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.
Sponsored IT training links:
If hankering after 642-591 preparation then CT0-101 online training is best answer to your problem. Just go through practice questions and pass your 1Y0-A23 exam on first try.
“Greenhouse Theory Disproved a Century Ago”
http://globalwarmingnot.blogtownhall.com/2009/02/03/greenhouse_theory_disproved_a_century_ago.thtml
What do you all think of this analysis of some old research? Is it an anti-Gore/Hansen bomb?
Perhaps of interest is the question of increased ocean salinity and its impact on sea ice. Increased salinity significantly lowers the freezing temperature of water. If oceans have increased salinity due to runoffs, then we would expect less sea ice through time. However, I understand that mainstream science believes that the oceans about 100 million years ago decided that they had the right salinity levels, and annual salt sedimentation on the ocean floors now equal the salt inflow from rivers etc. So no impact on sea ice there. I have seen some AGW arguments that ocean salinity is increasing because of increased evaporation due to higher temperatures. Less often, I have seen arguments that salinity is decreasing as the Greenland glaciers melt. So are salinity levels having an impact on sea ice?
Great ice extent was reported for the winter of 2007-2008. You just don’t read all the headlines 🙂 At that point, it was not at all clear whether the rapid decrease in areal extent and volume (very very important; not covered by your analysis) seen in the summer of 2007 marked a transition point in the long-term decline that has been noted for a number of years. The summer ice of 2008, however, while greater in extent because of the cold preceding winter, melted and declined rapidly. BECAUSE IT’S THIN! So right now, winter ice seems to be on the fence, and with the expected regional cooling over the next decade, perhaps it will hold it’s own. But summer ice may very well have crossed a threshold, in which case we can expect the Arctic oceanography, ecology and economy to undergo some very interesting changes over the next few decades.
Ice cubes in your freezer, and ice cubes in my freezer, are more or less the same (though we have a relatively old fridge). But there are significant differences (dynamic and causative) between permanent, long-term, and summer ice in the Arctic.
Thank you Jeff for your article and many of the resulting posts above. Many of the AGWs do not get that most of the people that write here can agree to some warming. But is it short term trends, cyclic anomalies or even abnormal? I have read on paleo-anthropology and archeology for nearly 50 years now. The Gulf of Mexico has been 2 meters higher based on shells and human occupation sites well inland now that were shoreline then. The arctic circle has been much more occupied or settled in the past, because it was so much warmer then(=less ice). Humans live where it is easiest to live, and migrate away when food sources diminish or are harder to aquire. Everywhere a glacier retreats, or shoreline ice melts, we find traces of human occupation or growing plants. I know the AGWs can’t see what this means, but it is evident to many. The fraction of a degree change we might have and millimeters of sea level change can only be viewed as well within the noise of the natural variations that occur. The mysterious deification of CO2-GHG as the omnipotent ruler of climate says all that need be said about that blind-sighted theory. There is nothing abnormal or unprecidented going on other than those making money by scaring people and legislating taxes on emissions of a beneficial trace gas.
tom (09:35:28)
“Where is the tipping point between non-toxic doses and levels which are too high to support animal life?”
The tipping point for a grand mass extinction of most life on the Earth is somewhere for the sake of informal discussion about 100ppm to 175ppm less than the present levels. We live in an inter-glacial period that is extraordinary with respect to the rest of the ~542 million year period of the Phanerozoic Eon. The temperatures and carbon dioxide levels are now the lowest they have been since the Late Devonian major mass extinction event.
By contrast, the Earth has typically been 10C to 12C warmer than at present, and the carbon dioxide levels have typically ranged between around 1200ppm to 4800ppm, with multicellular life deveolping in the early Phanerozoic around 5000 to 7000ppm.
In other words, we are presently living in conditions within 0C to 2C and ~110-175ppm of carbon dioxide minimums in which major mass extinctions occurred in the past. Many types of plants such as grasses cannot thrive or even survive with reductions of carbon dioxide to levels of half or less of the present amounts. We are also presently around 10C in temperature and 1000ppm to 4200ppm in carbon dioxide less than the environmental conditions normal for most life on the Earth.
