There’s a couple of indicators that at least for Arctic temperature, the numbers are headed south. First the weather plot from the drifting buoy that is connected with NOAA’s North Pole Cam:
After some very brief excursions above freezing, it is now averaging below freezing. See the raw weather data here. The temperatures from the buoy have been hitting -2°C regularly the past nineteen days.
Another indication is the north pole cam itself.
Note that there are no melt pools or leads visible. The tilt is a bit puzzling, but as the temperature did get above freezing briefly, it may be a harbinger of things to come from this peer reviewer NASA paper. The buoy has drifted with the sea ice and is now near 84.1N, but started at 89.648N, so presumably, temperatures at the actual North Pole would be colder than what is being measured and seen now.
And finally the third temperature indicator is from the Danish Meteorological Institute.
The blue 273.15K line is 0°C or freezing. Of course seawater freezes a bit below that, typically at -2°C according to the US Navy.
The DMI plotting model, seen here, comprises the “daily mean temperature and climate north of the 80th northern parallel, as a function of the day of year.” Note that this year, the temperature rise got off to a late start. However the drop below freezing appears to be headed along the normal bell curve.
While sea ice extent has not seen the depths of 2007 or 2008 numbers yet, it did take a small hit to extent numbers yesterday. Given the temperature situation, it may begin to take a turn in the next two weeks. Traditionally, we have about 20 days of melt season left from this point.
However, as Jeff Id noted in his sea ice video, the winds of the polar region seem to be more of a determining factor in extent than temperature, as much of the ice is being driven southward. Our NOAA North Pole Cam and its drift from 89.648N to 84.1N is an example of this movement.
The date of the turn is always interesting to speculate. I’m going to take a SWAG and suggest Sept 9th as the day Arctic sea ice extent bottoms out.
They just had a several day rain event. Those are ponds of rain water. They had frozen over a week or so ago but it warmed up a little and rained in the past few days.
The tilt appears to be the camera flopping around on its mount. If you go to http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/ , and select this month’s pictures, you will see some where the camera is pointed more to the right and you can see the support structure that it is on. Looking at the shadows cast by the structure when there is some sun, it doesn’t look like the structure itself is leaning, looks like the camera is loose on its mounts and flops around a bit in the wind.
Yet another lagging indicator of the NH “Year Without A Summer Mini-Me” and a leading indicator of early onset of NH climatic autumn and winter.
Note also the track of Bill – that type of track is what you would have at the end of the season – i.e. between the equinox and Nov 1. Only thing is, we had that track in mid – late Aug.
Questions for the Fall:
Does it stay below freezing from here on out into Winter?
Does the falling temperature profile follow the average bell shape or might it fall more steeply or some other anomalous fashion?
What impact will the third spotless Fall and Winter (assuming the Sun continues to be spotless) have on temperature at the North Pole and beyond.
What will sea surface temperatures be, coming out of this next Winter?
And how thick will the ice be after this Winter on the North Pole.
If the Northern Hemisphere is the primary driver of climate, and many people think it is, this Fall and Winter of continued spotless days (should it continue) will answer a lot of questions…
Cap and Trade in the Senate?
A dead letter…
“much of the ice is being driven southward. ”
Doesn’t all motion from the pole go southward?
“Alan the Brit (04:59:47) :
September 8th is my two-penneth worth, it’s my 25th Wedding Anniversary! We can have a shilling on the side.”
Congratulations, 33 for me!
cheers David [the Brit]
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will be visiting (or is visiting) the North Pole… what do you think he will see there and what crap people will tell him to support their AGW agenda?
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gEW-RnogTZwzTbimtbMBGhZMe9Ww
I understand the upper layer of the Arctic Ocean is less salty than say your typical Bering Sea but even so, as dynamic as oceans are, it will take much cooler temps to freeze “seawater in the wild” than -2C air temp. Anecdotaly, the avg low temp in Nome, Alaska for October is -4 to an avg Dec low of -17. The sea there takes until mid-late Dec to freeze…although I do remember a little ice once around Thanksgiving Day and another time none at Christmas. Bear in mind wind and currents play with ice like a child’s toy. Except for shorefast, ice is always going somewhere.
You know, at this point I don’t even care if the arctic ice extent bottoms out all the way in a tie with 2007. Algore, the American Geophysical Union and the BBC said the arctic would be ICE FREE by 2013. ICE FREE FOLKS!
To get there, we’re gonna need some SERIOUS ice melting and record mild winters to occur for the next 48 months!!
