Guest post by Steven Goddard
In Woody Allen’s classic 1977 movie “Annie Hall,” there is a wonderful scene in a theatre queue where he is having a heated argument with a Columbia University academic about the meaning of Marshall McLuhan’s writing. His opponent is getting quite agitated, so Woody Allen pulls Marshall McLuhan out from behind a sign to prove his point.
Man in Theatre Line: Oh, really? Well, it just so happens I teach a class at Columbia called “TV, Media and Culture.” So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!
Woody Allen: Oh, do ya? Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just let me…
[pulls McLuhan out from behind a nearby poster]
Woddy Allen: come over here for a second… tell him!
Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!
Woody Allen: Boy, if life were only like this!
Sometimes life is like that. Pen Hadow has been reported to be telling the press some interesting things this week :
and from the Catlin Web Site :
Fortunately, there is an expert standing behind the sign. The Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research has just completed a much more expansive investigation of Arctic Ice, and yes they did actually make it to the North Pole – the old fashioned way – in an airplane. Below is the original German text and the Google translation :
At the North Pole ice sheet is thicker than expectedDas Forschungsflugzeug “Polar 5” beendet am Dienstag in Kanada seine jüngste Arktis-Expedition.The research aircraft Polar 5 “ended on Tuesday in Canada’s recent Arctic expedition.Bei dem Flug haben Forscher die aktuelle Eisstärke am Nordpol gemessen, und zwar in Gebieten, die nie zuvor überflogen worden sind.During the flight, researchers have Eisstärke the current measured at the North Pole, and in areas that have never before been overflown.Das Ergebnis ist überraschend.The result is surprising.Das Meer-Eis in den untersuchten Gebieten ist offenbar dicker, als die Wissenschaftler vermutet hatten.The sea-ice in the surveyed areas is apparently thicker than scientists had suspected.Normalerweise sei neu gebildetes Eis nach zwei Jahren gut zwei Meter dick.Normally, ice is newly formed after two years, over two meters thick.“Hier wurden aber Eisdicken von bis zu vier Metern gemessen”, sagte ein Sprecher des Bremerhavener Alfred-Wegener-Instituts für Polar- und Meeresforschung.“Here were Eisdicken up to four meters,” said a spokesman of Bremerhaven’s Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research.Für die Wissenschaftler steht dieses Ergebnis derzeit noch im Widerspruch zur Erwärmung des Meerwassers.For scientists, this result is still in contradiction to the warming of the seawater.
And from the Wegener Institute web site :
Another focal point of the campaign were large-scale measurements of ice thickness in the inner Arctic, which were conducted in close collaboration of the Alfred Wegener Institute together with the University of Alberta. An ice-thickness sensor, the so-called EM-Bird, was put into operation under a plane for the first time ever. To conduct the measurements, Polar 5 dragged the sensor which was attached to a steel cable of eighty metres length in a height of twenty metres over the ice cover. Multiple flights northwards from various stations showed an ice thickness between 2.5 (two years old ice in the vicinity of the North Pole) and 4 metres (perennial ice in Canadian offshore regions). All in all, the ice was somewhat thicker than during the last years in the same regions, which leads to the conclusion that Arctic ice cover recovers temporarily. The researchers found the thickest ice with a thickness of 15 metres along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island.
So the question is – why does the suspect Catlin data get unlimited press coverage, while the comprehensive data of the Wegener Institute gets buried by the press? Is it possible that some members of the press have an agenda?
Woody Allen made some great movies in the 1970s, while the press was up to it’s usual antics – as reported by The Business and Media Institute.
