Jeff Id at the Air Vent has been doing some interesting work lately. Before the NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice anomaly plot went kaput due to failure of the satellite sensor channel they have been using, they had created a vast archive of single day gridded data packages for Arctic sea ice extent. Jeff plotted images from the data as viewed from directly over the North Pole. It took him over 15 hours of computational time. An example image is below.
Jeff gathered up all the resultant plotted images and turned them into a movie, but placed them on the website “tinypic” where the movie won’t get much airplay.
I offered Jeff the opportunity to have it hosted on YouTube and posted here, where it would get far greater exposure and I completed the conversion this afternoon.
What I find most interesting is watch the “respiration” of Arctic Sea Ice, plus the buffeting of the sea ice escaping the Arctic and heading down the east coast of Greenland where it melts in warmer waters.
Jeff writes:
I find the Arctic sea ice to be amazingly dynamic. Honestly, I used to think of it as something static and stationary, the same region meltinig and re-freezing for dozens or even hundreds of years – not that I put much thought into it either way. Shows you what I know.
This post is another set of Arctic ice plots and an amazing high speed video. The NSIDC NasaTeam data is presented in gridded binary matrices in downloadable form HERE.
The data is about 1.3Gb in size so it takes hours to download, I put it directly on my harddrive and worked from there. The code for extraction took a while to work out but was pretty simple in the end. This code ignores leap years. Formatting removed courtesy of WordPress.
filenames=list.files(path=”C:/agw/sea ice/north sea ice/nasateam daily/”, pattern = NULL, all.files = TRUE, full.names = FALSE, recursive = TRUE)
trend=array(0,dim=length(filenames)-1)
date=array(0,dim=length(filenames)-1)
masktrend=array(0,dim=length(filenames)-1)
for(i in 1:(length(filenames)-1))
{
fn=paste(”C:/agw/sea ice/north sea ice/nasateam daily/”,filenames[i],sep=””) #folder containing sea ice files
a=file(fn,”rb”)
header= readBin(a,n=102,what=integer(),size=1,endian=”little”,signed=FALSE)
year=readChar(a,n=6)
print(year)
day=readChar(a,n=6)
print(day)
header=readChar(a,n=300-114)
data=readBin(a,n=304*448,what=integer(),size=1,endian=”little”,signed=FALSE)
close(a)
if(as.integer(year)+1900<=2500)
{
date[i]=1900+as.integer(year)+as.integer(day)/365
}else
{
date[i]=as.integer(year)+as.integer(day)/365
}
if(i==1)
{
holemask= !(data==251)
}
datamask=data<251 & data>37 ## 15% of lower values masked out to match NSIDC
trend[i]=sum(data[(datamask*holemask)==1])/250*625
}
###mask out satellite F15
satname=substring(filenames,18,20)
satmask= satname==”f15″
newtrend=trend[!satmask]
newdate=date[!satmask]
After that there is some minor filtering done on 7 day windows to dampen some of the noise in the near real time data.
filtrend=array(0,dim=length(newtrend))
for(i in 1:(length(newtrend)))
{
sumdat=0
for(j in -3:3)
{
k=i+j
if(k<1)k=1
if(k>length(newtrend)-1)k=length(newtrend)-1
sumdat=sumdat+newtrend[k]
}
filtrend[i]=sumdat/7
}
So here is a plot of the filtered data:
Here is the current anomaly.
This compares well with the NSIDC and cryosphere plots. This anomaly is slightly different from some of my previous plots because it rejects data less than 15% sea-ice concentration. Cryosphere rejects data less than 10%. In either case the difference is very slight but since we’ve just learned that the satellites have died and are about 500,000km too low, my previous graph may be more correct. I hope the NSIDC get’s something working soon.
All of that is pretty exciting but the reason for this post is to show the COMPLETE history of the NSIDC arctic sea ice in a video. I used tinypic as a service for this 27mb file so don’t worry, you should be able to see it quite well on a high speed connection. It took my dual processor laptop computer more than 15 hours to calculate this movie, I hope it’s worth it. Brown is land, black is shoreline, blue is water except for the large blue dot in the center of the plot. The movie plays double speed at the beginning because the early satellite collected data every other day. You’ll see the large blue circle change in size flashing back and forth between the older and newer sat data just as the video slows down.
After staring at the graphs above you think you understand what is happening as ice gradually shrinks away. Well the high speed video shows a much more turbulent world with changing weather patterns in 2007 and 2008 summer blasting away at the south west corner of the ice. I’ve watched it 20 times at least, noticing cloud patterns (causing lower ice levels), winds, water currents and all kinds of different things. I’m not so sure anymore that we’re seeing a consistent decline to polarbear doom, with this kind of variance it might just be everyday noise.
