And Cryosphere Today says that we are still 100km*km behind 2005 even though their comparison pictures don’t show it. There is a major problem with their anomaly graph. I wish they would fix it.
Today on the Drudge report, for the first time, 3 headlines concerning record cold and ice growth! Finally!