The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s.Three months before, on January 11, The Washington Post told readers to “get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come,” in an article titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” The article quoted climatologist Reid Bryson, who said “there’s no relief in sight” about the cooling trend.Journalists took the threat of another ice age seriously. Fortune magazine actually won a “Science Writing Award” from the American Institute of Physics for its own analysis of the danger. “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed,” Fortune announced in February 1974.“It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude,” the article continued.That article also emphasized Bryson’s extreme doomsday predictions. “There is very important climatic change going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest.”Bryson warned, “It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way.” However, the world population increased by 2.5 billion since that warning.Fortune had been emphasizing the cooling trend for 20 years. In 1954, it picked up on the idea of a frozen earth and ran an article titled “Climate – the Heat May Be Off.”The story debunked the notion that “despite all you may have read, heard, or imagined, it’s been growing cooler – not warmer – since the Thirties.”The claims of global catastrophe were remarkably similar to what the media deliver now about global warming.“The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations,” wrote Lowell Ponte in his 1976 book “The Cooling.”If the proper measures weren’t taken, he cautioned, then the cooling would lead to “world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000.”There were more warnings. The Nov. 15, 1969, “Science News” quoted meteorologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell Jr. about global cooling worries. “How long the current cooling trend continues is one of the most important problems of our civilization,” he said.If the cooling continued for 200 to 300 years, the earth could be plunged into an ice age, Mitchell continued.Six years later, the periodical reported “the cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”A city in a snow globe illustrated that March 1, 1975, article, while the cover showed an ice age obliterating an unfortunate city.In 1975, cooling went from “one of the most important problems” to a first-place tie for “death and misery.” “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind,” said Nigel Calder, a former editor of “New Scientist.”He claimed it was not his disposition to be a “doomsday man.” His analysis came from “the facts [that] have emerged” about past ice ages, according to the July/August International Wildlife Magazine.The idea of a worldwide deep freeze snowballed.Naturally, science fiction authors embraced the topic. Writer John Christopher delivered a book on the coming ice age in 1962 called “The World in Winter.”In Christopher’s novel, England and other “rich countries of the north” broke down under the icy onslaught.“The machines stopped, the land was dead and the people went south,” he explained.James Follett took a slightly different tack. His book “Ice” was about “a rogue Antarctic iceberg” that “becomes a major world menace.” Follett in his book conceived “the teeth chattering possibility of how Nature can punish those who foolishly believe they have mastered her.”
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The anti-Wegener bias is huge and shocking but we have already learned that the postmodern journalism is pretty much incompatible with basic human ethics, so there’s no news here.
177 centimeters being both “first year ice” and “thin” is a very amusing kind of lie. According to both common sense as well as technical terminology, 177 cm is a very thick first-year ice. In fact, thick first-year ice starts at 120 cm, search for 120 anywhere here:
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/App/WsvPageDsp.cfm?ID=167&Lang=eng
http://www.awi.de/fileadmin/user_upload/MET/PolarsternCoursePlot/ICE.html
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/ice/sea_ice.shtml
Well, Nature has been very nice to Pen Hadow et al. and kindly allowed them to survive, so they revenge by emitting piles of lies directed against Her laws.
I live relatively close to Pen Hadow and it is likely he will giving a talk locally on his expedition.
If i get the chance to go along and ask questions could we come up with a consensus on which ones to ask-say three of them?
I will not make ad hom attacks-whatever I think about the dubious scientific merit of the expedition it takes a lot of courage to do what he attempted in such severe conditions. Which of course could be one of the questions to be asked;
“Pen,
Were the conditions more severe than you had been planning for?”
Any other suggestions from anyone?
TonyB
E.M. Smith (23.42)
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” – gotta be a contender for QOTW
Any thoughts on the idea contained in my second paragraph?
“The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind,” said Nigel Calder, a former editor of “New Scientist.”
And now new scientist says.
“Who sparked the global cooling myth?”
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/10/global-cooling-was-a-myth.html
Regarding “agendas”, check out The State of the World Forum. http://www.worldforum.org/
It is an appeal to that demographic known as the Cultural Creatives, who are a growing segment of the voting public. The State of the World Forum’s members, including Gorbachev, appeal to Obama and other leaders, to drive forward the issue of climate change, because climate change is the one issue that can most appeal to the sensibilities of Cultural Creatives. Climate Change = Cultural Creatives. Cultural Creatives are the largest growing voting demographic. Any kind of change will require their support.
Now for my 2 cents. The leaders who are driving forward CC are not themselves CC. I think they know and understand the potential of CC and are simply using that issue with that demographic. The bigger (and real) issues are about global economic infrastructure and governance. CC is simply a way to package grand restructuring into something CC will feel for and vote for.
Cultural Creatives are not particularly concerned with the economy, and Obama knows this. But the power they will give him may give America sufficient power to lead through with other kinds of global changes. Read the chairman of The State of the World Forum’s ideas about how USA needs to be the “last empire”, by using its status and power to drive through a new structure for the world. No Cultural Creative would understand this nor be interested in such a project–it may even be anathema to them–but the “global” aspect of Climate Change is the necessary sexy voting issue to gain support for such shifts in global structure and power. Climate Change even has Cultural Creatives saying things like, “democracy is just greedy people voting for polluting industries” (words to that effect). CC are now in a trance and would accept anything.
One day Cultural Creatives will wake up and wonder what on earth happened.
Up-to-date arctic sea-ice graphics.
