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
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See for yourself:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=10&fd=15&fy=2007&sm=10&sd=14&sy=2008
No significant global warming since 1995
Scientist who was fmr. Greenpeace member says ‘no proof’ CO2 is driving global temps!
By EPW Blog Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Another Dissenter: Finnish Scientist who was former Greenpeace member says ‘no proof’ CO2 is driving global temps!
Dr. Jarl R. Ahlbeck is lecturer of environmental technology and a chemical engineer at Abo Akademi University in Finland who has authored 200 scientific publications and hold four patents. Ahlbeck is a former member of Greenpeace and the Finnish socialist party DFFF. Bio here
No significant global warming since 1995
by Jarl R. Ahlbeck The writer is D.Sc. and lecturer at Abo Akademi University, Finland
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/5582
RW: “What you obviously neglect to mention is that the current ice area is still far below the 1979-2000 mean. From this graph it looks to be about 2 million square kilometres, or about 25 per cent, below the long term average. ”
The years 1979-2000 do not a long term average make. BTW, if you average the area of ice from 2001-2007 into your “long term average”, I’ll bet in drops it down enough so that the 25 percent goes away.
It is interesting that the NOAA NWS has been consistently underestimating lows and high’s nearly every day for the NW portion of the US. And not by a small number. These estimates by NOAA could lead a person to believe that their last ditch effort to leave some produce still on the vine (note the pumpkin crop is WAY down and VERY small per pumpkin so every little bit counts) will help. Alas, nighttime temps have been in the low 20’s, not the above freezing low 30’s. Pumpkins froze solid over night. The down side is that small farmers sometimes depend on pumpkin crops for those last bills of the season. Here in Pendleton, the pumpkin crop has been so low that some farmers were not able to open their fields to students from area schools. The same is true for corn stalk mazes. The stalks are so short that the maze is not very hard to figure out. Does this mean that the Arctic cold/refreeze is somehow connected to the cold night time temps we are experiencing in the NW? Hmmmmmmm. Me thinks that NOAA needs to talk with Anthony about fine tuning their predictions.
“Freeze baby Freeze!
“Is the ice thickness now the new concern?”
Of course it is. They were shutout of having a new record low extent and an ice-free north pole. So, they have to change the criteria and claim victory!
[…] Following on from Andrew Bolt’s post yesterday, Watts Up With That? has the full story […]
hmmm. When we talk about ice thickness, are we talking about ice blown into the side of Greenland where it piles up, or are we talking about flat multi-year ice, or are we talking about thin one-year ice? Here are my WA hunches:
The wind blew like a bugger, shoving lots of ice next to Greenland this time around. I would bet the thickness and concentration there is as great as its ever been, or even thicker. It may very well be true that flat multi-year ice, before it got shoved into a pile, thinned a bit due to warm ocean currents underneath and somewhat warmer temps above prior to last winter. I also would wager that the one-year thin ice that grew the last winter was thicker than it has been in a long time. That means that we are now in a period of rebounding ice thickness if the above graph is any measure.
I don’t think coal dust had as much to do with thinning ice than wind, temps, currents, and warm water. But I do think that thicker is better.
See why I was excommunicated? Bad Pam.
Pamela Gray,
I have noticed this for the last year and a half in my area. There is no excuse to continually get hi/lo temps wrong. It is a simple matter of wet/dry bulb reading and a formula. I have discussed this with others and have no idea what to make of it other then another way that AGW is causing harm to real meteorology and climate science and hurting weather forecasting credibility.
ts
I’m betting on the red line.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png
This is a better way of saying what I am thinking:
AMSR-E extent in 2005: about 7,000,000 km^2 Cryosphere Today anomaly, -100,000 km^2
AMSR-E extent in 2007: more than 7,000,000 km^2 Cryosphere Today anomaly, -200,000 km^2
I don’t see how ice extent can go UP and yet the anomaly goes 100,000km^2 more negative.
Also, thickness in 2009 will be much greater than it was in 2008 because 2009 will have more old ice. Old ice stands up to summer melting better. In fact the thickness of the ice in 2008 was already better than it was in 2007. Every year the Russians put a science station on an ice floe. It took weeks to find a suitable floe at the end of 2007 and even that one was thinner than their desired minimum. They found a suitable floe in only a few days in 2008.
2009, given conditions similar to 2008 will end with much more ice than 2008 had because it will start with older ice having less salt content. Ice with less salt content is harder to melt.
