There is a webcam at the “North Pole” (at least it starts out very near there) that reports via satellite data uplink at regular intervals. They also have a weather station with a once weekly data plot. Note it is still below zero centigrade there.
Latest data (updated approximately weekly)
Readers should note that the station really isn’t at the north pole anymore due to significant ice drift.
WUWT reader GlennB called attention to the webcam images today. A couple of weeks ago (5/31/09) it looked like this. You can see the weather station in the distance.
Now it looks like this:
click for larger images
It appears either a snow drift and/or pressure ridge has blocked the view of the weather station.
Here is what they say about it on NOAA/PMEL’s web page:
NOAA/PMEL’s North Pole web cam deployments began in April 2002. The web cams operate during the Summer warmth and daylight (April – October) and are redeployed each Spring. The images from the cameras track the North Pole snow cover, weather conditions and the status of PMEL’s North Pole instrumentation, which includes meteorological and ice sensors (seen in the camera images). The instruments typically continue to transmit data for months after the solar-powered web cams stop.
Web Camera provided by Star Dot Technologies with technical support by Vance Kozik. System design by Oceantronics. Camera images are relayed via the Iridium satellite system.
Link is here: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np.html
What I find most interesting is the ice/snow sounder graph.
Ice-temperature plot: Plots of air, ice, and ocean temperature as measured by Mass Balance buoys developed by CRREL. Final versions of files will be created by CRREL.
Download preliminary data: 07948.cplot (click for header information)
Latest data (updated approximately weekly)
Not much change in the ice pinger distance, even though the station has drifted 161 miles to the SSE (lat lon data here). If I interpret the pinger graph correctly, the ice thickness has changed from ~2.75m to ~2.5m.
We’ll see if there is any significant chnage in a couple of weeks, assuming it is still transmitting.
Never mind, It’s late and I wasn’t seeing great, the station is just following the flow down the east side of Greenland that showed so well in the polar ice animation.
OT but “Denmark to power electric cars by wind in vehicle-to-grid experiment”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/19/denmark-wind-electric-cars
“The project on the holiday island of Bornholm will use the batteries of parked electric cars to store excess energy when the wind blows hard, and then feed electricity back into the grid when the weather is calm.”
I don’t think so. Those crystals are in sharp focus while at the same time the weather station in the background is also fairly well focused. Webcams normally have very short focal length lenses, but no ordinary webcam will be able to focus at zero distance from the lens and several tens of meters away at the same time.
That snow and ice should be something like a meter away from the camera, maybe more.
Nev (18:16:28) :
I say this because science and public policy have published a new extract from Air Con that alludes to this http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/commentaries/seriously_inconvenient_truth.pdf
I think the Utopian beast is going to continue eating our lunch until we figure out how to kill it so it stays dead.
Maybe we could send them to the north pole to clean the camera lens.
Well, in the meantime the arctic sea ice extent has now gone below its 2008 value. It will be interesting to see what will happen in the weeks to come…
Chris: Good point about cherry picking start dates. I had some fun with this at: http://www.woodfortrees.org/notes#trends
I think the most we can say is that there is not (yet) any evidence of the kind of extreme increases projected at the wilder end of the debate, and until otherwise proven I’m personally still hopeful that the feedback sign will turn out to be negative.
Flanagan (03:13:57) Would you give a link to show your data that contradicts the JAXA graph above?
Phil. (18:43:57) :
Actually, from his web site, this is what he said.
I guess it’s a matter of opinion as to whether “should only be used as a rough guide” is the same thing as “isn’t really worth bothering”.
Flanagan wrote (03:13:57) :
“Well, in the meantime the arctic sea ice extent has now gone below its 2008 value. It will be interesting to see what will happen in the weeks to come…”
Well I guess it depends where you look. Looking at http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic arctic ice appears to be in good shape being close to its 1979-2007 average. If I then look at http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png the 2009 sea ice is getting pretty close to 2007 (not 2008) but not there yet. As requested by Steve Keohane above maybe Flanagan could provide a link and Anthony Watts invite someone to write an entry on the various sites providing information on arctic ice and their relative reliability.
Steve Keohane (04:25:16) :
I guess Flanagan’s counting leap days, which is legitimate.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv
06,19,2008,10449531
06,20,2008,10386719
06,20,2009,10425000
Note that this site often issues an update for the most recent day.
At any rate, above or below 2008, 2009 is solidly in the middle of the range since 2002. The September minimum is all that really counts though.
Chris Schoneveld (23:35:47) – I agree with the dangers of cherry-picking but the year 1998 belongs somewhere in the discussion. Depending on the starting point, it can influence a trend line either way and the alarmists certainly use it to bolster their case (it’s almost critical to their proposition).
I think the salient point is that the modern warming period, the period of alarmism, runs for approximately 30 years. Yet contrary to the alarmist models, in roughly 1/3 of that period – the last third by the way – the warming appears to have ceased and receded a bit. The longer this trend continues, the less relevant ’98 becomes.
Sure enough
06,20,2009,10449375
woodfortrees (Paul Clark) (04:14:04) :
“I think the most we can say is that there is not (yet) any evidence of the kind of extreme increases projected at the wilder end of the debate, and until otherwise proven I’m personally still hopeful that the feedback sign will turn out to be negative.”
