Guest post by Steven Goddard
The WUWT Arctic Ice Thickness Survey has been conducted from the comfort of a warm living room over the last half hour, without sponsors, excessive CO2 emissions or hypothermia. The data is collected from the US military web site http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil. All of the active military buoys show significant thickening ice over the past six months to a year, as seen below.
Location of Catlin team relative to buoy 2008D and the North Pole
Buoy 2008B has thickened by more than half a metre since last autumn, and is more than 3 metres thick.
2008C also shows thickening by more than half a metre since last autumn, and is nearly 4 metres thick.
2008D has not been updated since early February, but showed thickening and is 3.5 metres thick. It is close to the Catlin team position.
2007J has thickened more than half a metre, and is nearly 4 metres thick.
2006C has thickened by nearly a full metre over the past year, and is more than 3 metres thick
UPDATE: The military site also has graphs which are supposed to show depth. It appears that many of these are broken, which is why I used the more reliable temperature graphs. The depth at which the ice drops below the freezing point of seawater (-2C) is of course the bottom of the ice. You can’t have water in a liquid state below it’s freezing point.
Some of the buoys have reliable depth data, and they correspond closely to the temperature data – for example 2007J which shows 400cm for both.
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/buoy_plots/ice2007J.gif
http://imbcrrel.usace.army.mil/buoy_plots/2007J.gif
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Aren’t satellites neat? Now all we need is a team to go to the buoys and confirm the measurements …
Next you will be trying to tell us the satellite hot spot signature predicted by all the GCMs is missing, not as some have suggested, stolen by skeptics.
Bruce,
The freezing point of the seawater is -2C, as you can see in the graphs. That is where the temperature slope breaks from vertical.
Steven Goddard (09:12:37) :
It would seem sensible to use the feezing point to determine the bottom of the sea ice, but then perhaps not…
There was an interesting article in last week’s Science – KEN GOLDEN PROFILE: Cold Equations link here – http://www.math.utah.edu/~golden/News_articles/Science_April_3_2009_Golden_Profile.pdf
This suggests minus 5C as a Phase transition temperature, above which the ice is increasingly permeable. I’m not suggesting you are wrong – I haven’t had time to think it through. Apologies for a ‘post-and-run’ but i need to go cook supper.
Interesting article at NASA. It says, “much of the atmospheric warming observed in the Arctic since 1976 may be due to changes in tiny airborne particles called aerosols.” The article goes on to posit that most of the decrease in aerosols is due to more stringent environmental regulations.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/warming_aerosols_prt.htm
Steven, did you at least shiver a little bit as you post this? We don’t want the Catlin crew to feel, well, foolish or anything.
Bill (at 9:03):
The politicians/enviromentalists will simply replace AGW with AGC (anthropogenic global cooling) as the nest great bogey man which must be fixed NOW or life as we know it will be over, and then continue on their merry way attempting to take full control over every aspect of all of our lives.
It’s nauseating to hear all the alarmists droning on about how if the ice cap at the north pole melts then the feedback from the open water will boil the planet! However, I’ve never seen any actual analysis on what the magnitude of the effect would actually be, notably also taking into account the fact that open ocean cools faster than ice covered ocean!
So I’ve taken a whack at it! I’m sure there are some small holes that could be picked in the approach (such as not taking into account whether or not the Arctic is more or less cloudier than the rest of the planet) but at the end of the day I don’t think this would change the overall picture much!
To begin, let’s figure out how much extra radiation would be absorbed into the Arctic ocean as a percent of the total radiation striking the Earth’s surface.
The Earth’s appears as a disc to incoming solar radiation. The portion hitting the Arctic Circle at Equinox is represented by the chord as defined by the latitude of the Arctic Circle at 66.561 degrees.
(180+2 * 66.561) /360*pi+ cos(66.561) * sin(66.561)
1 – —————————————————- pi
= 0.014
The current minimum ice extent (2008) was about 5 million sq. km. which occurs around Equinox. This represents just under 25% of the Arctic Circle area. Therefore the “melt area” in question represents 0.0035 of the total incoming radiation to the Earth.
So lets say this minimum ice “disappears” completely for the full 3 months centred on the Equinox. This means the total annual incoming radiation potentially affected represents 0.000875 of the earth’s total ANNUAL incoming surface radiation budget.
