Something odd is going on at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Look at this image:
The image is directly from NSIDC’s Artic Sea Ice News page today. Of course there’s the large drop of about 1 million sqkm of sea ice in the last couple of days that is puzzling.
If this were real, we’d also expect to see something also on Cryosphere today plots, and while that group does not do an extent graph, they do make an areal graph. It “should” show something that reflects the drop but instead goes up. WUWT?
While ice extent and area are not exactly the same, they are closely related. So one would expect to see at least some correlation. But we have zero. I suppose there could be a wind issue that is compacting sea ice, but surely there would be something in the area graph.
Something seems not right, and NSIDC owes the public an explanation as they did for a previous drop in extent change from January 15 to 26 which is currently in their Feb 3rd news release.
h/t to Joe D’Aleo and many WUWT commenters.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It appears that Cryosphere Today posts data to their coverage vs. time plots about a week after the fact, that is why it is likely not showing on the plots on their site yet.
Also, in Cryosphere Today, my feeling is that there are frequent graphical or satellite errors. Sometimes they are corrected for, sometimes they are not. I do not follow the NSIDC data as much, so I do not know their patterns.
Is an agenda at play? I don’t know.
Look at the maps yourself:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/cgi-bin/seaice-monitor.cgi
Compare Feb 15 to Feb 10.
-Aleutian Islands (north) less ice today
-Eastern Siberia Sea not much net change
-Barent’s Sea ice seems to have grown slightly
-Eastern Greenland slightly less today
-Western Greenland slightly more today
-Northern Quebec scantly more today
[snip]
Readers,
Use these 2 sites:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/cgi-bin/seaice-monitor.cgi
and
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
[snip]
“Are we perhaps seeing athe result of satellite repositioning in response to the latest “incident”?”
For the benefit of future readers: I suspect he’s referring to the collision of an Iridium and russian satellite last week.
Make sure someone downloads their data.
LOL! Maybe Obama and Holdren are getting ready for stage 2 of their Power Grab.
***Breaking News*** CHINA: RICE BAG FALLEN OVER! SITUATION UNCLEAR!… it is daily data… if there is an error, the error will be corrected. Your minds have to be extremely twisted to see an agenda.
BTW: no UAH temperature blog entry in this month at Watts Up? An agenda?
REPLY: RSS was posted, I just haven’t gotten around to posting up UAH yet. I have a life outside of this blog. Which is why it has now been all day since I have been able to comment. – Anthony
Eyeballing the graph, ice extent is about the same as it was back on January 10, 2009.
Now compare January 10 to February 15 here:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/cgi-bin/seaice-monitor.cgi
I rest my case.
tarpon
Photos show no such shifting.
They screwed up.
Peter Hearnden
It gets down to credibility. What would happen if the Commerce Dept managed their data that way?
These climate departments screw up the data more often then they get it right. It’s a bleeping circus!
Image at NSICD has now been corrected.
Sad though it is to admit, I follow the NSIDC ona daily basis! Some may now understand why I have been drawing attention to NSIDC on other recent topics asking if anyone knew what was going on. I have tried to contact NSIDC regarding the sudden re-alignment of the up spike shown last week which was very quickly smoothed down the way. No response to date.
This sudden ice loss shown today though is a complete joke! Just yesterday all was well in the Arctic (albeit the line looked suspiciously close to the 06/07 line). But today another (this time) major re-alignment down the way. Has anyone noticed how during the freeze season, the re-alignments are always down and during the summer melt season the down spikes are never re-aligned up the way? I personally find this very odd – a simple law of averages would suggest there’s something a bit fishy about that alone!
I have also checked archive temperatures on “Wettercentral Top Karten” for the affected areas for the past week. There is no way that temperatures have been anywhere near the values required to melt that volume of sea ice.
I smell a rat!
Ben
Appears they’ve taken their fiction off the internet:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Valentine’s Day & President’s Day together give gov’t & university workers a three-day weekend. Is anyone minding the store? Or maybe NSIDC is too busy gearing up for a visit by Pres Obama tomorrow; he’s to be in Denver; maybe hoping for a little show-and-tell?
Do all entities share data from a single satellite or do they all have their own satellites providing imagery/data? For example, do JAXA & NSIDC each have their own satellites or does a single satellite send each the same data?
Whatever the case, NSIDC has got a problem. They’re showing the sudden appearance of large swaths of open water (noted quite accurately in several previous comments).