Extent difference
Difference in sea-ice extent between 2009 and recent years
Melt Rate
2009(blue) daily melt rate of Arctic sea-ice compared to 2008(red)
——-
2009(blue) daily melt rate of Arctic sea-ice compared to 2007(magenta)
*Data retrieved from JAXA
Telegraph blogger mentions WUWT!
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/james_delingpole/blog/2009/05/15/global_warming_explorers_in_arctic_get_nasty_shock_polar_ice_caps_blooming_freezing
88 comments. It’s been hard to find anyone who will mention Pen Hadow and offer comments at the same time, most likely for fear that they will end up here and actually learn something…
The Catlin fraud is complete. They could not progress due to the extreme cold, and they now falsely claim they were pulled off due to early melt.
They imply this early melt is earlier than ‘normal’ which is of course *proof* of AGW.
In fact they never got close their objective, they never were objective, they were dangerously under-prepared, and their ‘results’ were determined before they left.
Typical AGW scam.
Catlin = fraud = AGW
Smokey
Was catching up with WUWT on my lunch break when I saw your Prince Charles post. Am now attempting to clean my laptop after spraying it with a mouthful of coffee.
Bill
Looking at the graph you linked to, my reading is that the ice had moved by the time when they did the ground measurements. If you look at the two curves there is an impressive fit if you allow about a 10-20m horizontal shift between the them. This would make the error of 20 in 600 in position rather than 1in 3 in thickness.
I am not saying one is right and one is wrong, I am simply pointing out that there are alternative views that must be considered.
I am open-minded and resent attempts to close down debate. Attempting to “score points” seems pretty puerile, and many AGW promotors seem to be taking an increasingly puerile approach – see posts above re Monbiot’s latest Royal Flush contribution.
TonyB,
These questions aren’t meant to be snarky or ad hominem, although they are aggressive. It’s important to be transparent about the motivation for and quality of the expedition.
1. What was the Catlin Insurance Group’s investment in this exercise and how are the results going to be used to assess risk?
2. What liability does Catlin incur if it bases risk assessments on inaccurate data?
3. How does your survey address the criticism that the data collection methods were inadequate to answer the question, “Is arctic ice thinning?”
kuhnkat (22:05:33) :
From Catlin’s site:
““The ice thickness measurements that Pen and the team have been able to phone in imply that they are travelling over predominantly thick first-year ice.”
Predominately THICK first year ice??? I thought they told the press it was thin??”
Unfortunately, the Catlin website was putting out enough info that they are getting caught trying to unravel their own statements. In addition to kuhnkat’s catch here’s some more.
1) On April 2 Hadow reported “We’ve noticed that the ice is older and thicker than before”. When you were interviewed at the pick up site, he indicated that the ice was expected to be “much thicker” than the 1.77m average recorder during the trek.
2) The Catlin website reports “First year ice is typically thinner than 2 m, while Multi-year ice is generally thicker than 3 m.” Since the route was primarily planned over first year ice, how is an average measurement of 1.77m surprising?
3) Also on the website it is claimed: “The Catlin Arctic Survey’s route was specifically designed so that the team would begin the expedition on multi-year ice, transit briefly through a region primarily covered with first-year ice, then enter a region in which second-year ice now prevails.” The track of the route clearly shows most of the transit over primarily first year ice.
4) The expedition was terminated after 73 days of the 100 days planned, largely explained by the onset of ice melt. This is in spite of the 3rd slowest April ice melt recorded in the recent past. That would suggest that under recent ice melts history the plan was too ambitious?
Please feel free to add other discrepancies. Maybe some journalist with cajones will be at the press conferences. Of course, how could I be skeptical of a WWF sponsored “scientific expedition” with a stated mission to discover how the Arctic ice is thinning.
OT: UK medical and climate specialists issue the dumbest report I have ever seen:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17126-climate-change-diagnosed-as-biggest-global-health-threat.html
They claim that each society has a range of optimal temperatures in which to survive (I go along with htat) then claim that 70,000 people died in the heat wave of 2003. Of course that heat wave is a sign of what is to come. No mention of the lack of air conditioning, caregiving from relatives who were on vacation etc. They claim thet every single medical condition knopw to man will worsen. No mention of the fact that people adapt and already live in warm climates successfully. Nor that cooling would be drastically worse. So they imply that a constatnt temperature is best.
Wait! Could this be a satire?
