Arctic Sea Ice Increases at Record Rate
Guest Post by Jeff Id on February 3, 2009
Something I’ve been interested in for the last several months is sea ice data. What makes it interesting is that as I understand it, models demonstrate the poles should be most sensitive to global warming leading the planet temp, especially in the Arctic. Recently I have been able to process the monthly and daily gridded arctic data as provided by NSIDC. The daily values allow a better analysis of trend than can be provided by the monthly data.
If you’re like me you recall the claims of fastest melt rate ever were made about 2007 , I fully believed them, because the graphs showed a much more negative value than in the previous 30 years as shown in Figure 1 below.
This effort was originally intended to investigate how bad the melt rate was in comparison to the natural variation, I didn’t get that far yet. Accessing and processing the gridded data was critical to the analysis, so I spent the time reading the literature and writing code. Having full access to the NSIDC data allows some interesting analysis, they do an excellent job on their site.
There are two primary algorithms used for processing ice data NasaTeam and Bootstrap. The descriptions of the data state the difference between the two is very small and the sets are interchangeable except that bootstrap is recommended for trend analysis in research publications. Bootstrap is only provided in monthly data format while NasaTeam is provided in both monthly and daily provided you’re willing to download over 1G of data, write code to process it, refit the land and missing data mask and sum the results. I am. Also, NasaTeam provides a near real time version of the polar ice data which has a different land mask and hasn’t been processed for missing data. This data isn’t as clean but I wanted to use it. I applied the same land mask as the rest of the series to insure that there was a consistent baseline for trend analysis. The missing data from Jan 2008 onward created noise in the series which I simply filtered out using a 7 day sliding window filter.
The mask looks like this Figure 2
The brown is land, black edges on land are coastline and light blue is the satellite data not measured. This mask is applied consistently through the entire data series. There was some question about masking on one of my other posts at WUWT where visually the land area seemed to change size, in the case of the NSIDC data they apply masks consistently except for the satellite hole and the near real time data.
The NasaTeam version of the arctic ice data looks like the plot below for 2009 (note the small size of the satellite data hole). This graph was created in R using the actual Nasa Team masks and data. I used the worst case land and polar masks to adjust the entire dataset to eliminate problems with consistency. Figure 3
Of course it’s an interesting picture, but what I wanted to know when I started this post was how bad was the worst melt rate in history and what is the actual melt area. In the plot below the arctic is losing sea ice at a rate of only 56K km^2/year. Of course sea ice area went up in the Antarctic during the same time frame though. Note the strong recovery in 08 of Figures 1 and 4, which actually exceeds values of most of the record, matching data back to 1980. Much of this is first year ice so the melt in 08 was expected to be a new record.
If you recall, in 2007 and 08 we were treated to headlines like this, which most of us accepted with a shrug.
Scientists warn Arctic sea ice is melting at its fastest rate since records began
NASA data show Arctic saw fastest sea ice melt in August 2008
Arctic Just Witnessed Fastest August Ice Retreat in History
I processed and analyzed the NasaTeam land area and missing data masks spending hours understanding different variances they list on their own website. After nearly everything I could find (except satellite transitions errors) was corrected (a different post) and corrections for variance in the measured pixel size, the final result in 30 day trends of arctic sea ice looks like the graph below (Figure 5). This graph is a derivative of the ice area plot. The maximum peaks and valleys represent the maximum rates of change in 30 day periods through the ice record.
Looking at this plot of the 30 day slopes of actual NASA gridded data, the maximum ice melt rate occurs in 1999 and in 2004 not in 2007. Surprisingly the maximum ice growth rates occur in 2007 and 2008, I don’t remember those headlines for some reason. Don’t forget when looking at the 2008 – 09 peak, the data is preliminary and hasn’t been through the same processing as the other data. From looking at the unprocessed data I doubt it will change much.
Certainly the 30 year arctic trend in ice area is downward, even the most committed global warming scientist has to admit this happens regularly in climate along with regular 30 year uptrends. The questions are, did we cause it or not, and was CO2 the instigating factor. The rapid recovery of ice levels has to have some meaning regarding the severity of the problem. This goes directly in the face of accelerated global warming and the doom and gloom scenarios promoted by our politicians and polyscienticians.
