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
Suppose that someone from a well respected scientific institution told the press that since the last IPCC meeting in 2007, temperatures and sea level have risen faster than expected, and ice has diminished faster than expected.
Difficult to imagine that happening, since they would be wrong on all counts. Also difficult to believe that the bulldogs in the press would allow such nonsense to fly without double-checking the facts.
sort of on topic I guess….why doesn’t Google Earth appear to be showing any ice over the Arctic? Greenland comes up all nice and white, so too the Antarctic….but all blue over the Arctic??
Jeff L,
I say – read the entire first paragraph. All four sentences.
talking about ice grows thicker in the winter has no meaning. The absolute thickness is important regarding the summer melt.
The Arctic is so cold now, why did the ice already start to melt?
Anthony, I think you’ve coined a new term: “schadenfroid”
Defined as: “Taking guilty pleasure in someone else’s unnecessary chilliness.”
wenx-
As the days lengthen, the sunlight penetrates and warms the water beneath the ice. The ice melts from the bottom up.
The AMO would be the more important source of April melt. Not air temp and not PDO. The AMO has not completely flipped to its cold phase. It is much more erratic and shorter term than the PDO but also has long term trends as well. It is also true that cold and warm currents literally are bed fellows up in and around the Arctic. So it doesn’t take much to blow ice into a warmer current. All of this is well known, even by NOAA, so I wonder why people are still asking why.
Mark (15:04:03) :
See previous post regarding your question about years.
Above at: John F. Hultquist (10:21:01) :
Pamela,
The summer ice deficit in 2007-2008 was on the Pacific side of the Arctic, so the PDO is very important.
And I also want video cam and regular updates from Steve. We need to know if he stubbed his toe on the way to the John and other vitally important details of this armchair adventure, including the condition of your sleeping bag, mode of transportation, measuring devices and drills, and who your sponsors are. However, I am assuming your re-supply is Walmart?
Steven,
“The question is – what is happening now during the solar minimum and cool phase of the PDO?”
I’d hope for some recovery, though given solar activity was just about as low in 2007 as now, I’m not sure that is having much of an effect now. I’d have also hoped the current La Niña would help, though minimum 2008 Arctic ice looks like it had even less volume than 2007.
The long term trend in the Arctic Sea Ice index indicates some other effect is swamping solar activity and ENSO:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/n_plot_hires.png
“Suppose that someone from a well respected scientific institution told the press that since the last IPCC meeting in 2007, temperatures and sea level have risen faster than expected, and ice has diminished faster than expected.”
I’ve said nothing about expectations of the first two. As for the third, as I mentioned above CRREL wrote:
“The observed September minimum annual ice extent has decreased faster than model predictions.”
So you don’t need to suppose, unless you refuse to regard CRREL as “a well respected scientific institution.”
Richard Sharpe,
“Nice cherry picking there Tom P.
There is only one multiannual dataset to present, buoy 2006C. Therefore criticising presenting that data as “cherry picking” is obtuse. But as I said, read the CRREL publications if you want the broader picture.
“Do you happen to have data for Ice extent or thickness during the MWP? The Holocene Optimum?”
Do you really mean to imply that it’s pointless collecting any data that we can’t compare to similar measurements in the MWP or the Holocene?
Steven, I don’t quite follow you. The pacific side of the Arctic does not contribute much in terms of Arctic currents. Please share your thoughts about the PDO influence. I am curious. I have included the link for Arctic currents which I find instructive. I also follow jet stream patterns closely and it appeared to me that outward winds that pushed much of the ice out to warmer waters came from Atlantic sources. Tell me what you know.
http://www.aquatic.uoguelph.ca/oceans/ArticOceanWeb/Currents/frontpagecur.htm
And Tom, what can I say. You need to study jet stream behavior and Arctic oceanic currents and wind patterns. See my link above regarding Arctic currents. Visit any jet stream site to understand how these things work at the poles. During the melt season, follow WEATHER systems. Yes, WEATHER. Weather pattern variations explains a LOT about climate!!!!!!! Weathermen and weatherwomen rule! And by the way, why the ^%&#@ur momisugly$%^&& does my spell checker underline weatherwomen but not weathermen?????? Like I need to fix the spelling or something???????