In today’s Chicago Tribute (5/18/09), the weather page has the following headlines: “The Arctic Ocean: Ice in retreat”
http://weblogs.wgntv.com/chicago-weather/tom-skilling-blog/2009/05/the-arctic-ocean-ice-in-retrea.html
Statements made include: The area of open water is increasing during the summer… it is projected that the ocean might be totally ice free…A graphic showing a world map of “changing global temperatures” show the world to increasing by 4 to 9 degrees F by 2100.
Please send your thoughts on this major US Newspaper making these statements to.
TSkilling@tribune.com
Send your thoughts to their top chief meteorologist: Tom Skilling
Seems like “Back to School” …
[after Diane gives Thornton an ‘F’ for his report, which was actually written by Kurt Vonnegut]
Diane: Whoever *did* write this doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!
[cut to Thornton’s dorm suite]
Thornton Melon: [on the phone] … and *another* thing, Vonnegut! I’m gonna stop payment on the cheque!
[Kurt tells him off]
So why did Hadow and friends do this?
1. Go to a polar region and risk one’s life.
2. Take half-as…d measurements to seem scientific and busy.
3. Get the obligatory frostbite and complain like hell about conditions.
4. Enlist the royal buffoon’s support.
5. Unleash your secret weapon – i.e. lie like hell when you get back.
6. Write up what you want people to believe.
7. Learn never to do anything so stupid again.
8. Sit back and get the inevitable knighthood for proving that you are the most stupid person on the planet.
Let me take a stab at this. bill are you listening? The Caitlin survey took sporadic measurements approximately the distance from Boston to Buffalo, ( a good percentage of that distance was due to ice movement), and are then able to confidently extrapolate the ice thicknesses for an area the size of the continental U.S.? Give me a break!! Your eyes and mind are fully closed. As fatbigot said a few threads ago ( I am still laughing at that one ) ” Oh, It’s a stool alright”. :^D
jack mosevich (06:49:44) :
They claim thet every single medical condition knopw to man will worsen.
Including frostbite? Oh, my!
Mark
Re: early summer ice melt in the Arctic
Current temperatures in the Canadian far north are Resolute -12 C and Alert -11 C. The high temperature Monday in Resolute is forecast to be -9 C. If there is melting going on, it is not the air temperature that is doing it!
bill
“wrong at 295 metres error is about 800cm at a ground based reading of 3.1metres. Also check out the error at 0 metres.”
800cm is 8 meters – off the scale of the graph. Why don’t you re-think your statement and get back to us.
Bill:
Further what of the punch-through and breakage of the undersurface of the ice happened which would directly affected the manual measurements?
—
The “lies” of the Catlin expedition occur ENTIRELY in the deliberate selection of WHERE those not-taken-at-random few data points were drilled:
Leave aside the “let’s scrape off the snow from the top of the ice” and let’
s “pull-up-randomly-harder-or-softer-against-the-bottom-of-the-ice” or “let’s decide WHEN and WHERE to drill a hole = drill ONLY where the ice is flat (low), smoother (short-lived, shallower, flatter, recently frozen) and non-random.
At least the ice radar would have recorded the deeper bumps and ridges that they walked over, but by deliberastely only drilling a few spots, they can/could ignore ANY evidence of deep ice areas as they manufactored data to fit their preconceptions, paid for BY a insuracne company with pre-conceptions, FOR an audiance that DEMANDED pre-conceived ideas of global warming.
And you see no “projudices”? No biases? But YOU are the side of the argument that claims sponsorship (by an energy company) is solely a reason for rejecting scientific data?
I explicitly do NOT trust the Catlin “scientists” to produce valid data: they are being paid, and have paid physically, incredible prices to produce ONLY ONE RESULT (that AGW is “real” and that the polar ice is melting according to AGW theory.
An unbiased, simple air-borne ice radar IS more credible because the Catlin team is biased and unreliable and unaudited.
And – every time ANYBODY has actually checked their data, their quotes, their measurements, their metrology, their course, their biometrics, their sampling methos – the Catlin team has been found to be fabricating data and exaggerating their results.
Tony B:
I would ask something like:
Pen, have you been able to compare your results with those from the Polar 5 team, I believe you reported spotting their plane flying over your position a few times – their results directly contradict yours, do you have any idea why?
or
Pen, have you been in touch with NSDIC regarding the early summer melt which forced you to leave – they have reported a verly slow spring melt so far, but I understand their numbers are based on extrapolation/logarithms/computer models whereas you have actual measurements to correct their findings?