Maybe I’m nuts, let me know what you see.
No Jeff you aren’t nuts. Here is the YouTube Video, suitable for sharing:
Here is another video I posted on You Tube last month which shows the flow of sea ice down the east coast of Greenland. Clearly there is more at work here than simple melting, there is a whole flow dynamic going on.
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I’m not sure, but if you run it thro’ slow motion, squint, fan your fingers in front of my eyes for a strobe effect, I think I can see three walkers with sleds, two canoes, and a sailing boat, all with Union Jacks on. Oh & an ice breaker stuck in the ice. Then again I probably just imagined it! Shucks.
AtB
To help better understand the phenomena now clearly visible in that magnificent video, I’ve extracted some relevant segments from my Journal of Energy and Environment paper (VOLUME 20 No. 1 2009)
The lunar nodal cycle and climate
The 18.6 year lunar nodal cycle (LNC) tidal periodicity has a pervasive role in climate change. It is the period of a full rotation of the Moon’s orbital plane around the ecliptic, the geometric plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. It is the clearest tidal signal in the thousands of time series analysed.
The LNC encodes information about the Moon, Earth, Sun geometry that relates to tidal extremes, at least at high latitudes. It defines how the angle of the Moon’s orbit to the Earth’s equatorial plane combines with, or partially cancels out, the tilt in the Earth’s axis. From the perspective of an observer on the Earth, during the LNC the Moon moves along a northern latitude about ten degrees from a position about 18.5 degrees north of the equator to one that is 28.5 degrees, which it reaches after 18.6 years.
The regular sequence of eclipses is a result of the regular, highly predictable rotation of the plane of the Moon’s orbit round the Earth. It has been known since ancient times that eclipses occurred in regular predictable cycles of a little more than 18 years. This period is known as the Saros cycle.
Mazzarella and Palumba (1994) point out that bistable modes of oscillation with respect to time are well known in physical and engineering systems and have been extensively studied. This research from Physics and Engineering demonstrates that a sinusoidal force applied to any dynamic system induces sinusoidal periodicities in the system. Accordingly, the LNC induces bistable sinusoidal periodicities in the atmosphere (pressure, temperature and rainfall) and the ocean (temperature and sea level). The sinusoidal, highly stable 18.6 year LNC has a distinctive and significant effect on the Earth’s climate dynamics.
The elongated tidal bulge necessarily continues to be aligned with the Moon as Figure 2 shows. The bulge moves to the northern (and southern) latitudes as the Moon moves northwards because of the LNC, being the furthest north it can get to at the 18.6 yr point. This last happened on September 16, 2006. Even though the amplitude of the LNC is at most 5 cm, a small tide over a long period has great power. The ocean currents generated by the northward movement of the tidal bulge, in conjunction with the rotation of the Earth through the bulges in the normal manner creating our experience of the tides, brings warmish equatorial water to the Arctic accelerating the warming that had being going on there because of other forms of solar activity as discussed below.
The LNC has maximum effect at higher latitudes, resulting in higher sea levels at these latitudes. It creates tidal currents resulting in diapycnal mixing, bringing the warmer equatorial waters into the Arctic. The LNC is therefore a major determinant of Arctic climate dynamics, influencing long term fluctuations in Arctic ice. As a result, it is a key driver of European climate. Da Silva and Avissar (2005) showed that LNC is unambiguously correlated with the Arctic Oscillation since the 1960s. The authors explain how the LNC tidal forces contribute significantly to the regulation of the Arctic Oscillation, which is a major driver of climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere.
5.3 Complex interaction effects between the lunar nodal cycle other solar variables and climate
The joint effects of the LNC and other solar variables illustrate that solar variables may interact to produce significant climate events, in this case the melting of the ice in the Arctic and higher sea surface temperatures at northern latitudes. In 2006 the LNC jointly with other solar activity during the preceding ten years provide an adequate explanation for the observed recent Arctic warming.
1. Camp and Tung (2007c) established for the first time as statistically significant that the warm ENSO (i.e. El Niño) warms the Arctic. Moderate to very strong El Niño events occurred in the following years since 1972: 1972/3; 1977/78; 1982/83; 1986/88; 1991/92; 1993/94; 1994/95; 1997/98; 2002/03; and 2004/05. The El Niño event which began in early 1997 and continued for about one year was one of the strongest ever recorded, both in terms of sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific and atmospheric circulation anomalies reflected in the Southern Oscillation Index. The last El Niño event started in September 2006 and lasted until early 2007, occurring at precisely the same time as the peak of the LNC.