Why are my conclusions different from the news reported records? I think it’s likely due to the fact that the scientists used the monthly data which is processed using a weighted filter of the daily data that incorporates a longer time frame than a single month. This means their use of the monthly data to establish a monthly trend was in error and the real record down trends were actually set in 1999, 2003 and 1984. While the record uptrends were in 2007, 2008 and 1996.
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Another polar expedition to keep an eye on.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/4176711/Pen-Hadow-Snow-Patrol.html
DJ: same here I am most happy for “AGW’s” to keep talking about anything concerning climate… the data is/will destroy their “theories” LOL.
There is a nice website on Cyrosphere Today (from the Polar Research Group at the University of Illinois) which allows to compare the daily sea Ice from today back into the 80’s. very interesting to compare todays Arctic sea ice with the one from the same day last year (or years earlier)!
Check it out here:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=02&fd=03&fy=2008&sm=02&sd=03&sy=2009
Enjoy,
DET.
DJ (01:25:15) :
DJ….
Lots of very confident statements but not one single reference…. none from you either.
… its defence merely shows a misunderstanding that Arctic sea ice … back at ya!
….Personally, I am most happy for “sceptics” to keep talking about sea ice because these data are irrefutable evidence of a rapidly warming world…… I’m a skeptic, in part, because of words like “irrefutable” in arguments. I dislike “skeptic” being used as an insult, I’m proud to be one. And, wonder how it’s possible to do science without being a Skeptic?
Hit the AGW’er over the head with the recent “shields went down” embarassment. They haven’t an answer, because thier models are dumb idols that cannot speak. Watch Gore, read his eyes, he’s cracking under the strain, though his face may appear stone cold. He knows the Sun is hanging up there like a dead bird, and he hasn’t got forever. This is a political shame that scientists who should have known better got suckered into. Trapped like rats.
The AGW for lunch bunch is going to regret this scare campaign.
DJ
What exactly is old ice / permanent ice, please,? Is it ice with an age of 10yrs, 20 yrs, 30yrs, 100 yrs or some other arbitrary figure, because you will know that the arctic has melted on several occasions in the past for which there is ample historic evidence.
Secondly, please instruct us all on how ice volume can be measured and when those measurements began. The year date will suffice.
Thirdly, but I can’t speak for Anthony, I think you may well have missed the point. I don’t believe that A was trying to prove that global warming does not exist but that using the same data but unadjusted, and with a different statistical ‘method’ gives a different picture to that most published. Which is the correct situation on the ground? I will have to leave that to your intelligent analysis.
Mary
You are becoming unhinged, i’m afraid. I criticised Anthony for being too much of a ‘news’ cum pseudo science site. Now I believe he is moving more into the climate science mode.
I would like you to consider what you believe to be the essential knowledge base for a climate scientist. Eg me, I’m a physicist, solid state that is, with a couple of degrees. B UT I do not consider myself qualified; So who is? An astronomer (Hansen), a computer programmer (Shmidt), or perhaps a statistician? of maybe a combination.
Right? Now relate that to this site and its progress.
And your answe’r is *********************
We skeptics did not rush out on a campaign to scare the world half to death.
We did not seek to remodel data or rewrite history.
We did not go before Congress and other bodies to present dire staits.
It is not we whom you have to worry about. It’s the politicians who will soon hear the public screaming at them, and in turn, the politicians will throw the AGW program under the bus, and the proponents with it.
You did this to yourselves.
You had only to stick to calm scientific debate.
Now the political sword lived by will come into play.
Sorry, but the political world is not the friend of science.
Come back to calm waters of peer review before it is too late.
I am not science. I’m the layman.
There are hundreds of millions who have far less tolerance than I.
Tokyoboy: “One of my colleagues, who has been recruited by IPCC for three years, says that though the polar ice area is apparently increasing the ice layer is thinner so that the ice mass itself is slowly decreasing in line with the AGW theory. Is his opinion reasonable or not ?”