Resurrecting the ghost of Karl Popper once again, if I may: For the Catlin team actually to have done SCIENCE, they would have had to take with them a few more (independent) teams, which would attempt to duplicate their findings, inasmuch as the constantly varying condition of their study precludes attempted duplication at a later time. So: say I question the accuracy of their findings, even question if their data are actual measurements (or were made up): How can they respond? They would be, and in fact are, asking us to take their data ON FAITH, and that is, per se, not science. And, just for the record (although I kind of hate to say it), the same is true for the fly-over data. They too needed to have built-in replication by other independent teams for it to be science, otherwise they too are asking us to take their findings on faith.
“”” Graeme Rodaughan (16:44:59) :
bill (15:31:33) :
1 Alfred Wegener have published no data as far as I know
2 It is inaccurate from their own poster:
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/2171/hembird.jpg
when towed behind a helicopter frequently 10% adrift with one 30% failure
what happens when towed behind a plane?
Which could be more accurate a man with drill and tape or a piece of electronics trying to determine the snow-ice interface. I would suggest the former.
What should have happened is for the catlin route to be traversed to do a check on results.
Catlin say somewhere that the say a plane flying low on a number of occasions – perhaps Alfred Wegener were doing just that?
I just don’t understand, – how is using a tape measure and holes drilled through ice, that is floating/moving on the sea surface Repeatable Science? (As opposed to a non-repeatable publicity stunt).
A flight path can be recorded and reflown at the same time next year to provide a repeatable data set. “””
Well i’ve never ever measured an ice thickness; but I have seen a whole lot of video footage taken under floating sea ice; and the most apparent characteristic that comes to mind, is that the bottom of floating sea ice is anything but flat; it looks like inverted mountain ranges.
So boring a hole, and sticking a tape down through it; is about as reliable as poking a wet fingure in the air to meaure wind direction.
I hate to keep repeating myself; but do any climatology school courses teach about the Nyquist sampling theorem, when they discuss sampled data systems. My guess is the Catlin Arctic survey team didn’t bore enough holes to properly sample so much as a single acre plot of ice; let alone the whole Arctic ocean; and much of the distance they travelled was backwards around the pole, so hardly representative of even a meridional slice.
A sheer waste of time and money; not to mention the public air waves.
The UAF-led expedition, which also includes lead researchers Cathleen Geiger and Chandra Kambhamettu of the University of Delaware and Jacqueline Richter-Menge of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, begins April 1. The field expedition is part of the Sea Ice Experiment: Dynamic Nature of the Arctic project, dubbed SEDNA, which is part of UAF’s collaborative International Polar Year research efforts.
Hutchings said the fieldwork will involve deploying buoys and other instruments to measure the movement and stress of the ice pack in the area around the field camp.
“We are going to use that information to validate the current generation of sea ice models,” Hutchings said. “We are trying to reduce the uncertainty of our prediction of arctic climate change.”
$1.4M
————–
Wide-Band Radar for Measuring Thickness of Sea Ice
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Saturday, November 01 2008
This instrument could contribute to understanding of climate change.
advertisement:
A wide-band penetrating radar system for measuring the thickness of sea ice is under development. The need for this or a similar system arises as follows: Spatial and temporal variations in the thickness of sea ice are important indicators of heat fluxes between the ocean and atmosphere and, hence, are important indicators of climate change in polar regions. A remote-sensing system that could directly measure the thickness of sea ice over a wide thickness range from aboard an aircraft or satellite would be of great scientific value. Obtaining thickness measurements over a wide region at weekly or monthly time intervals would contribute significantly to understanding of changes in the spatial distribution and of the mass balance of sea ice.
A prototype of the system was designed on the basis of computational simulations directed toward understanding what signal frequencies are needed to satisfy partly competing requirements to detect both bottom and top ice surfaces, obtain adequate penetration despite high attenuation in the lossy sea-ice medium, and obtain adequate resolution, all over a wide thickness range. The prototype of the system is of the frequency-modulation, continuous-wave (FM-CW) type. At a given time, the prototype functions in either of two frequency-band/ operational-mode combinations that correspond to two thickness ranges: a lower-frequency (50 to 250 MHz) mode for measuring thickness greater than about 1 m, and a higher-frequency (300 to 1,300 MHz) mode for measuring thickness less than about 1 m. The bandwidth in the higher-frequency (lesser-thickness) mode is adequate for a thickness resolution of 15 cm; the bandwidth in the lower-frequency (greater-thickness) mode is adequate for a thickness resolution of 75 cm. Although a thickness resolution of no more than 25 cm is desired for scientific purposes, the 75-cm resolution was deemed acceptable for the purpose of demonstrating feasibility.
