Update on Arctic sea ice melt – "Ice pockets choking Northern Passage"

And the ice AREA, where Nansen shows 2009 above 2008, is 0.9 mill sq km bigger.

Thank you, Pierre Gosselin (01:56:17), for the map with water temperatures and you, Pamela Gray, for your enlightening posts: (14:30:44) and (15:32:36) on the influence of the wind.
Pamela Gray (15:32:36) wrote:
“Let me say this again. The wind patterns have been blowing ice together towards the pole and up against the Canadian/Greenland coast. On the few occasions when the wind went South it lasted but a couple of days or was in areas that created ice jams as the ice tried to leave the Arctic. The ice is THICK!!!!! The summer wind has consistently blown it into piles that will not melt quickly. It is not anywhere near being thin. And it probably has not melted all that much. The ice extent and area is measured with the assumption that the ice went South or melted in place. It is my firm belief that it didn’t melt as much as it moved NORTH and created thick jumbled piles, thus taking the extent and area with it. Take a fluffy snowball and compact it. Same amount of snow, just a smaller, harder ball of it. We are near the end of the melt season and we have a compacted ball of ice. That hard ball of ice up there ain’t gonna melt so fast.”
The picture I get is that
1. polar ice melts mostly at the bottom, and
2. the wind does it’s thing and that is usually the determining factor.
The wind can blow the ice to the Atlantic Ocean where it melts fast (like in 2007),
or keep it in the polar region where it melts slower.
And even make it pile up so that a smaller bottom surface area is exposed to the water, which greatly diminishes the total volume if ice that melts per given time unit.
With air temperatures overall close to normal or below average and arctic water maybe a little warmer but not a lot, the wind is again the determining factor.
If, as you say Pamela, the wind has piled up the ice, that explains why the surface area of polar ice suddenly diminished so fast from May15 until July20, after being so resistant to melting until May15. (That really puzzled me).
Now we may reasonably expect the slow down in melting that started July20 to continue. (unless the wind turns?).
This is all so exciting.

Now that I get how the wind determines how fast the ice melts, I finally get the significance of the geography around the North Pole.
The polar ice is Almost completely locked in by land: Siberia and Scandinavia on one side and Alaska and Canada on the other.
Warm water can reach it only from the Pacific through the narrow and far from deep Bering Strait and (much more) from the Atlantic, left along both sides of Greenland.
Sorry, I am just a layman, but slowly catching up – and having a great time.
I love science.

When the ice extent in 2008 melt season proved to be 9% greater than 2007 despite alleged warmer ocean water, I wrote to NSIDC when they in their analysis were going on about the demise of arctic summer ice over the next year or so and suggested that, if we now were starting from cooler water plus 9% more ice in 2008, that there was a reasonable probability (one that would change to a high probability if we had another rapid freeze-up like we had for fall-winter 2007) that we would increase the ice again. I made a prediction of adding 15% more ice to the summer survival extent for 2009 plus adding a year to the age of the existing ice. I was reacting to the commentary that seemed to ignore this probable case. Now, understanding since the “movie” of the 2007 clear out under the wind that this could happen again (and probably had umpteen times over the centuries) I lowered my probability estimate to 60%, eventhough we did have a very rapid freeze-up that fall and probably (at the time) a very cold winter in the offing. I’m bravely going for 15% more than 2008, emboldened by the number of “expert” forecasts that I beat using a complex model that everyone has in their heads. I know the theoretical physicists will chide me that I wasn’t aware and hadn’t considered some number of climate/weather effects and that my prediction would just be lucky. Gee, this just tells me that all the sophisticated models brought to bear so far haven’t had the blessing of science or luck. Oh and I’m predicting a return to “normal” extent in 2010 and surpassing “normal” for the next number of years.

So 2007 was the year of the great record arctic ice melt; ergo global warming.
Not so. In the TV Documentary, “The Deadliest Catch”, about the hazards of the Alaskan King Crab commercial fishery; the program documents the story of the fishing fleet based in Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians; and these crab ships head about west north west of Dutch Harbot out into the Bering Sea; they never get into the Arctic Ocean. The further north in the Bering, they can get to lay their crab traps, the more crab they can catch; but the ships eventually ice up with frozen sea spray, and the crew has to knock ice off to stop the ships capsizing from top heavy icing.
In 2007, the year of the greatest Arctic Ocean sea ice melt in the entire recorded history of this planet; going back to around 1979, this documentary records on film that one of the crab ships became locked in floating sea ice in the Bering Sea. The video clearly shows that the sea ice cover was in the range of 90% total surface coverage or more. They had to abandon their trap set, and head south to escape from the ice and the bitter cold storm.
All that floating sea ice, had been blown into the north Bering, from the Arctic Ocean; and it was in the much warmer waters of the north Pacific (or Atlantic) that all that 2007 ice finally melted; not in the arctic ocean.
I believe it is well documented, that the 2007 sea ice got blown away by a hurricane like storm, and melted in the warmer oceans; not in the Arctic Ocean.

Pamela Gray (20:24:01) :
Douglas, see my earlier post 16:22:43
Noted-missed it.
capted3126 (13:04:29) :
You’ve been there-done that.At the very least, we are at a Pre-1950 state if not a
pre Dalton state.As a former professional pilot, one of the things that i have noticed in North American aviation,(I still keep up with it) is the incidence of airframe icing. I’ve challenged the Cascades more than once(sometimes in equipment that was,shall we say marginal.) .Flying Icing is as much an art as science.I fear the pilots trained in the 90’s haven’t experienced icing as bad as the 70’s and 80’s and before.-but will again.I hope I’m wrong…

Shawn: if you read carefully your own link, you will note that in 1944 Larsen had to go back to Greenland in July because there was too much ice around Frobisher Bay, which this ear has been ice-free for weeks. Then he went to Pond Inlet by mid-August. All these regions have been ice-free for weeks now.
Larsen then went through the Parry channel and turned south in the Prince of Wales strait, but this part of the trip was done at the end of August/beginning of September. So let’s wait before comparing.
In any case, I wonder how you extrapolate the situation of a single strait to “the Arctic sea ice has increased”?

if you read carefully your own link, you will note that in 1944 Larsen had to go back to Greenland in July because there was too much ice around Frobisher Bay
He sailed around the ice. Once more a matter of common sense.
Something todays science community could use a good dose of.

What good is it to plot 2009 against a 1979-2000 average? Shouldn’t that be a 1979-2008 average? Isn’t that the whole point of tracking an average? Would these last few years not be bringing down the average, thus demonstrating that we are not currently deviating far from the average?
Continuing to cherry pick start and end dates for averages is dishonest at best, but pretty much what I have come to expect from the agenda-driven warmists.