Personally I am hopeful that the feedback will be positive since I strongly believe in the benefits of a warmer world but also of the benefits of higher CO2 levels (increased food production). After all, our atmosphere is, on a geological time scale, CO2-impoverished. I think it is a shame that within 50 years we may start running out of fossil fuels to help bring up the levels well above the 560 ppm. Alas!
Flanagan, It’s called spring, then comes summer. Even in the Arctic. Just so you know, the days begin getting shorter very soon. The next couple of months will be even more interesting than the next couple of weeks. Shake it off and bring your inquisitive mind over to our side. You must feel it deep down in our bones that your viewpoint is not tenable. That nagging doubt like the telltale heart under the floorboards.
Flanagan I am predicting more ice at the minimum in 2009 than 2008.
Barring some weird weather I expect this to be the second year in a row I am correct and the consensus of science is wrong.
Below freezing again today in Alert.
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/city/pages/nu-22_metric_e.html
An interesting article in UK The Sunday Times today. “Gas that saved the ozone layer is making the world warmer” A study by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency warns that “by 2050 HFCs sould account for up to 19% of global warming and a tonne of HFC-23 used in refrigeration has the same global warming potential as 14,800 tonnes of CO2.” What about getting CFCs back to combat global warming? If you are a “climate change denier” I suppose it does not matter, but perhaps such individuals as Al Gore, Dr James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt ought now to petition the UN to have the 1987 Montreal Protocol rescinded with immediate effect.
Seems to be still quite cold in the Arctic.
http://www.uni-koeln.de/math-nat-fak/geomet/meteo/winfos/synNNWWarctis.gif
The data is from the IJIS website of the JAXA, from which the graph is taken. David Ball, I’m quite surprised by your reaction. I was only noting that the extent is quite lower than the average for this date, because to my knowledge springs happens every year… It only confirms the downards trend, that’s it. But let’s wait for the spetember minimum….
Phil re Roy Spencer not bothering about… using that data… This might help…see here
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/01/daily-monitoring-of-global-average-temperatures/
I would like to start a discussion on significance of the standard deviation. It is rather uncommon to say anything about data that is at or near 1 standard deviation. It is something else again to say that a particular data point is at or beyond 2 standard deviations from the mean. However, this is complicated by the steepness or flatness of the normal distribution. It is something to consider when looking at data that includes standard deviation shading. However, in general, individual data points that are within 2 standard deviation are safely said to be normal variation from multiple normal causes. Data outside this is said to be unique and outside the normal situation. When studying time-dependent data such as the Arctic sea ice data, the shaded area can narrow or spread depending on the time axis. It is quite possible that overall extent and area at its peak in the Arctic can have a rather steep normal distribution with narrow standard deviations. However, at the bottom of the melt period, it is conceivable that the normal distribution would have a flatter bell curve, and wide standard deviations. I would hazard a guess that variables in the dead of winter are rather few, but variables in summer are many in comparison. Here are just a few websites that talk about SD and normal distribution.
http://www.robertniles.com/stats/stdev.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation
I am left to wonder why cries of alarm, or even suggestions of alarm, have been issued by anyone at this point who is seeing anything other than situation normal regarding the current extent and area of sea ice in the Arctic.
To continue my thoughts, this site uses plus or minus one standard deviation on its graphs and therefore should be used with caution when saying something significant about the ice.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
This site uses the more acceptable plus or minus two standard deviations and is therefore more usable when saying something significant about the ice.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2009/050409.html
Shawn: may I remind you the consensus on the Arctic would place its extent higher than it is today. A continuation of the long term trend would mean a 3.5 million sqm area (not extent) in September. We’ll see…
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (02:12:24) :
Phil. (19:16:20) :
“The camera transmitter has been on the frizz for a few weeks but now seems to have sent some data. Rather than a snow drift and/or pressure ridge has blocked the view of the weather station it appears to be snow accumulation on the camera itself (checkout the crystals in this photo).
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2009/images/tmp/noaa1-2009-0618-041044.jpg.tmp”
I don’t think so. Those crystals are in sharp focus while at the same time the weather station in the background is also fairly well focused. Webcams normally have very short focal length lenses, but no ordinary webcam will be able to focus at zero distance from the lens and several tens of meters away at the same time.
That snow and ice should be something like a meter away from the camera, maybe more.
Not at zero but certainly those lenses will focus at a minimum distance of ~0.1m which is what that image looks like, so it is snow on the camera housing is what’s being seen, not a snow drift or pressure ridge.
Pamela Gray (09:36:09) :
To continue my thoughts, this site uses plus or minus one standard deviation on its graphs and therefore should be used with caution when saying something significant about the ice.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
This site uses the more acceptable plus or minus two standard deviations and is therefore more usable when saying something significant about the ice.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2009/050409.html
Acceptability depends on the number of data points, for a small number of data points two standard deviations could be very unlikely.
Check out Chauvenet’s criterion for example.
Two questions Flanagan,
1. Are you referring to a linear trend? But the historical sea ice data that creates the mean and standard deviations of the mean do not act linearly.
2. Using a non linear averaging statistic, what would your prediction be in terms of its relationship to 2 standard deviations from the mean?
Given the current measurement and its residence well inside the 2 standard deviation area, and given the predicted weather, current, and wind patterns through the summer, I predict a greater chance (better than 50%) of maximum melt to be within the 2 standard deviation of the mean.