by Jeff Id
As we approach the Arctic Sea Ice minimum, a lot of eyes are looking and projecting what the minimum will be. In a previous post I calculated the centroid of the sea ice as a method for determining how the weather patterns were affecting the data. About a month ago, it seemed that the weather pattern was going to support a leveling off of the sea ice shrink rate so that’s what I predicted and that’s what happened. The curve cut across the 2008 line and reached over until it touched the 2005 line.
![AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent[1]](http://noconsensus.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/amsre_sea_ice_extent11.png?quality=75 "AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent[1]")
Unfortunately, from this centroid video, it looks like the winds from the Southeast in the image which created the huge reduction in Sea Ice in 2007 appears the have restarted this year. It’s already starting to accelerate the melting which caused this year’s red line to dip below the 2005 green line.
The shift in weather pattern is most visible in the shadows on the ice which are actually clouds blowing through. The shadows indicate the 29GhZ microwave data is sensitive to clouds which is part of the noise in the long term signal.
Below is an updated 2007 – present video.
Click to play
If you missed the original video which is full record length and shows the unusualness of the current weather patterns in the last 30 years, it’s linked at this post below.
Arctic Ice Weather Patterns
That post explains the arrow vector and the source of the data.
I’m going to update my prediction from this shift in weather. Now I think the ice level will dip quickly downward in relation to 2005 but will still sit above the 2008 minimums. It looks like the ice has been thinned by the recent blasts of weather from the southeast and if this pattern maintains itself the dip will be fairly strong. Of course I’m an engineer and not a meteorologist so we’ll see.
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The wind vector makes the video perfect.
It must have been a lot of work.
Thanks for posting it.
Nice work. I linked it on my Facebook page, too.
Thanks, Jeff — for both the original and this update.
I’m still not sure what the significance would be if this Ocean becomes ice-free, or nearly so, for a few weeks even as I doubt that will happen. Will not the energy of the water move to the atmosphere faster with no ice cover? When southern currents bring warm water that undercuts the ice layer is that not also increasing the loss of energy from ocean to atmosphere to space? And the DMI Polar Temp is below freezing so the solar heating has faded. Seems to me this part of Earth is like a freezer with an open door pulling energy from the Earth system and dumping it out. Is a cold NH winter on the way?
Cool,
Unfortunately few people are going to accept this as anything other then evidence that the arctic sea ice is going the way of the Dodo. It will always be global warming that is the cause not a shift in weather patterns.
There’s got to be a better way of referencing vectors than the usual N, E, S and W at the poles!
I like it that time lapses slowly in the video.
The prediction of an ice free North Pole in 5 years looks to be wrong.
Jeff: I’m always in awe of your mapping capabilites when I view these.
Don’t we have less baby ice this year (more of it in the terrible twos and threes)than we did in 2007?
Regardless of whether the ice area is greater or less than 2005’s, the AGW crowd will continue to harp on the fact that it’s below the 1979-2000 average, no matter how many ways we try to show that elevated SST anomalies and TLT anomalies of the mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are the results step changes caused by ENSO events.
Hmmm, thinking of your graphics capabilities… Do you know how to create Hovmoller plots?
Britannic no-see-um (15:32:04) : “There’s got to be a better way of referencing vectors than the usual N, E, S and W at the poles!”
Well, North and South still work, but East & West are iffy. Perhaps this-a-way (sinister) and that-a-way (dexter)? Or maybe deosil and widdershins? The latter sounds unscientific enough to fit right into the post-modernist bent of latter-day science.
John F. Hultquist (14:51:33) : “…I’m still not sure what the significance would be if this Ocean becomes ice-free, or nearly so, for a few weeks even as I doubt that will happen. Will not the energy of the water move to the atmosphere faster with no ice cover?”
Yes, given that (1) the emissivity of open water is about 0.993, much higher than ice, and (2) ice is an insulator, and (3) the nights will be getting longer in just another month, (autumnal equinox = Sept 22, 2009; 5:18 P.M. EDT), there would be very high energy loss. Add to this a hypothetical decrease in nighttime sky black body temperature during a solar minimum, and the result would be rapid rebound of Arctic Ice in October, perhaps at record rates.
Creating catastrophe
by Ian Plimer
August 22, 2009
Destroying the factory, building the bureaucracy
The government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme has the potential to ruin Australia’s productive economies and to build an even greater bureaucracy. Even the name of this bill should ring warning bells as carbon is the foundation of life and is not a pollutant.
It is claimed that there is a scientific consensus about human-induced climate change. Consensus is a process of politics not science. There is certainly no scientific consensus about human-induced climate change and the loudest voice does not win scientific discussions. Science is married to evidence, no matter how uncomfortable.
Creating catastrophe
by Ian Plimer
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/08/creating-catastrophe
[b]jorgekafkazar (16:10:41) : [/b]
[i]Britannic no-see-um (15:32:04) : “There’s got to be a better way of referencing vectors than the usual N, E, S and W at the poles!”
Well, North and South still work, but East & West are iffy. Perhaps this-a-way (sinister) and that-a-way (dexter)? Or maybe deosil and widdershins? The latter sounds unscientific enough to fit right into the post-modernist bent of latter-day science.[/i]
I believe that it would be North and South that become unuseable as when you are at the North pole, all directions are south and vice versa. The only references that work are those towards eastern and western ehmispheres.
Seems like the accelerated melt so far is not quite accelerating, actually the melt rate has been the same for a few days now.