Perhaps you should consider the fact that the past 600 million years of experience shows us that the only tipping point we risk is having too little carbon dioxide and too low of a mean temperature for the biota to survive and thrive.
If you want something environmental to worry about, you may want to find a replacement for fossil fuels to maintain higher carbon dioxide levels to avert a major extinction event and a means of eliminating persistant plastics pollution.
Pamela Gray (06:48:17) :
Understanding Arctic ocean currents and prevailing wind patterns as well as weather patterns both short and long term, will go a long way in helping you understand sea ice behavior.
Thank you Pamela for introducing those facts once again.
For the warmers and their models; any loss of Arctic Sea Ice does not automatically evidence of Global Warming nor is it conformation that any guesses made by models are accurate. If anything, what Pamela provided, is evidence of what the models are not capable of regarding the Arctic Sea Ice volume or extent. Models cannot generate accurate projections of all natural influences. Hence, they are a work in progress. A ‘tool’ that may someday help us to better understand the climate. Nothing more.
Ok, ok, I’m almost convinced. Seems the majority here feel carbon dioxide is a harmless gas.
The only way to settle this is through scientific experiment. Those who feel carbon dioxide is benevolent, harmless, etc. here’s a good way to convince all who feel otherwise. Lock yourselves in air tight rooms and start breathing. Just breathe, till all of the oxygen has been used up and all that’s left is carbon dioxide. If you can survive this condition for 10 min., we’ll all be convinced. If you die, we will all know for sure that carbon dioxide is a poison.
I believe it to be a poison so, I’ll sit and wait for all responses (if any.) 😉
Robert Bateman; I am familiar with OSHA guidelines. Being a tradesman, I received extensive OSHA training.
One can say that all gasses displace oxygen. Perform the above mentioned experiment. Let me know how you do. 🙂
The main by-products of human respiration are water and carbon dioxide. I guess that means water is a pollutant as well.
Carbon dioxide is an essential gas. Plants cannot live without it. Our food chain, and life on this planet as we know it, depends upon carbon dioxide.
Plants give off oxygen as a waste product. Does that make oxygen a pollutant? Oxygen is a highly corrosive element. One of the great die-offs in earth’s history is believed to have been caused by the oxygen released through photosynthesis. Oxygen free radicals believe to cause cancer and other diseases. In high concentrations, oxygen gas is explosive Perhaps we should regulate oxygen as well.?
D.Patterson;
Thank you for your eloquent presentation of facts. Truly enlightening for me, at least. Your answer captured what I’ve been saying all along, with one difference; if people want to categorize carbon dioxide as being bad and if that categorization leads to environmental improvements, so what?
I am doing something. I’ve started a company specializing in the reduction of energy use in buildings and renewable energy systems installations. I am also working on a wind turbine design.
tom (11:08:54) :
Tom, I don’t see anyone here who has argued that a 100 percent carbon dioxide atmosphere is deadly to humans and other species of animals. Since you are familiar with OSHA, you should already see that the combustion of the entire remaining reserves of fossil fuels is incapable of poisoning humans with carbon dioxide. There just aren’t enough gigatons of carbon dioxide present in those fossil fuels to increase the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide much more than is present at this time. To do so would require the reconversion of most of the world’s carbonate sedimentary roks in the Earth’s crust deposited there by Nature for the past 600 million years or so into atmospheric carbon dioxide. If anything, the plant kingdom is currently deprived of carbon dioxide, and the animal kingdom is deprived of a more diverse and prolific plant kingdom who would thrive on the carbon dioxide.
tom (11:08:54) :
CO2 is Oxygen to plants. Most or our crops would not be doing as well as they are without the current atmospheric levels. In fact…. an increased elevation in atmospheric CO2 would help most crops even more. We are far, far from levels that would be harmful to man.