Climate satellites colliding – LOL!
Can’t say I’d blame them for trying. Those bloody satellites haven’t quite been delivering the data they want to see.
OT but Sky & Telescope magazine, March 2009 has an interesting article “Should we blame the SUN for Global Warming?”, also the main front page story.
On page 32, one can read: “The Little Ice Age can be explained in the models through a combination of the fairly intense volcanic activity and the relatively low solar output”, says climatologist Michael Mann (Penn State University). “When you decrease solar output by the amount we think took place during the Maunder Minimum, the models predict that has enough influence on the North Atlantic jet stream to cool parts of Europe a couple of degrees Celsius, even though the that same change in solar output cooled global temperatures by only a tenth as much”.
Interesting, I thought the Little Ice Age didn’t happen according to Mann and his hockey stick?
The graph on the NSIDC website has just changed in the last few minutes, it is now 19:30 GMT and I last checked half an hour ago. Most of the drop has been removed and it almost looks as if they are now using the plot of a couple of days ago. No comment on the site yet though.
Kindest Regards
The data has been fixed and updated. I guess it was a problem.
just me (11:11:42) :
***Breaking News*** CHINA: RICE BAG FALLEN OVER! SITUATION UNCLEAR!… it is daily data… if there is an error, the error will be corrected. Your minds have to be extremely twisted to see an agenda.
BTW: no UAH temperature blog entry in this month at Watts Up? An agenda?
That’s just the point! It is NOT daily data when it constantly being “re-aligned”. Now, I know I am unable to prove this to you because NSIDC doesn’t allow access to yesterday’s record. I can assure you though, that yesterday the graph showed almost an exact tracking of the 2006/07 line and the satellite image did NOT show the massive areas of melting ice shown today. Last week a similar (albeit less extreme) situation occurred. There was an upspike (not nearly as impressive as the current down spike) with relative ice growth shown particularly in the Barents Sea. That up spike was quickly adjusted down the way a few days later so that it no longer appeared on the image. I might understand it if the up spike appeared to be followed by a down spike but no, just a complete wiping off the record. Let’s see what happens with this down spike. Will it stay or will it go? All things being equal, it should go and it should also be wiped from the record because it is clear (see my previous post) that all this sea ice can not have melted since yesterday!
Ben
Anthony,
We’re looking into it. For the moment, we’ve removed the data from the timeseries plot.
You need to remember that this is near real-time data and there can be data dropouts and bad data due to satellite issues. While the processing is automatic, the QC is partly manual. Thus errors do happen from time to time and one shouldn’t draw any dramatic conclusions from recent data.
I’m not sure why you think things like this are worth blogging about. Data is not perfect, especially near real-time data. That’s not news.
Walt Meier
Research Scientist
NSIDC
ps – FYI, the JAXA data is from a different sensor, so it is not consistent with our data, but it provides a good independent check. If the JAXA data does not show a dramatic change while the NSIDC data does (or vice versa), then it’s likely an issue of missing data or bad data.
Pierre — If it was so easy for us to figure out they screwed up, why wasn’t it easy for them? And if they knew, why didn’t they put up a simple message that they screwed up and will have to get back when fixed.
Surly they could see the curves didn’t add up from a simple deduction standpoint.
It’s odd the data consumers are the ones finding the screw ups.
One thing I noticed watching the AMSR-E ice chart that Mr. Watts has a link to, is that every single time the current trend line is about to cross the “high” 2003 line, the slope instantly drops to zero, or negative. I’m sure its a coincidence, but just watching the curve while it was increasing last week approaching the magical “blue line”, I predicted a sudden drop in ice, and lo and behold it occured.
Looks like it was an error. It’s all fixed now.
I still stand by my prediction posted in another thread. Extent will grow to normal levels and thickness around the edges will be resistant to summer melt, especially if the wind continues to compact.
Anthony:
This is OT but I have a question. George Will wrote a piece recently attacking climate hysteria. Will’s piece was itself attacked on Nate Silver’s site 538.com. I know it is a political site, but that is where I saw the claims made. Silver showed a series of graphs showing constant, steep global warming occurring for about 100 years. What is the problem, as you see it, with those graphs???
Jim
REPLY: You are right it is OT, I don’t have enough time in my life to keep up with all manners of external opinon, nor do I care what Will thinks about 538.com. – Anthony
I’m curious if there were other times when there was an error in calculating ice areas and if so, did the areas incorrectly decrease or increase?