However Intellicast’s forecast maps show near to below freezing temperatures in parts of northern Canada and some areas in Siberia near the Arctic Ocean, if those areas continue to slowly cool off then it could possible just slow any ice melt from temps. in those areas.
Also we have also heard of SST’s in parts of the Arctic more than 10 degrees above average, assuming they use centigrade I look at Unisys SST anomalies and it’s not showing that, 2-3 degrees maybe but not 10.
jorgekafkazar (16:25:33) :
Pretty much the way I see it.
The Ice albedo thing is a strawman, the big thing is the additional heat loss because of the presence of open ocean. I hypothesise that this is a cycle.
1) the Earth warms, creating weather conditions suitable for ice melt.
2) The ice melts, allowing the Earth to cool & the ice to re-grow.
3) This inability to lose heat may even be one of the causes of the ends of ice ages.
DaveE.
bryan (16:30:19) : for your html code to work you must use, instead: ()
bryan (16:30:19) :
Actually, at the poles ONLY North or South work, (Depending on the pole you are at.)
DaveE.
Nogw (16:58:51) :
bryan (16:30:19) : for your html code to work you must use, instead: ()
What Nogw meant was enclose the HTML in left & right caret, ie [shift], & [shift].
All the best.
DaveE.
[On this site you must use <, > for your HTML, rather than brackets: [, ]. ~dbstealey, mod.]
Where is the wind direction/strength data coming from, i.e., is there a source data file? Or is the vector (the length/direction of the red arrow), merely calculated from the centroid variation data?
Compare the difference between these two plots:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/images/weatherdata/2004/wx_2004.gif
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/images/weatherdata/2009/wx_2009.gif
then look at all the available weather data plots from 2002-present here:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np.html
I would draw attention to the wind speed scales against the wind plots – recent years have seen almost no stormy weather.
The Arctic drifting buoys that are set up in the spring near the pole seem to tell a different story. Over the last few years – apart from the recent instability of the ice making longer-term measurements impossible for unmanned buoy deployments, compared to previous year’s deployments, which recorded more-or-less the whole year’s weather – the last few years show much less windy weather since 2004-5.
The recent years of calm Arctic weather (more southerly Jet etc.) have not led to pack-ice formation, – the surface sea ice topology has remained relatively flat, and has not contributed to either atmospheric/ice surface turbulence or at the interface between sea and floating ice – mechanically it has all been able to move more smoothly. Winds and ocean currents have been able to work together, with the net effect that ice has been able to flow away, or build up thicker single year layers, without piling up sheets of ice, and forming tall and deep ice structures during storm impaction events.
OT – slightly
you are now getting sunrise/sets in the high arctic islands (Grise Fjord started earlier this week and Eureka 80N should start theirs in the next day or so), so the sun angle is getting down lower. Around Oct 26(when I was there), was the last sun rise until the following Feb. Temps should be tailing off now too, however, they still get the odd blast of warmer weather before winter digs in.
actually ice is looking a lot more concentrated/thick this year
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=08&fd=15&fy=2009&sm=08&sd=22&sy=2009 you can also compare Aug 23 with 22,21,20 etc…
Based on last years trend, Predict ice rebound this year will bring anomaly above for most of mid 2009-2010
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_area.png
Anthony: “I’m going to update my prediction from this shift in weather. Now I think the ice level will dip quickly downward in relation to 2005 but will still sit above the 2008 minimums. It looks like the ice has been thinned by the recent blasts of weather from the southeast and if this pattern maintains itself the dip will be fairly strong. Of course I’m an engineer and not a meteorologist so we’ll see.”
Hi Anthony, I am a great believer in the power if intelligent use of generalist knowledge. By applying some general physical principles you are putting an ‘outer envelope’ on the prediction. More detailed knowledge could maybe improve it, or even lead one astray if one gets bogged down in intricate details and overlooks something. It’s harder to find mistakes in complicated reasoning. If the wind stokes up, I think you will be proved right. Of course the decrease will still be put down to CO2 in certain circles. Completely predictable!
REPLY: that’s from Jeff Id, not me, see the title of the post. – A
If you watch this map for a while (in conjunction with how the sea ice extent tracks) it’s pretty obvious that the melt over the week will be more than in 2005 but less than in 2008. (Click the image to enlarge and count the darkest individual pixels. The watch them disappear day by day.)
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_concentration_hires.png
This year’s ice will soon be WAY ahead of 2008’s and the main channel of the northwest passage will NOT open this year. Some boats will get though the southern route (with help from ice-beakers) but the big opening of the last two years ain’t happening this year.
This map does NOT confirm the high wind speeds.
http://www.athropolis.com/map2.htm
Frederik
Go on satellite image:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/2009231/
and you will see that the “big Nord West”(Mc’Clure strait) will open in few days may be less than a week.
The Amundsen route is already open.
The Siberian route also.
It is possible to circumnavigate the pole .
But I have not a boat.(not even a bicycle).
Bon voyage!
Here is a demonstration of the constancy of the sea ice cycle year after year.
Explaining very simply, the data from 2002.5 through to 2006.5 is least square best fit with the sum of 4 sine wave generators, the dark blue graph line. These are constant in frequency, phase and amplitude for the whole graph.
Yellow is the data seen for lsqr match. (data is truncated and the right hand side of the graph is a projection forward in time)
For clarity It also shows the separate sine waves.
Finally it shows the actual ice data from 2002 through to 2009.5
THE LSQR MATCH HAS NEVER SEEN THE ACTUAL DATA AFTER 2006
http://www.gpsl.net/climate/data/sea_ice/demo-ice-regular-func.png