2. Camp and Tung (2007a and 2007b) also revealed the surface pattern of warming caused by the Sun. Amongst other things, polar amplification is shown clearly with the largest warming in the Arctic (treble that of the global mean), followed by that of the Antarctic (double). Surprisingly, the warming over the polar region occurs during late winter and spring.
3. Camp and Tung (2006) found that there is a significant relationship between polar warming and the sunspot cycle.
4. Soon (2005) showed a statistically significant relationship between solar radiance and Arctic-wide surface air temperatures. Solar Cycle 23 peaked during 2000/01, having been preceded by the unusually strong 1997/98 El Niño.
5. Shirochkov et al (2000) report that the extent of Arctic sea ice is largely a function of solar variability. The extent of Arctic sea ice varies directly with all measureable indices of variable solar activity. Specifically, solar wind plays a notable role in the variation of the extent of Arctic sea ice.
6. The ice-albedo (i.e. reflectance) effect will amplify the increased melting of the sea ice resulting from the interaction of El Niño, solar irradiance and the LNC on the Arctic. The increased expanse of ocean warms further as it absorbs more solar irradiance. This will lead to more warming and more sea ice will melt. So the process would continue unless something intervened. Recent observations show Da Silva and Avissar (2005) showed that the LNC accelerates this warming processes. These processes enable a larger volume of liquid water to respond to the tidal forces. In addition, the changes in ocean stratification that follow improve the mixing efficiency.
Since the Moon’s orbit is elliptical, there is a point when the Moon is closest to the Earth (the perigee) and a point where it is furthest (apogee). It is to be noted that the perigee (and therefore the apogee) is not constant. Both vary, largely because of the perturbing effect of the Sun. There is a 40 percent difference between the lunar tidal forces at the perigee and the apogee of the Moon’s orbit. The Moon moves faster at the perigee, and slower at the apogee. This means that tidal currents quicken as the Moon approaches the perigee of its orbit. They are slower at apogee. The Arctic Oscillation (AO) is regulated by the solar cycle in a non-linear manner. Heightened and weakened solar activity activates the large Rossby and Kelvin waves. The effects of these waves on atmospheric circulation are intensified by the creation of Ozone during times of increased solar activity. The AO is stronger with more zonal circulation over mid-latitudes, especially in the European-North Atlantic sector, and more variable during the peak of the solar cycle.
The AO is also regulated by the peak 9.3 year and 18.6 year LNC tidal oscillations. The processes by which the effect occurs are different from those of variable solar activity. The tidal oscillation impacts on atmospheric circulation and on the large Rossby and Kelvin waves. It also impacts on the churning of the oceans. Nevertheless, the two solar processes interact amplifying each other’s contribution. The AO has a key role in Northern Hemisphere climate variability and its behaviour is largely the result of the interaction of the solar cycle and the 9.3 and 18.6 year LNC tidal oscillations. Berger (2007) found that solar modulation of the NAO is amplified by tidal cycles. He found that there is non-linear resonance between solar cycles and tidal cycles, especially the LNC and the perigean tidal cycle the effect of which is to amplify solar modulation of the NAO.
References:
Berger, W. H., 2007. Solar modulation of the North Atlantic Oscillation: Assisted by the tides? Quaternary International, 188, 24-30; doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2007.06.028.
Camp, C. D., and Tung, Ka-Kit, 2006. The Influence of the Solar Cycle and QBO on the Late Winter Stratosphereic Polar Vortex. Journal of Atmospheric Sciences in press.
Camp, C. D., and Tung, Ka-Kit, 2007a. Surface warming by the solar cycle as revealed by the composite mean difference projection, Geophysical Research Letters Vol. 34, L14703, doi:10.1029/2007GL030207..
Camp, C. D., and Tung, Ka-Kit, 2007b. Solar Cycle Warming at the Earth’s Surface and an
Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity, submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research, and published by the University of Washington on Ka Kit Tung’s departmental website,
http://www.amath.washington.edu/research/articles/Tung/journals/solar-jgr.pdf
Camp, C. D., and Tung, Ka-Kit, 2007c. Stratospheric polar warming by ENSO in winter: a statistical study, Geophysical Research Letters Vol. 34, L14809, doi:10.1029/2006GL03028521..
Da Silva, R. R., and Avissar, R., 2006. The impacts of the Luni-Solar Oscillation on the Artic Oscillation. Geophysical Research Letters 32, L22703, doi:10.1029/2005GL023418,2005.