Ice albedo is 0.35. The minimum angle of incidence of incoming radiation affecting the melt area in question is likely to be on the order of 80 degrees at midday (corresponding to the average latitude of the melt area in question). If we average this with the 90 degrees realized at the start and end of the day we get an average angle of incidence of 85 degrees. The albedo of water at this angle is about 0.40 which corresponds to a 14% increase in radiative absorption over the equivalent area covered by ice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo
This means the total change to the Earth’s annual surface absorbed radiation budget would be on the order of 0.0001225 or 0.01225%.
Wow! If we just look at the potential HEATING impact of the ice melt, it just makes me want to run and turn up my air conditioner to full blast!!
Now let’s look at the potential cooling impact.
The 5 million square miles of melt area represents about 1% of the Earth’s total surface area. If we normalize this to the 3 months we get 0.25% of annual cooling from the Earth’s surface. The loss of sea ice should increase the transfer out of heat energy by at least 100 W/m2 in the Arctic. This compares to a global average of about 500W/m2.
http://seis.natsci.csulb.edu/rmorris/sic/sicins.htm
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/Kiehl_Trenberth-1997_Fig7.jpg
So the overall effect on annual heat loss would be on the order of 0.05% or 0.0005.
Offsetting the heating and cooling impacts to each other gives a total net impact of 0.0375% in INCREASED cooling!
It’s amazing what you can find out if you actually do a bit of thinking for yourself!!! This sort of analysis should be built upon so we can put to rest the myth that increased Arctic ice melt is going to boil the planet’s oceans any time soon!
RE: Steven Goddard (09:12:37) :
Sorry, I looked over your graphs again and see that salt content seems to be included (as the last point on the slope is still a few degrees below zero C ) and that it is not significant in any case for the point of determining ice depth, as the straight vertical line is enough to show the ice to water transition. Took me a while to understand the charts completely.
tarpon (09:32:15) : Don´t get upset, just sit and wait…hopefully, as the chinese proverb says: “Wait at your door and you´ll see the corpse of your enemy passing by”…chances are you´ll be frozen up before it happens. 🙂
Let me clean up the format on that equation!
1 – ((180+2 * 66.561) /360*pi+ cos(66.561) * sin(66.561))/pi
= 0.014
Steven,
“The depth at which the temperature drops below the freezing point obviously corresponds to the bottom of the ice.”
Well then on by your own analysis as the maximum temperature on the plots in -2degC it would appear you’re not seeing the bottom of the ice! But I’m afraid you’ve got your basic thermodynamics wrong. The salinity of the Arctic Sea means it has a minimum temperature of about -2degC, and so the much less saline ice can be in equilibrium at the bottom surface at that temperature.
Have a look at figure 9 in the publication I cited. In summer the ice has a very similar temperature to the underlying sea:
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/6347/icetempprofile.png
That is why CRREL do not use temperature profiles to measure the ice thickness.
“Possible Forecast for Continued Antarctica Glacier Loss and Sea-Level Rise Due to Climate Change ”
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2186
Ellie,
Even if you used -5C as your reference point for “very solid ice,” that doesn’t affect the relative change in thickness from last year.
We need our own http://xkcd.com type of cartoon.
Anaconda (08:15:42):
Wonder if this news will make all the newspapers and websites?
I don’t think so; however, my audience will know about this AGW faked operation, at least through my radio program on next Saturday. Of course, I’ll give the deserved recognition to this extraordinary team (WUWT).
It seems that NASA has released a report that all of our smog controls have worked and our air is cleaner. The result is melting arctic ice due to lack of aerosols to reflect the sunlight. A little more the door opens and the CYA continues.
Mark: Indeed! good work and very practical analysis without a computer model as well. Maybe you should publish a paper?
Bill Ryan (09:03:23) :
“…Now the race is on to see whether the upcoming winters will be sufficiently cold to convince the politicians that AGW is not a threat, before they pass economically destructive legislation trying to curtail it.
It’s going to be a close one…”
The politicians will continue to do the bidding of their masters (read “friends” and creditors) and this rubbish will be foisted upon us all no matter how much science is piled up.
The agenda will not be derailed just because someone somewhere discovered something. Heaven forfend that mere facts should get in the way of mighty dollars. There is wealth to be redistributed and power to be enjoyed.
As Aron pointed out recently, the manipulators of this world have leaned hard against this churning ball of funk and it has a life of its own now. We are too late. We have been assimilated. A very few will control riches that truly are beyond the dreams of avarice. More than all the oil companies ever had, or ever will have, and all they gotta do is print vouchers.