My true-believer frinds say the same. Yet no one has presented me with any long-term thickness data to support that the current ice is really thinner than it was 50, 60, 70 years ago.
It’s all they have to clutch to right now….
DJ said:
You were politely asked: “Link, please.”
No link to your speculation/opinion was ever provided. But later on, you twice demanded of others:
And:
Aren’t you special. You never give the citations that you demand of others. Skeptical scientists are now expected to prove that the climate is acting as the climate always has?? You have the Scientific Method backwards, my friend.
It should also be pointed out that many times in the past the polar ice caps have disappeared: click
And Antarctica is conveniently omitted, since it shows increasing ice cover, which more than balances any Northern Hemisphere loss: click
In order to be taken seriously, climate alarmists must show that the current climate is not within normal and natural historical parameters.
Alarmists have abjectly failed to demonstrate that the climate is not acting normally. They have nothing, nothing but their always-inaccurate computer models to back them up. And now, according to their models, global warming means global cooling. Moving the goal posts is a disreputable tactic, which proves that the desired conclusion — AGW due to CO2 — must be arrived at by hook or by crook.
Warmists will have to do better than that to be taken seriously here. They need to provide empirical, real world evidence that a change in a tiny trace gas will lead to runaway global warming. Because that is what the AGW debate is about.
If such evidence is not forthcoming, the AGW/CO2 hypothesis fails, and we can begin to address real problems instead of scaring the awakening public by baselessly demonizing “carbon,” which we are made of and which is essential to all life.
Pamela Gray’s comments are on the right track. For answers to the Arctic sea ice puzzle, we should be looking at atmospheric patterns, not a tiny increase in average global temperature.
I have yet to see scientific evidence of a connection between the retreat of sea ice in the period 2005-2007, and AGW. There is evidence, however, that the loss of ice during those years was caused by unusual wind patterns pushing the ice into warmer waters.
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-20071001.html
I expect the alarmists will say that the winds were caused by CO2!
Alano, what is frustrating about so much reportage in the mainstream media about climatology is that they refuse to allow comments, so that every time they report the sky is falling alarmism backed up by palpably absurd and factually incorrect data, they cannot be corrected.
For example, Quote:”and last year saw the ice cap at its lowest level since records began. ”
That claim is completely false. Ignoring the fact that the “fabled Northwest Passage” was open in the late 1930’s and the fact that the records referred to by the AGW alarmists are only some 30 years old (therefore irrelevant in geological or even recent historical terms) this article does not even acknowledge that GLOBAL ice has been constant for the past 30 years and there was less Arctic melt in 2008 than 2007 in spite of wild speculation in the spring and summer of last year that the Arctic ice was going to disappear altogether. We had more ice cover and surely if the AGW alarmists are correct about the feedbacks from low albedo from melting ice, surely the increased ice means higher albedo meaning increased rate of cooling feedbacks and therefore we are headed for a new ice age!!! (assuming that the AGW alarmist science is *irrefutably* correct, of course!)
As for the main reason for this telegraph article, it will be interesting to follow this expedition. How will they know if the ice is getting thinner? Thinner than what? there is no recent baseline from which to compare. Is the ice thinner than 40 years ago? 80 years ago? 150 years ago?
But is it thinner than 2007? probably not, but there is no way to know. Additionally this will not tell us if the ice is going to continue to get thinner, or thicker. But will only be a baseline for the state of a tiny part of the moving and constantly changing ice over successive days.
How is this data to be used? How often will they repeat the expidition to see what direction ice thickness is moving in?
Undoubtedly they will report that the ice is thinner than decades ago, well DUH! what would you expect when we have come out of a little ice age 100 years or so ago to the warmest years in a century up until 1998? We already know that the globe warmed during the 20th century. This will add nothing to the knowledge as to why the earth warmed during that time.
If they did this expedition every year for 100 years, then we would have useful data. As it is they will only produce a partially useful baseline and a lot of alarmist propaganda.