Heck…… even in a ‘controlled’ breathing situation…. the Navy permits up to 1000 ppm of CO2 in compressed air Scuba tanks. But wait…. The US Navy standard for air on submarines is 8000 ppm.
But…. you call it a poison. Well…. we breath Oxygen. Pure oxygen is harmful to man. So do you suggest we start reducing the poison Oxygen from the atmosphere? Doing so, after all, would eventually eliminate any potential for future anthropogenic global warming.
tom:
The first law of toxicology is, “the poison is in the dose”.
Try another experiment: drink 10 gallons of water in one sitting – it’ll kill you.
Oxygen comprises almost 30% of the atmosphere, whereas CO2 comprises a mere 0.04% – almost 1000 times less.
Plants actually start dying off at below 260ppm, which is just slightly below pre-industrial levels – so if we cut CO2 levels by half we’ll also be killing our food supply.
Flanagan (00:09:04) :
WRT the initial post: I think the NSIDC gave some explanation as to why most rapid decreases/increases appear simultaneously during the long-trend melt. And I don’t know any source (that you don’t cite, either) about the fact that 30-years long trends appeared “regularly” in the past in similar conditions.
Arctic Decadal and Interdecadal Variability
Igor V. Polyakov
International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Mark A. Johnson
Institute of Marine Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Atmospheric and oceanic variability in the Arctic shows the existence of several oscillatory modes. The decadal-scale mode associated with the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and a low-frequency oscillation (LFO) with an approximate time scale of 60-80 years, dominate. Both modes were positive in the 1990s, signifying a prolonged phase of anomalously low atmospheric sea level pressure and above normal surface air temperature in the central Arctic. Consistent with an enhanced cyclonic component, the arctic anticyclone was weakened and vorticity of winds became positive. The rapid reduction of arctic ice thickness in the 1990s may be one manifestation of the intense atmosphere and ice cyclonic circulation regime due to the synchronous actions of the AO and LFO. Our results suggest that the decadal AO and multidecadal LFO drive large amplitude natural variability in the Arctic making detection of possible long-term trends induced by greenhouse gas warming most difficult.
Why are we having missing data from Jan 08??One would think in this day and age of computers we would all the data possible.That is unless one,or should I say all the global warming crowd which is getting thinner now, only want to get the reading they want.One other thing .Why hasn’t our new president,Obama, been to Kentucky to visit those people who are without power and food or shelter??? My guess is it doesn’t fit well with the climate change lies they are spreading.Nothing more than goverment control.
I expect a race to answer tom’s experiment; here’s my entry:
Displace the oxygen in a room with carbon dioxide, and the subject dies.
Displace it with nitrogen, and the subject dies.
And this “toxic gas” is about 80% of the air we breathe! Yikes! 🙂
tom:
I might add that CO2, unlike ‘pollutants’, is completely colorless, odorless and tasteless. You have no way of knowing that it’s there without some instrument to measure it with.
D. Patterson, as a paleontologist, I can only ask where on Earth you got those numbers and interpretations?? We have no “tipping point for a grand mass extinction”. Any such points depend entirely on the conditions under which the ecosystems under consideration evolved, the type of disturbance or perturbation, and the rate of the perturbation. Anyone who claims to understand the complex relationships among these factors is a charlatan (and yes, I would include fellow scientists here). It is precisely one of the most pressing questions that we are currently trying to understand. I am not saying that the tipping points don’t exist; they almost assuredly do (see here). But to even begin to claim that one understands the relationship between atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and ecosystem tipping points, and that we are currently in a safe zone, is nonsensical.
You simply cannot equate past conditions for life with the current ones. The Earth has been considerably warmer, and considerably colder, in the past, including the Phanerozoic. But, the rates of change of climate that we can measure in the distant geological record are all far slower than the rates observed today, and slower than those predicted to occur in the near future. (This is a simple function of the resolution of the geological record). Whether many organisms will be able to adapt to such rapidly changing conditions is unknown. Some undoubtedly will, but many others will be critically endangered. And, and this goes for so many others reading this blog, WHY do you think that predicted warmer conditions, if accurate, will be fine for humans??! Our ancient ancestors being able to migrate back and forth with glaciers and so on is totally irrelevant to the modern world. The human population is immensely greater than it was back then, resources are more limited, and the global population is, for all intents and purposes, globalized. Simplistic analogies with the past will not serve us well.
tom
You don’t die due to excess carbon dioxide at the levels we’re talking about here i.e. well, well less than 1% of air.