Melt ponds on July 21
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2009/images/noaa1-2009-0721-114114.jpg
Still there on July 29
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2009/images/tmp/noaa1-2009-0729-210408.jpg.tmp
And in areas on Aug 2
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2009/images/tmp/noaa1-2009-0802-222423.jpg.tmp
The camera shifts first time on Aug 3
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2009/images/tmp/noaa1-2009-0803-042922.jpg.tmp
Then shifts again on Aug 5 – 6
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2009/images/tmp/noaa1-2009-0806-053214.jpg.tmp
With a big shift to its current position on Aug 6
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2009/images/tmp/noaa1-2009-0806-174315.jpg.tmp
Back to the structure on Aug 12
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2009/images/noaa1-2009-0812-135836.jpg
then back again on Aug 15
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2009/images/noaa1-2009-0815-090152.jpg
REPLY: The Aug15 “melt ponds” appear to be snow drifts. Note the increase in snow on the snow sensor. – A
Actually, it was Professor Wieslaw Maslowski giving a speech at an American Geophysical Union meeting in Dec ’07 saying the artic would be ice-free by 2013…not the AGU itself…but I digress…
This post starts with an image showing graphs of T, pressure and wind. The Y axis of the wind graph is labeled “wind (to, m/s).” Can somebody please explian how to interpret the wind direction on this graph?
Thanks,
Tom
Victoria Gill of the BBC (her nonsense story mentioned above) needs to adjust her Polar Bear Disaster story. The latest catastrophe down to Global Warming is bird life in the Arctic.
Yes indeed the concerns are that an unusually cold summer may decimate bird populations that nest in the Arctic: Keeping the key points above in mind, it’s easy to understand why 2009 has winners and losers. The birds are trapped by the weather, food is limited and they use up their fat stores. They absorb their growing eggs or lay their eggs only to have them freeze. And finally they head south again without nesting.
However, this good news for bears:
On the other hand, the polar bears bask in the cool spring conditions, feeding on seals for a month or more – longer than average. The end result is large numbers of fat and healthy polar bears, with numerous healthy cubs – and great bear watching seasons in 2009 and 2010!
For the blog see
http://arcticadventuretravelblog.com/blog/good-news-for-polar-bears-bad-news-for-birds/
Of course, man-made disasters can be found everywhere (at least enough to keep you on the editorial gravy train of the BBC). All you need is to have the predisposition to see everything through the perspective that man is bad (original sin) and everything that happens is bad and furthermore the bad consequences must all be man’s fault. Amen.
Ray
From your linkj
“In November 2007, Ban travelled to the Antarctic to observe firsthand the effects of global warming.”
What exactly would he have seen when he went? Or more likely what would he have been told what he was seeing?
tonyb
RE:
Tom Moriarty (11:01:24) :
This post starts with an image showing graphs of T, pressure and wind. The Y axis of the wind graph is labeled “wind (to, m/s).” Can somebody please explian how to interpret the wind direction on this graph?
Thanks,
Tom
I believe that the wind graph indicated both wind direction (relative to ? direction) and speed (meters per second) relative to the sensor. What I am uncertain of is if the direction is relative to the prime meridian or not or if the sensor can shift and rotate relative to the background as the Ice shifts and rotates.
Willy (07:14:30) said :
The AMSR-E Sea Ice Extent graph underwent a quiet change last week. The red line (this year’s) used to dip down in July a bit, then straighten out quite markedly to cross over the orange line (last year’s). About 10 days ago this was suddenly revised to where the July dip is only half what it was, and the crossover less dramatic. Seemed like someone has his thumb on the scales. Unfortunately I did not keep copies of the old graphs to display.
Whenever the graphs don’t suite then this sort of thing keeps kept being dragged up. I can tell you after watching the graph for that period and downloading the details there was nothing of the sort. Put your tin hat away. If you want to see this in more depth go here
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6734
and contribute.
Regards
Andy
Will (09:50:32) :
“I understand the upper layer of the Arctic Ocean is less salty than say your typical Bering Sea but even so, as dynamic as oceans are, it will take much cooler temps to freeze “seawater in the wild” than -2C air temp. Anecdotaly, the avg low temp in Nome, Alaska for October is -4 to an avg Dec low of -17. The sea there takes until mid-late Dec to freeze…although I do remember a little ice once around Thanksgiving Day and another time none at Christmas. Bear in mind wind and currents play with ice like a child’s toy. Except for shorefast, ice is always going somewhere.”
Air temperature has little to do with cooling the ocean until it freezes, except that any precipitation that falls as ice will cool the water surface faster than that falling as water, as will also wind chill, mixing with deeper water, and radiation to space.