Hey guys, I think I will copy those kind of pages predicting “global warming has stopped” or even “global cooling is on its way” so that we can have a good laugh together in a few years. I already did that, but with letters from “skeptical colleagues” at the time (yeah well folks I’m not that young anymore) – t’was in the early 90ies and I did have a good laugh some ten years afterwards…
This is going to be embarrassing… For skeptics, I mean…
One thing to keep in mind for all the talk of Arctic sea ice thinning and melting is we only have 30 years of good data and a thousand or so years of sparse evidence. It is not unreasonable to expect that during the time of Norse settlement in Greenland that at least the sea ice around Greenland was greatly reduced, but that really tells us nothing about what was happening in Siberia or off the northern Alaskan and Canadian coasts. The alarm on sea ice was of course because after many years of slowly falling ice extent from 1979 to 2006 there was a big decrease in the minimum ice for 2007. All those scaremongers worrying about a tipping point in temperatures had their evidence. Of course the fact that 2008 had more ice kinda messes up the argument. Next fall’s minimum should be interesting to observe.
Grant Hodges (19:28:04)
Thank you, great post.
I would like to add the following as it appears that some of the above have no conception of the word logic :
Websters Dictionary;
PERMANENT= adjective = continuing or enduring without fundamental or marked change. STABLE.
An Iceberg ( which is what the North pole ice sheet is) to be Permanent would have to be Anchored to a fixed (or PERMANENT object ) Now there is no land mass under our iceberg just water, sea water, and like sea water in the rest of our oceans it moves, and above our iceberg we have air, and like the rest of our world where there is air it moves and is called wind, still don’t believe me? well try this simple experiment.
Fill you bathtub with 5-10 inches of water, leave it to settle for an hour, then tale the head of a match and very carefully place it in the middle on top of the water.
This match head represents the polar ice cap the water in the bath represents the worlds oceans, just watch that match head move, it will in 24 hours without any help do 2 or 3 tours of the tub!
Now those that still believe in fairies, go play at the bottom of the garden and leave this site to serious folks.
Alan
Personally, I am most happy for “sceptics” to keep talking about sea ice because these data are irrefutable evidence of a rapidly warming world.
When one reads non sense like that , one can only agree with Dr L.Motl who identifies climate “scientists” as crackpots who would be utter failures in any serious domain of science .
Their followers like this DJ are then of course sub par crackpots that confuse thinking with parroting the Hansens , Manns and similar doom prophets .
Obviously locally melting ice (or freezing ice for that matter) is “irrefutable” proof of nothing and certainly not of a rapidly warming “world” .
If anything and if it was statistically relevant (what it is not because of a ridiculously short time of observation) it would suggest something about the LOCAL fluctuation of oceanic currents .
As the climate video games don’t resolve the oceanic current fluctuations they can say nothing about the rate of local phase changes .
What serves here as “science” is a phase change parametrization and heavy averaging .
Of course extrapolating from a local empirical measure to a global result (like “the whole world is warming”) is only hand waving which is the usual “scientific” method of the warmers and nobody expects better anyway .
If somebody is interested to go a bit deeper in the arctic climate dynamics and the fact that it has nothing to do with “global” factors , there is f.ex Polyakov’s paper : http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~igor/research/amplif/amplif_jul02_2.pdf
A quote :
The ice-extent and fast ice thickness time series display a combination of decadal and multidecadal variability, with lower values prior to the 1920s, in the late 1930s-40s, and in recent decades, and higher values in the 1920s – early 1930s, and in the 1960-70s (Figure 3). This is consistent with the multi-year variability (LFO) evident in SAT records (Figure 1). Analysis of trends in these records shows that they are not statistically significant. Trends for recent decades seem to be larger but because of the fewer degrees of freedom in these shorter time records they are not statistically significant either.
Mary Hinge wrote: “Since Anthony has left the WUWT ship in other crew members hands the ship has been steadily steering away from real science, beyond pseudo science and deeply into the murky realms of conspiracy theory. I suggest Anthony grabs the wheel and steers back to the real world quickly.”
I agree. Anthony, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This blog has the potential to play a big role in the discussions ensuing from AGW, but with the direction it is taking lately it will have nothing to fall back on when some renewed warming kicks in or Arctic Sea Ice level accidentally hits another low. The danger is, when AGW turns out to be a reality, that all this site did was promote inaction and obstruction.