You die due to lack of oxygen in your experiment, if you die at all. You need oxygen to convert the food you eat into energy your body can use (the relevant cycles called glycolysis and the citric acid cycle/Krebs cycle for the biochemists amongst you).
Carbon MONOXIDE is a poison because it competes with oxygen for the haemoglobin protein which transports oxygen from the lungs (capturing the air we breathe) to the tissues, thus preventing oxygen doing its job where it’s needed.
Carbon dioxide is dissolved within blood as bicarbonate and diffuses across the lungs to be exhaled having been produced as a by product of the energy generation process.
The experiment you need to do to prove carbon DIOXIDE is a poison would be to create an environment with 20% oxygen and whatever levels of carbon dioxide you want to test, with the rest being nitrogen.
IMHO
DJ:
Any increase over the summer minimum is, by definition, seasonal ice. Conversely, the ‘permanent’ ice extent cannot, by definition, be greater than the summer minimum, and is probably considerably less.
Regular reader, infrequent commenter, hydropower engineer with over 40 years, experience in all continents except Antarctica. (If it warms up quickly enough I might just get a shot at that too).
Tom (11:08:54) – your comments are breathtakingly [snip]
Reply: Nice pun there, but too harsh to get past the moderator ~ charles the moderator
I’ve not had a chance to check whether someone has already posted a similar remark, but I am very interested to see what happens in the Barents Sea over the next week or so. This together with the Okhotsk sea the main areas where sea ice is missing by comparison with the long term average. So, if it fills up, we should start to see the 2009 line begin to converge again with the long term average.
It does seem odd that the data just seems to have stood still for the last few days – just as temps in that area have taken a dive. I noticed the same thing happening when Hudson Bay suddenly filled up earlier on in the season.
Whatever the case however, both Hudson Bay and the Barents Sea have been late at best this season, which may lead to less thickness before the melt onset. It may be the case of course that Barents Sea fails to catch up before the melt. The Barents Sea is of course in the firing line of the Gulf Stream, so tends to be the area of the Arctic Ocean with least winter ice pack.
Ben
tom (11:08:54) :
“The only way to settle this is through scientific experiment. Those who feel carbon dioxide is benevolent, harmless, etc. here’s a good way to convince all who feel otherwise. Lock yourselves in air tight rooms and start breathing. Just breathe, till all of the oxygen has been used up and all that’s left is carbon dioxide. If you can survive this condition for 10 min., we’ll all be convinced. If you die, we will all know for sure that carbon dioxide is a poison.”
Have you never heard of oxygen narcosis Tom?
DaveE.
By my calculations, 2008 Global temps were only .092 degrees above normal. Is that correct?
http://www.remss.com/data/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_2.txt
Peter (the other one):
What is the temporal resolution of the measurements in the distant geological records? How can we be sure that cyclical changes of the order of a degree over a few decades (or even centuries) haven’t happened innumerable times in the geological past?
tom (11:25:13) :
“D.Patterson;
Thank you for your eloquent presentation of facts. Truly enlightening for me, at least. Your answer captured what I’ve been saying all along, with one difference; if people want to categorize carbon dioxide as being bad and if that categorization leads to environmental improvements, so what?”
Because there is substantial reason to believe categorizing carbon dioxide as bad for the environment in a best case scenario will result in extensive environmental damage and human death, while in a remote worst case scenario doing so might result in contributing to all of the harm to be expected with an early return of the ice age. A most likely scenario is that not focusing on carbon dioxide can only help and avoid the substantial harm resulting from ill conceived responses to an illusory threat.