Snow, hail and frozen rain can fall through air at a few degrees above zero C at the surface, cooling the water as the latent heat of fusion is taken from the body of water, not necessarily cooling the air as much as it falls. Icy precipitation will float, creating a low salinity layer on the surface, but chilling it rapidly, like the ice in my cocktail glass, as long as the ice lasts.
With increasing wind speeds, wind chill and disturbance of the surface layers of the ocean will reduce the ocean temperature at the surface and increase the salinity through mixing, and forced evaporation.
Still clear skies, even with the sun just above the horizon, can allow the ocean water to lose heat faster (by infrared radiation) than the sun can warm the water by absorption of shortwave radiation. A thin layer of ice may prevent radiation from the water, and reflect the shortwave, whereas thicker layers of ice not only reflect shortwave radiation, but emit even longer wave radiation at lower temperatures. During the long polar winter night, Temperatures can drop as low as the apparent radiation temperature of the zenith above if measured at the surface – about minus 60degC, and not much lower.
Air will respond to temperature variation by convection, taking warmer air upwards, further away from the surface.
Apparent from the first image, winds are almost non-existent between 89 and 84 degN, as they have been for most of the last five years, with little of the storminess experienced in the previous few years since 2002 by the polar drifting buoys.
One wonders what the Caitlin crew were battling against.
somebody wrote on climateaudit, that the winds are currently compacting the ie, thus reducing the extent.
this could lead to higher volumes,
(though volume doesn’t matter if it increases,
like short term trends don’t matter if ice inreases,
and 30 year trend don’t matter, if we now start seeing the refreezing part of a 60 year cyle…
actually that would all be indisputable signs, that it is worse than expeted.)
‘Polar’ mentioned it but was ignored so I’ll mention it again –
The comment “…as much of the ice is being driven southward.” needs to be clarified because at the North Pole, every direction is south. In the future, please include which longitudinal direction tward the south you are refering to.
Thanks in advance,
Jeff
REPLY: I did. See the drift track map that was linked to. here it is again for your convenience
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np_weatherdata.html#drift
– A
BTW, the data file on the site that you linked to is only current up to the last update on the 17th{Jda 229, today is jda 237}
I suspect we may still see fairly dramatic loss of ice, possibly rivaling 07 and 08. Of course this will be claimed as justifying the alarmist position, although the evidence would indicate that winds and currents have been much more responsible for the increasing loss than temperature, primarily the dominance in recent years of the wind vector from Alaska toward the Fram which has caused the area where thick ice congregates to move from along the Canadian coast from Ellesmere island west to the Fram, where the transpolar drift current is able to move it out down the east coast of Greenland. I’ve seen a couple of studies that indicate that these changes of weather pattern occur on decadal time scales, though I don’t have the links to hand at the moment. I still think all the drama about is highly overwrought, as the period of declining ice is now decades advanced and as far as I can tell no catastrophic, or even deleterious phenomena are appearing as a result. In fact over the period of the most dramatic loss of ice the global temps have been markedly stable. One might even suspect that the increasing amount of ice leaving the Arctic to melt at lower latitudes has been a stabilizing factor.
corrigendum: should be “all the drama about ice loss is highly overwrought”
The tilt is from the sweeping vista of open water just behind the camera. It’s base is about to fall into the water, much to the joy of kayakers who have been circling about in anticipation of this moment.
Nah, just kidding.
Predict guys. Minimum ice date, min extent (million Km^2)
Anyone talking about ice free artic at any time of the year is in need of serious mental treatment.
It will never happen in our times, especially because we have arrived at what looks like to become a serious cooling event.
From historic observations soalr minimum coincided with cold periods and there is absolutely no reason to expect that the current solar minimum will pass “unpunished”.
It’s just a matter of time.
Another peer reviewed scientific report will be published this week from the Oregon State University stating that we could enter a new Ice Age right now.
Link via climatedepot.com: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/08/24/lawrence-solomon-new-ice-age-could-be-coming.aspx
I can’t wait to read it.
Frost warning for eastern Newfoundland tonight + snow in the forecast for western Labrador on Thursday!!!
Tom in Florida (05:26:09) :
“The buoy has drifted with the sea ice and is now near 84.1N, but started at 89.648N, so presumably, temperatures at the actual North Pole would be colder than what is being measured and seen now.”
So we really aren’t measuring the same place. Perhaps a variation of the “How not to measure temperature” series”.
Right Tom, I wonder why nobody took notice of all the partying going on next to the sensor: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_2JCfBJEzimk/RkjI21PmNJI/AAAAAAAAAok/_vNNAjcZf4c/s400/polarbearBBQ.gif