Mazzarela, A. and Palumbo, A., 1994. The Lunar Nodal Induced-Signal in Climatic and Ocean Data over the Western Mediterranean Area and on its Bistable Phasing, Theoretical and Applied Climatology 50, 93-102.
Shirochkov, A. V., Makarova, L .N. and Volobuev, D. M., 2000. The arctic sea ice extent as a function of solar variability, presentation to the first conference of S-RAMP (Solar- Terrestrial Energy Program, 1990-1997 Results, Applications and Modeling Phase; A fiveyear (1998-2002) effort to optimize the analysis of data obtained during the Solar-Terrestrial Energy Program, 1990-1997). The conference was held at Sapporo, Japan, October 2-6, 2000. See http://www.kurasc.kyoto-u.ac.jp/s-ramp/abstract/s18.txt
Figure 2 follows:
(but it wouldn’t copy)
Aron:-)
Where did your figure for 180ppm come from for 20,000ya? Also I thought that @ur momisugly <200ppm plant life would suffer significantly?
There is research that shows CO2 levels of around 330ppm 9,500 ya over Denmark taken from from lake deposits, so I suspect the level varies globally over all scales!
BTW, I agree with your last comments wholeheartedly!
Below is a link to the historical total accumulated ice coverage for Eastern Canada since 1969.
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/IceGraph/CwtClimChtSrvlt?region=ecoast&nrmlsta=1971&nrmlend=2000&sizex=1230&sizey=780&lang=en&showwarn=false&plotnormal=true&plotmedian=false&plottrend=false&plothilite=false&plotwarn=false&plotscaled=false&cachelife=60&errorpage=/IceGraphDisplay-GraphdesGlacesDisplay.jsf&charttype=stac&ssnsta=1969&ssnend=2009&histdtsta=1126&histdtend=0528&format=csod
First class post! Since we know there has been some warming over the last 20 or so years it’s not surprising there has been a bit of a downward trend.
Doesn’t seem like a reason to do a Chicken Licken, though!
Today’s local temp — 78F; forecast for Friday — 50F. Yikes!
Thanks for the support everyone.
There are several comments about jet streams, when I made the video I got to watch it in full resolution at a variety of speeds. I believe the cloud patterns and flow patterns from the melt are visibly different over the 2007 and 2008 years literally blasting away at the southwest corner of the ice sheet.
I have an idea to do a centroid of the sheet on top of the video. The centroid (center of mass) would show the ice being pushed one way or the other. Since there are two primary drains for the ice at the top of the video a change in ice level could simply be a result of change in direction of the weather patterns.
TonyB (00:46:53) :
I nominate Tony to be the Arctic historian. You seem to have the expertise, if you write it up I bet there would be a lot of interest. tAV would run it :D.
Great stuff Jeff Id.
Was it so hard that the NSIDC couldn’t have done this. I mean they only have dozens of computer-savy professions working 40 hours a week and getting paid for it.
Any chance that the data can be posted up somewhere in a spreadsheet?
Anthony please remove video link wrong link previous message thanks it should be this link here http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
Jeff Id — You the man !!
Now, how about a similar effort for the Antarctic sea ice…
Anthony – Bravo on that rebuttal. Of course the climate is warmer than during the LIA (Thank God ! Those winters were brutal !). And you were quite precise in that statement that the warming is not 100% attributal to man. Some – yes – maybe at most a third, but most is entirely natural.
In reviewing all the eco-tourist follies, from strolls to the pole, to rescues off the Greenland ice, to stuck icebreakers, there is one bit of good news – none of the looney tunes tourists have ever tried to make nice with a polar bear. That’s one You Tube vid I hope we never have to see
OT, but one of those SC24 sunspot groups has actually become quite respectable…
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_igr/1024/latest.html
It is much more respectable, IMHO, than the sunspecs that have been counted as “sunspots” in the past.
“…A mile long, a quarter-mile wide, this ruined city was perhaps as big as any in Alaska today (biggest: Juneau, pop. 5,700).”
??? The population of the municipality of Anchorage as of June, 2008 was
279, 273 according to the Bureau of the Census.
The population of North Star Borough, which includes Fairbanks, is just shy of 100,000. Of course the area of this municipality is approximately the size of the state of New York.
I assume that these figures do not include the moose population.
Alaska is directly divided into municipalities: no counties. Areas within municipalities can be incorporated as autonomous political units.
