Guest Post by Steven Goddard
The Catlin Arctic Survey has generated quite a bit of discussion, more because of the difficulties they have faced than because of the scientific merit of their expedition. Their home page is covered with testimonials about the importance of measuring “ice decline” and raising “climate change awareness.”
Normally a scientific experiment will start out with a neutral approach, where the conclusions are derived from the data, rather than arriving at conclusions prior to attempting to collect data. The appearance of presumption presented on their web site that they are measuring “ice decline,” could easily be interpreted to be putting the cart before the horse.
It is also difficult to understand how they could be measuring “ice decline” from a single set of data points taken at minus 40C, measured over an eight week period.
Are they going to come back next year and measure again? Not likely, and even if they did the ice would not be in the same place next year – as it is blown around by the wind. There is little question that the ice will continue to thicken over the next few weeks, as it normally does not start to melt near the pole until late June or early July. Fortunately we do have an objective and consistently reliable data source to work with, from that same region.
The US Army keeps a set of buoys on the ice which continuously monitor ice thickness, temperature and location year round. These buoys maintain themselves with a minimum of trauma, twittering, publicity, rescue expeditions and frostbite – and are normally able to provide more than one year of data.
The Google Earth map below shows the attempted Catlin route in green markers, and the Army buoys in yellow. The buoys are marked with approximate thickness of the ice, which I estimated based on the water depth where the temperature rapidly drops below the freezing point of seawater (minus 2C.)
As an example, I estimated the thickness at buoy 2007J as 3.5 metres, based on the graph below. Above -350 cm, the water temperature drops off quickly below -2C, which means that it is frozen.
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/buoy_plots/2007J.gif
All five buoys show water temperatures indicating ice thickness in the range of 3-4 metres. Catlin is attempting to take another 10,000 or so measurements on the shifting, moving ice they are trying to travel across. While that data may be useful in understanding the local behaviour of the ice, it likely will provide little information about long-term ice trends, unless the same measurements are taken on a consistent basis over many years. You can also see in the 2007J graph above that the ice has thickened at least half a metre since March, 2008.
In most fields of science, that is considered an increase rather than a “decline.”
From the Army web site:
Data policy: We encourage the use of all data on this web site. Please reference any data use as:
Perovich, D.K., J.A. Richter-Menge, B. Elder, K. Claffey, and C. Polashenski, Observing and understanding climate change: Monitoring the mass balance, motion, and thickness of Arctic sea ice, http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/sid/IMB/
“C Colenaty (23:58:27) :
hengav (22:12:32) :
You say that the tem is heading SOUTH??? Do you have any notion as to why they are heading south when heir objective is to each the north pole?”
Actually, they are not “heading South”. They are making negative progress heading North. They keep walking North, but the ice flow they are on is moving South. They’re just not walking fast enough.
JimB
The first 100 cm shows a very constant temp. Doesn’t that mean that the first meter is above the ice giving a thickness of 350-100 cm (roughly avg)?
Dorlomin
decline of the age and percentage of the multiyear ice…
??How does multiyear ice decline in age??
I’m looking forward to this autumn’s ice extent minimum figures to help shut up some of the nonsense talked about arctic ice.
Looks like they’ve resupplied
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/7952165.stm
The two from Devon are nearish neighbours of mine.
Pen Hadows departure was greted by this headline in the local paper
‘Local Dad heads for Arctic’
Quite what the scientific point is though I don’t know. Pens motives are no doubt honourable but one of them will be that he loves going to the Arctic.
TonyB
Per this article : http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102066621&ft=1&f=1003 there is a ‘growing consensus’ that the ice is melting in Antarctica. How does a consensus grow? I thought when you had a consensus you had everyone’s agreement already? Damn semantics!
From Bloomberg. com March 18:
“Polar Explorers Run Short of Food; Weather Stops Supply Flights
By Alex Morales
Three U.K. explorers bound for the North Pole on a scientific expedition to study global warming said they are close to running out of food after “brutal” weather conditions halted three attempts to fly in supplies.
The support team hopes to decide within hours on when it can send an airplane to land on nearby ice with provisions, Tori Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Catlin Arctic Survey in London, said in an interview today.
“We’re hungry, the cold is relentless, our sleeping bags are full of ice,” expedition leader Pen Hadow said in a statement e-mailed yesterday by his team.”
Gee, it’s March, it’s the high Arctic and it is bloody cold. Who knew?
Dorlomin (00:45:41)
The multiyear ice is thickening. Wow, the things you learn! I thought that it was the decline of the age and percentage of the multiyear ice that was causing the declining thickness of the Arctic ice cap, now I find it is actualy the multiyear ice that is meant to be thinning.
Wow, an overall decline in ice extent for a number of years, along with a large decline in 2007 mainly due to ocean currents and winds, and the age and percentage of multiyear ice is STILL recovering less than two years later? That is truly alarming, Dorlomin. Thank you for bringing that stunning bit of science to our attention.
We were blind, but now can see. Praise be to Gore.
What’s happening at Cryosphere Today ?? Anyone know ?? No Arctic sea ice extent update since March 14th. Just when it looked like Greenland was going to be joined to Iceland. When did that last happen ??
From a science standpoint, they are wasting millions of dollars for nothing, as Anthony explains in the post. It’s too bad the money could not have been used on something better. Another sad part of “climate science.”
Does anyone know how they’re planning to analyse their data once they’ve collected it?