Even the green (environmental) movement had its’ teeth pulled when this issue was posited as a lifestyle one, not a cause to be crusaded. They have been absorbed into the gelatinous mass of misinformed, ill educated and wilfully ignorant humanity at large. Much easier to tune in to “The Apprentice” and tune out any dissonant edginess that reminds them that they once had a choice and that they chose to do nothing with that power except delegate it.
The “common man” tired long ago of
discoveringbeing shown that politicians do not have their best interest at heart. They just looks after number one and number one ain’t you. You ain’t even number two.Truth is the first casualty of war. The good guys lost. Everybody knows. Sorry.
Temperature “NORMALS” – one more time; probably applies to all like data
I’ve read this “why don’t they use all the data” thing and responded from memory a few times. So as to not be considered lazy, this time I found the answer.
Here: http://www.wral.com/weather/blogpost/1246650/
It says: “The idea behind using 30-year periods ending on the most recent “zero” year as the basis for climate normals is that 30 years serves as a reasonably good compromise between longer time periods that might obscure ongoing trends, whether they be related to global pattern changes or more localized effects (urbanization, deforestation, reforestation, etc) and shorter time periods that might be unduly influenced by short-term variability. Updating the normal every 10 years likewise allows for regular updates while maintaining some stability to the numbers for planning and engineering purposes. . . .
. . . this protocol for standardidizing international climate normals was selected at an International Meteorological Conference in Warsaw, Poland in 1935, with the first calculated normals based on the period 1901-1930. The values have been updated every ten years since, with our current normals based on 1971-2000.”
Can anyone comment on the rate of ice growth at, say -25C, -35C with a thickness of ice already at 1 m, 2m, 3m? I realize that currents beneath the ice thin it but lets assume no appreciable current. Intuitively, one can see that the thickening slows, perhaps to become in equilibrium as thickness increases. A brief tutorial would help visualize the effects of cooling and warming air above the ice. At Alert, Canada’s northnmost point, there are only 20 to 30 days a year when the temperature goes above 0 C and the mean for that period is only a few degrees above zero C. Does the fast ice under such conditions stay about the same thickness?
Steven,
Please do not read my submitted post, alter you previous response, and then discard my submission.
It leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth.
REPLY: Tom, none of your submissions have been discarded, they are all there. However I’ll point out I rescued one from the spam filter due to the number of URL’s/links in it. All of your posts are intact. Please don’t blame Steven for a post of your going to the spam filter, he does not moderate comments in any way. He also does not have the ability to alter any comments already posted. No comments have been altered here. – Anthony
Tom P,
The freezing point of the seawater is about -2C, so temperatures less than -2C correspond to solid, and temperatures at -2C correspond to liquid. Just as the graph you provided shows. As salinity decreases, the freezing point increases towards 0C.
Note the close correlation between these two crrel graphs. Freezing depth at 400cm.
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/buoy_plots/2007J.gif
http://imb.crrel.usace.army.mil/buoy_plots/ice2007J.gif
Catalin have mentioned their drilling work
Meanwhile NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center have released their latest sea ice data for the Arctic, showing that the decade-long trend of shrinking sea ice cover is continuing. The new evidence, from satellite observations, also shows that the ice cap is thinning.
Catlin Arctic Survey expedition leader Pen Hadow says that, 37 days into the Project and having drilled into the ice in hundreds of different spots, his observations would seem to support this latest research.
“The drilling experiments I’m doing are showing the ice to be between 1.5 and 2 metres thick”, he told Independent Television News. “Scientists say that means it will not last the summer melt”.
Steven, yes you are right.
I thought this phase transition stuff was interesting, perhaps in relation to how some measurements are done and where ice is not continuous. Anyway that doesn’t apply here as the buoys seem well away from open water (basically now i have had time to digest the post properly along with my dinner. Just shows – you should never post-and-run).
John F. Hultquist (10:21:01) :
It says: “The idea behind using 30-year periods ending on the most recent “zero” year as the basis for climate normals is that 30 years serves as a reasonably good compromise between longer time periods that might obscure ongoing trends …
The part I bolded seems to be an admission of deliberate fraud.
Putting it in my own words, using the longer period might reveal the claimed trend does not, in fact, exist. Have I got the concept right?