Great piece of detective work.Things are not as the IPCC want them…
Anthony, I don’t think many here are offended by the word Croc, although I guess if we continue the sentence it would be offensive. I looked those videos up from greenman3610 on youtube and I think they would make and excellent topic.
I watched one on treehugger and it said NOTHING at all. Except that fossil fuel companies are the ones pushing the skeptical argument. What is going to heat my house, what is going to drive my car or power my electricity. I couldn’t imagine that our fossil companies are actually worried about their business going down from these alternative fuel companies. They are a mere pinprick.
Here are the greenman3610 videos.
http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610
“” Jeff Id (05:53:41) :
TonyB (00:46:53) :
I nominate Tony to be the Arctic historian. You seem to have the expertise, if you write it up I bet there would be a lot of interest. tAV would run it :D.””
I for one am interested. Maybe if it was done well enough, who knows, maybe Anthony Watts would give it a guest post? Just my opinion, and hope. 😉
Thanks for all the work Jeff, and to Anthony for posting it. Thanks toTonyB as well for your historical references. I remember reading about the flourishing population around the arctic circle some 2000 years ago, but it must have been at least 20-30 years since I read that.
Great work; thanks!
The rapid mode of atmospheric circulation entered in the the mid 1970s has consequences as Professor Marcel Leroux wrote to climatesceptics in 2007: “”When sea-ice is concerned, or any other phenomenon, the
(climatological) reflex would be to search a meteorological reason able to explain the melting …
In this case what can explain the summer melting of ice, over the eastern side of Arctic, and over its western side, while the central Arctic, in the prolongation of Greenland, still remains iced ?
Meteorologically speaking, the reply is : an advection of warm air, and of warm water, from South (Atlantic and Pacific).
Since Arctic is not a closed space, explanations of such an intensified advection constrain to examine the whole circulation around the Arctic area. Consequently, it appears unuseful to evoke a “local” warming … or an anomalous radiation which would forget, just, the Central Arctic … because meteorological phenomena are interdependant … in the framework of general circulation …”.
great video, thanks
Ryan O. (Steig et al falsified) has been taken to the woodshed by RC.
Gavin has taken out his ruler and gone pedagogic on him!
From the Front Lines –
The Boy of John
Things are changing in the Artic.
Like the private jet traveling HRH the prince of Wales, the crown princess of Sweden and the two crown princes of Denmark and of Norway are all concerned about global warming.
On the ice sheet of Greenland the 3 airs of the thrones of the Nordic countries all met in order to learn about global warming. The spring has arrived on the Greenland ice sheet. Despite this they got a chilly reception and spent tenting overnight in tents at 20 C below zero degrees temperatures.
http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/06/01/nyheter/miljo/kongefamilen/kongelig/klima/6498016/
http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/kongelige/article3100339.ece
You can have the articles translate from Norwegian by going to Google’s translation tools.
Jeff Id, thanks for a uniquely memorable understanding of the Arctic. I have lived for two weeks sans computer; upon return not only am I refreshed from vacation, but I experience a youthful “Awesome! Totally Awesome!” due to your efforts. Breathing with the Arctic gives an amazing sense of Earth’s periodicies and oscillations within a short-term relatively steady state. We can depend on Arctic ice for the present — filling and voiding (partly), inspiration and expiration, even with wild winds (jet stream?) and tides influenced by lunar nodual cycle (thanks to Richard Mackey). Anthony, you, your blog, posters and commenters, all are Awesome!
Tony B, I second your nomination as historian of the Arctic.
Bill,
The data is 1.2 Gb – too large for a spreadsheet. If you want pieces of it drop a request at tAV and I’ll try to help.
====================
Dr. Steig has responded to our posts claiming that we are overfitting at RC.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/rc-replies-dr-steig-claims-overfitting/
Extremely educational. I can’t believe that it is only WUWT and collaborators who are able to produce stuff like this!
As an aging civil (hydro) engineer, with an extensive background in climate (it’s a fundamental input), I can’t believe how much I am learning on WUWT.
Thanks, Jeff – you done real good. Onya, mate.
Bill Illis (05:59:58) :
Great stuff Jeff Id.
Was it so hard that the NSIDC couldn’t have done this. I mean they only have dozens of computer-savy professions working 40 hours a week and getting paid for it.
Like this one?
http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice_animation.html
Well I couldn’t find the movie at home, but it works at work, which is a wonder because our IT people have youtube blocked.
Very nice Jeff, and well worth the time you put into it. Is there a way to save a copy of this thing to watch, when we want to, and can it be slowed down (if wanted) so we can look at details and timing ?
Geoirge