Steven,
“Do you think that The Catlin Expedition is retroactively collecting data from past years?”
I think I’m with you there – I wouldn’t want to touch any of their data with a very long ice screw!
“The Arctic is so cold now, why did the ice already start to melt?”
Because CO2 lowered the freezing point of water, thus ensuring that the ice will melt in -30C conditions. CO2 is a very misunderstood pollutant. It is responsible for a wide variety of things. CO2 cost me my job. CO2 is how your steak gets overcooked when you go out to eat. CO2 slashed my tires. I even heard that there was a study done suggesting Bernie Madoff was high on CO2.
Pamela,
What I’m saying is that the low amount of multi-year ice now is largely due to the fact that an unusually large amount of first year ice melted on the Pacific side during the last two summers.
Pamela,
Weatherpeople are lovely – Anthony for instance has been very responsive in getting submissions past a very hungry spam filter.
But when you see multidecadal trends, I think climate scientists probably have some explanatory potential as well.
Sorry Bill, that’s not going to happen. They will pass CO2 taxation and Cap’N Trade policy. It has nothing to do with warming and everything to do with money and power. The string pulling masters will not let this go that easily. (sad but true)
I note that the Catlin team are already shifting the goalposts: http://margosmaid.blogspot.com/2009/04/shifting-goalposts-to-success-and.html
Unfortunately, I believe you are absolutely correct. Obama and company will not let this go that easily. They will implement this at all costs. Obama must have Cap’N Trade in order to pay for his budget, and to empower and enrich the people that put him into office (AIG, Goldman/Sachs, etc…). He has NO choice!
An even more disturbing part of this is that a recent Gallup poll shows that only 53% of Americans are opposed to a socialist America, while the remainder support American socialism. I am getting ready to move my family to some other part of the world, just not sure where yet. Bali maybe?
Also, to everyone here who really cares about the quality of life in our country, please attend a local Tea Party (they will be everywhere) on April 15th, and stand up for yourselves, your family and our quality of life! Please!
– Thank you!
Jeff Peterson (09:07:49)
Please post your pictures, or email them to me. You should be able to deduce the correct email from the link above. Thanks, Mike S.
wenx (16:49:33) :
“The Arctic is so cold now, why did the ice already start to melt?”
Craig Moore (17:16:09) :
wenx-
“As the days lengthen, the sunlight penetrates and warms the water beneath the ice. The ice melts from the bottom up.”
I must disagree with the analysis. It’s probably too early and too cold for the sunlight penetration effect. The answer for wenx lies in the regional behavior. Most of the early melt comes from the sea of Okhotsk which is really sub-polar, most of it being below 60 latitude (same as Oslo). Cryosphere Today has some good info on this. The only other region showing a declining trend at this time is the St. Lawrence basin. All other 12 regions are stable or even increasing at this time. The true polar ice decline will not get started for a couple of weeks. For details check this:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.4.html
Hey Tony, get this one:
NASA GISS admits that soot-ladened aerosol brown clouds have caused 45 percent OR MORE of Arctic warming for the past 30 years. That’s in addition to the ice-thawing & thinning effects of sootfall on ice that has modeled to show 90% of the thawing in the Arctic in the past 150 years.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/warming_aerosols.html
See also: V. Ramanathan’s work on brown cloud heating effects. It turns out that when soot & SO2 are adjacent in atmospheric brown clouds they trap sunlight together, the SO2 drives more NIR into the soot particles, heating the soot more than the soot shades the Earth. The net effect of soot-driven temperature anomalies over the Pacific alone is around 40% total, about 50 – 60% of the effect the GCM’s model for CO2.
Ohioholic (17:44:57)
lol, you’ve got to stop it before I wet my pants
Thanks again Steven for an interesting analysis. As I mentioned before, it will take a while before some of the buoys yeild year to year differences.
I looked up your name on google and found this amusing link… It seems you’re a stooge of some sort (presumably for the oil and gas industry) that no one has been able to track down… So are you an anonymous insider from GISS? Well, let’s hope so, maybe there is an “Ice ceiling” over there you’re trying to break through:
http://frankbi.wordpress.com/category/climate-cranks-and-climate-inactivists/steven-goddard/
I guess that would amount to an honorable mention, eh? Mike S.