Perhaps if they published their algorithm whilst they’re still collecting their data it could be debugged by the time they need to use it.
Such an approach might even give them some credibility back.
These Catlin guys remind me of the time members of the “Christian Peace-keeper Teams” entered Iraq on their own on about 2003-2004 when the post invasion violence was at its near peak. They were there to find and collect evidence of war atrocities and human rights violations they were sure were being conducted by the United States military. It just had to be happening.
Sure enough, the team found powerful and undeniable evidence that both war atrocities and human rights violations were indeed taking place.
At least one of them had been beheaded, and another had to be rescued in an armed raid.
If you are out there wondering who did the beheading, it’s probably a fair bet you are also convinced AGW is real.
I know nothing about the intracies of measuring ice thickness. However, as a scientist, I do know that, on occasions, it is highly desirable to measure the same phemenon with different techniques at the same time. Yes, there are all sorts of high tech ways of measuring ice thickness. But what the Catlin scientists are doing, (which is, I believe, unique,) is to measure the ice thickness by radar, and then measure the same ice thickness by taking a wacking great auger, drilling an actual hole in the ice, and then directly measuring how thick it is. Does this combination of techniques add significantly to our scientific knowledge? I have absolutely no idea whatsoever. But the three people who are out there on the ice clearly think it does. And I believe they are absolutely correct.
philincalifornia (04:39:32) :
They’re updating images in the archive, the 3/17 image looks decent, but other recent images are awful. The 3/18 image shows Hudson’s Bay completely open.
The images are formed from combining swaths of image data that are tangent to some high latitude. This means the data furthest from the poles has the least redundancy and that’s where the bogus open water shows up.
Perhaps the images are so bad they aren’t putting them up on the home page.
Images for dates mentioned above:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/ARCHIVE/20090314.jpg
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/ARCHIVE/20090317.jpg
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/ARCHIVE/20090318.jpg
All the images show Greenland is connected to Iceland by ice, exactly what are you looking for?
OT, but please have a look at this: <a href=”http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/5015003/Sacked-executive-discriminated-against-due-to-belief-in-climate-change.html”. Many earlier threads/posts have discussed AGW in terms of religious belief. Looks like the great and good are showing their slips at last!
Whoops, bad HTML.
OT, but please have a look at this: <a href=”http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/5015003/Sacked-executive-discriminated-against-due-to-belief-in-climate-change.html”. Many earlier threads/posts have discussed AGW in terms of religious belief. Looks like the great and good are showing their slips at last!
Whoops, bad HTML.
OT, but please have a look at this: Many earlier threads/posts have discussed AGW in terms of religious belief. Looks like the great and good are showing their slips at last!
perhaps the images doesnt show what they want them to show ;-).
Dorlomin,
The large decline in multiyear ice which occurred during the winter of 2007-2008, was due to winds which pushed much of the ice out into the North Atlantic, where it melted. At the end of the 2007 summer, there was ice covering the North Pole – yet after another winter in March, 2008 the North Pole had only first year ice.
This winter, the winds are different, as indicated by the buoy drift maps and the fact that the Catlin explorers are being blown the other direction (which is obviously not what they were expecting.)
BTW – NASA has excellent technology for measuring ice thickness from satellites across the entire Arctic.
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/200804_Figure6.png
Anothe rway to measure ice thickness is
And a final try! AGW views amounted to a philosophical belief .
Aron,
You were asking in the modeling thread
Aron (13:41:10) :
Steven,
Where can I get data for concentrations of CO2 in cities/urban areas as opposed to global figures?
Thanks.
Try the Beck website
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2_supp.htm
There is also a thread in Lucy’s blog:
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=90
There seems to be a campaign of mindless negativism on this web site, to say the least, and this blogpost by Steven Goddard is a good example of it.
Goddard says that measurement of ice thickness along the path of the expedition cannot provide data that would track the time dependence of the ice thickness and buoys are better for that. This is a kind of straw man argument, because the expedition obviously was not intended to get the time dependence of the ice thickness from the measurements that will be made. This type of argument is used to make it seem as if the scientists who are working on this problem are fools and blockheads.
It is known that the satellite data from which we get ice extent data has interpretation problems, and that the algorithms to calculate the ice statistics have needed revision over the years.
Skeptics on this web site often talk of the need for real world data. From my reading of the news article, the purpose of this expedition is to provide real world data with which to calibrate satellite measurements.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7917266.stm
“…It is intended to give scientists the very latest “ground truth”, to better constrain their models and their interpretation of the observations coming from satellites. ..”
The data from buoys comes only from multi year ice blocks which drift around in the ocean and cannot provide the kind of cross sectional data that the expedition can supply, to calibrate the satellite measurements.
I’m sorry, EJ (23:34:31) :, but you understand neither sociology nor science. I’m not changing your grade.
mr.goddard:
i’m 64 years old, spanish speaking and for me the internet is a wild country! the link i added was about the diference betwen the report of andy rivkin about the melting of antarctic ice (1000+ years!!) and reuters (the we are near the tipping point!!).
the new study posted says the “melting” will take hundreds of years or thousands.
“Does this combination of techniques add significantly to our scientific knowledge? I have absolutely no idea whatsoever. But the three people who are out there on the ice clearly think it does. And I believe they are absolutely correct.”
HUH?
I would have great confidence in those numbers since the army needs to know the exact thickness of the ice before they puncture a hole with the tower of a submarine.