Why bother if the Germans have already done it? and more accurately!
———————–
Report Date : JUN 1991
Pagination or Media Count : 24
Abstract : Field trials using a man-portable Geonics, Ltd., EM31 electromagnetic induction sounding instrument, with a plug-in data processing module, for the remote measurement of sea ice thickness, are discussed. The processing module was made by Flow Research Inc., to directly measure sea ice thickness and show the result in a numerical display. The EM31-processing module system was capable of estimating ice thickness within 10% of the true value for ice from about 0.7 to 3.5 m thick, the oldest undeformed ice in the study area. However, since seawater under the Arctic pack ice has a relatively uniform conductivity (2.5 + or – 0.05 S/m), a simplified method, which can be used for estimating sea ice thickness using jet an EM31 instrument, is discussed. It uses only the EM31’s conductivity measurement, is easy to put into use and does not rely on theoretically derived look-up tables or phasor diagrams, which may not be accurate for the conditions of the area.
200mm accuracy in 2 metres!!
———————
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA286884&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
5% when resting on ice compared to drill hole reference
—————————–
Interesting but how much did thid cost
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA310887&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
———————-
http://www.aspect.aq/docs/ASITW.schedule+abstracts.A4.pdf
Although the standard deviation of the difference between the thin ice thicknesses estimated from the SSM/I algorithm and AVHRR is ~0.05 m
The ULS records the two-way travel time of an acoustic pulse between the sensor and the ice from which the distance to the ice-water interface is calculated. At the same time, the pressure is measured which is converted into the ULS depth. In theory, the difference between the ULS depth relative to the water level and the distance to the ice equals the ice draft. For converting travel time to distance, however, the speed of sound along the path of the acoustic pulse needs to be known which usually cannot be measured simultaneously over the whole data acquisition period. Therefore, patches of open water or thin ice have to be identified in the data series which are used as “zero-draft” reference level to which the distance measurements are related. The identification of open water areas is the most critical point of the data processing which influences the accuracy of the ice draft measurements.
Upward looking sonar can only see the bottom of the ice and then have to calc thickeness!
The paper will summarize German activities and results of EM thickness sounding in the Southern Ocean, and will present operations of a unique helicopter-borne EM thickness sensor. The so-called EM-Bird is easy and inexpensive to use and operable from ice breakers and by any helicopter. Therefore, it can also be used by other research groups to extend the observational basis in the Southern Ocean. We suggest forming a group of key scientists possessing the required logistic background to initiate a systematic monitoring program of Southern Ocean sea ice thickness, based on repeated ship cruises and our EM equipment and experience.
Independent snow thickness measurements are still required for the important differentiation between snow and ice. We will present an approach to snow thickness measurements based on the simultaneous use of EM thickness and laser/DGPS freeboard measurements, and on efforts to integrate a ground penetrating radar system into an EM Bird.
(1) Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany.
Doesn’t seem to know snow thickness! (in 2006)
Measurements of EM, ice drilling and snow thickness were made at 1 to 2 m intervals along 13 transects (50 to 500m long) on 10 different ice floes. The ice thickness and snow depth ranged from 0.2 to 5 m and from 0.04 to 1m, respectively. This study investigated the effect of the saline slush snow layer over the sea ice and seawater-filled gap on the snow and sea ice thickness measured by EM. Results showed that for relatively smooth surface and thinner ice 3.5 m, with seawater-filled gaps between deformed ice floes, the simple model showed a large underestimating error over 50%. By developing the 1-D multi-layer deformed ice model considering slush snow and seawater-filled gaps, the error was decreased to below 30%.
http://www.aspect.aq/docs/ASITW.schedule+abstracts.A4.pdf interesting doc.
—————————
Analyzing the apparent conductivity data obtained by the electromagnetic induction technique and drill-hole measurements at same location allows the construction of a transform equation for the apparent conductivity and sea ice thickness. The verification of the calculated sea ice thickness using this equation indicates that the electromagnetic induction technique is able to determine reliable sea ice thickness with an average relative error of only 5.5%. The ice thickness profi les show the sea ice distribution in Neila Fjord is basically level with a thickness of 0.8–1.4 m.
Good old drill holes used as reference again!
——————————-
Shallow Climate, They can re-fly the EXACT route the following year, thereby establishing data points. This is not “faith”. The Caitlin expedition could not in a million years establish a baseline because they could never reproduce their journey. They sometimes could not even navigate using GPS.