Also, 2007 was not a melt event due to temperatures, it was a wind event. The wind literally blew much of the ice out of the Arctic ocean into the Atlantic. That ice simply floats on water. Given the right wind currents, it can practically all blow out into warmer summer Atlantic waters where it melts.
“1979 – 2000 mean”
It is my understanding that in the 1920’s – 1940’s ice levels were low as well.
http://mclean.ch/climate/Arctic_1920_40.htm
Admittedly satellite pictures from tha era are hard to come by ….
Right now at 9:20 PM it is 33.5 degrees F. The NOAA NWS predicts a low of 32 tonight for Lostine, Oregon (just 13 miles from Enterprise). The low usually hits after midnight and sometimes just before the Sun begins to lighten the eastern sky. Anthony, maybe you can speak to these daily predictions that are always too high for this location. Remember, the private Enterprise station was bought and installed because the NWS was not an accurate source of weekly weather, and not even 24 hr weather.
I have to ask “What is the bump in ice coverage that occures every June 1st”
NSIDC normally does monthly updates but changed to twice monthly as the minima was reached. As pointed out above they are still not that late if they decide to do a midmonth update or not.
to be perfectly honest it is rather early in the re-freeze season to be trumpeting anything one way or another at the moment. Using the graph above and it’s data set most years seem to be very close going into January and it is at that point the maxima seems to be determined.
We shall see though.
Regards
Andy
Folks,
I thought it would be interesting to try to correlate temperature with (lack of) sea ice. Here’s a 12-month running mean of both temperature and Arctic sea ice extent, normalised, and the sea ice inverted so we can try to match maxima of temperature and minima of ice.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/nsidc-seaice-n/mean:12/normalise/scale:-1/plot/wti/mean:12/normalise
So the overall trend is clear (temperature increasing ice decreasing), but I can’t see any correlation in the peaks at all, not even with a time delay. In particular, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of the 1998 El Nino spike in the ice extent – it’s clearly far more complex that that.
Pamela Gray
– its weird, In northern sealand, Denmark, in the morning i had 3-4 mm ice on certain water areas in my garden, on my car etc. But the Danish DMI said there had only been 0,2 degrees frost, and it was one tiny area in Jutland 200 km away. We had no frost, but a big area of North sealand was frozen.
Thi however could be some effect that only the boarder quite near the ground was frozen? Not 2 meters up? Hmmm maybe..
– this happened 6 oct
Did you notice how all the curves tend to join in November? I would personally wait till the end of November before trying to conclude anything. The pace is fast, but not faster than 2007 if you count days from the minimal extent.
Bob Tisdale – anomalously warm tropical sea surface temperatures do not affect the temperature of the Arctic a decade later.
Bruce Cobb – there is nothing unusually rapid about the rate of ice formation this year. You can see this by downloading ice extent data and finding for each year the difference between ice extent at minimum, and one month after that. In fact, the increase in extent so far is close to the average since measurements began.
Tom in Florida – yes, if you extended the period over which the mean is define to include a lot of years in which ice extent has been falling rapidly, the mean would be lower. That doesn’t tell us very much about anything though.
Ed Scott (17:11:18) :
No significant global warming since 1995
And when you consider that the 3 years or so previous to 1995 were affected by the Pinatubo eruption you could be talking about no significant warming for almost 20 years. Of course. “significant” here means in the statistical sense.
But I am surprised no-one has actually produced a reconstruction of global temps without the Pinatubo effect. It shouldn’t be that difficult. After all James Hansen has often claimed how well climate models were able to reproduce the Pinatubo cooling.
I wonder why it’s not been done.
Economy hits EU climate plans
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7673107.stm
keeping the electorate sweet
[…] Arctic sea ice now 28.7% higher than this date last year – still rallying […]
“to be perfectly honest it is rather early in the re-freeze season to be trumpeting anything one way or another at the moment. ”
That didn’t really stop the “experts” from predicting months in advance of impending north pole meltout, did it?
We can look at the same trends and draw the same conclusions the other way.
If it’s good for the goose…
Crosspatch
– on the difference betwwen “Extent” and “Area”
Yes, this can be a bit confusing so I went ahead and sent a mail to one Bill Chapman(found his mail under “Contact” on Cryosphere Today) and asked for some information.
To summarize the answers(can quote his actual answers if wanted):
“Extent” – all grid cells(pixels) in the satellite data with a ice-concentration greater than 15% will be counted and summed
“Area” – all grid cells(pixels) will be summed but weighted according to the value of the ice-concentration for each grid cell(pixel)