Regarding Arctic Sea Ice extent: Anyone care to make any predictions on what minimum will be in relation to previous years? I’m not an expert – quite the contrary – but I have this feeling it will fall between 2007 and 2008.
And, as I said, the NSIDC actually pointed out the very rapid sea ice increase in their news
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/111008.html
but as it lasted a half month only, I think it is not very relevant, compared to the long and rapid melt.
stephen richards (03:06:56) :
Mary
You are becoming unhinged, i’m afraid. I criticised Anthony for being too much of a ‘news’ cum pseudo science site. Now I believe he is moving more into the climate science mode
Well I am not alone in the view that the quality of this site is declining. From the
‘Ocean acidification and coral’ posting (a very poor quality piece) comes this comment from Paul Clark of ‘Wood For Trees’. His website is an absolute gem and I use it frequently, Anthony also uses his website for a number of topics. This is paul’s comments, in its entirety ( my bold text highlighting):
I would take what Mr Clarke says seriously and I really hope Anthony gets this site back on track.
REPLY: I understand your concern. Part of it has to do with time, I’m exceptionally busy, my business needs attention in these terrible economic times, I have deadlines looming, and the moderation duties are at times overwhelming. I also have been devoting a huge effort into getting the surfacestations project done, rather than posting about it. We are now approaching the 70% mark. News items take less time than analysis pieces. When I have more time, I’ll be able to devote time to blogging on the measurement issues.
There simply is not enough Anthony to go around. – Anthony
Lucy Skywalker (02:22:13) responding to Philip_B (19:46:46) : “Perhaps that’s because, thanks to the special stratospheric warming event, the North Pole has sent its cold surplus down to the UK.”
May I add that another shot of “surplus cold” has moved all the way into Florida. Inland temps tonight could hit the teens north of Tampa and definately into the 20’s even south of Tampa. Luckily I live near the Gulf coast south of Tampa so the water temp will keep me just slightly below the freezing mark for only a short period. I can also add that this will be the third time this year I will experience below freezing temps at my location. My coconut palms are probably not going to make it as they have been overly stressed by the two previous cold snaps. My banana trees likewise. My grandmother who has lived here since 1960 has told me that once there were plenty of coconut palms growing naturally here, now there are none unless you buy one and plant it yourself. Perhaps the canary in the coal mine should be the latitude of survivability for coconut palms.
If the Arctic “new ice/baby ice” is that thin, anyone care to forcast how soon the Russians will send in the icebreakers to prepare for the drilling platforms?
DJ,
Are you asserting that in recent years three was permanant Arctic sea ice?
Additionally, do you know at what temperature sea ice forms?
DJ – “this thread and its defence merely shows a misunderstanding that Arctic sea ice because of geography and climatology retreats much more rapidly in summer than winter in a warming world.”
Has nothing to do with chemistry, and the fact moving saltwater does not freeze easily, or quickly.
Link – http://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=1598
As explained by an 11 year old.
DJ (18:21:21) :
“This is a simple case of geography. Melt ice to a record low summertime extent and you then can freeze a record amount of ice in the subsequent fall. Of course, your replacing metres thick once permanent ice with very thin seasonal ice and as a result the volume is a fraction of what it was.
This change is exactly as expected under global warming and will continue for a period while the Arctic switches from a perennial ice regime to a seasonal ice regime.
DJ, Your claim is absolute BS (Bad Science)
1. Sea ice per definition has no permanent character.
2. Wind and ocean currents break up the ice or pushes it together.
3. Throughout history the sea ice has been growing and melting.
4. Please read this article: http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
5. It has happened before: Quote:
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.”
President of the Royal Society, London, to the Admiralty, 20th November, 1817 [13]
6. I know it is difficult for many people to give up on doctrine, in this case the AGW “religion”, but simply look at the facts.
There is nothing wrong with our climate and if we are not returning into a “Maunder Minimum” condition we can enjoy this beautiful planet and direct our talents to real problems that are in need of a solution. Human induced Global Warming and Climate Change are a HOAX.