The April 1st National Snow and Ice Data Center Arctic Sea Ice Extent plot continues its unusual upwards trend and is almost intersecting the “normal” line. Given the slope of the current trend it seems highly likely it will intersect the normal line with the April 2nd plot.
Other sea ice metrics such as JAXA, using a different satellite platform (AQUA) and the AMSR-E sensor agree.
It is an odd sort of a divergence, this growth of Arctic Sea ice well past the normal start of “melt”.
As first mentioned in a WUWT story two days ago, Dr. Walt Meier of NSIDC says:
“It’s a good question about the last time we’ve been above average. It was May 2001.”
It may be winds pushing ice further southwards in the Bering Sea, it may be fresh ice. It may be a combination. While this event isn’t by itself an about-face of the longer downward trend we’ve seen, it does seem to suggest that predictions assuming a linear (or even spiral) demise aren’t holding up.
We live in interesting times.
“It is not the end of global warming,” said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder.
Researcher says sea ice growth a fluke outcome
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100401/sea_ice_100401/20100401?hub=SciTech
R Gates
As you are well aware we are mostly skeptics here. When you give us facts we respect your well-reasoned arguments. When you give us a CNN story we immediately raise our hackles expecting to find liberal Goebbels types. Let’s just hope that Guam doesn’t tip over and capsize causing a huge tsunami.
Anu
At least you’re taking this in stride. You are right that current arctic sea ice condition does not mean that this year’s minimum arctic sea ice extent cannot still be one of the lowest in our short historical record, but it could also be one of the highest. The recent upswing in arctic sea ice extent just reinforces that we have a rudimentary understanding of the workings of Earth’s climate system, and thus should be prudent in ascribing any degree of certainty to predictions of its future state.
“you might as well celebrate with a drink tonight :-)”
I will and also a cheers to you for the magnanimity displayed.
I’m afraid that sea ice extent will go down to 2009 levels shortly. We’ll see.
R. Gates (12:05:04) : “We know that the straosphere has been cooling over the past 20 years, (as predicted by AGW models) and this is exactly because more energy is being absorbed and then retransmitted in the troposphere.”
Models are not reality, nor even close. Reality is a polar ice cap that is growing when the models say it won’t.
Just the Facts said:
“…everyone is going to think that you are just a Warmist stooge being paid to try to influence opinions on WUWT…”
________
:)) Now that is funny!
I saw another term for the ice yesterday. It was called “stagnant ice” instead of rotten ice. LOL
The same thing happened last year.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png
The extent is measured in terms of the 21 year observation. Bit like looking at a rock to judge its age.
Anyone else notice that in the early days the land masks were wrong and they were counting ice on land as sea ice?
DaveE.
Richard deSousa (10:05:56) :
Those Catlin fools must be still going backwards or around and around. Haven’t heard a word lately so may be they were a polar bear meal… 🙂
They’re evidently not bear chow yet, but the site *has* removed the embarrassing squiggly “Where We Are” graphic.
They’re at 86º10’37”N, 083º11’12”W, which means they’ve probably started moving in a straight line, blazing along at about 7.2 miles per day, so they should reach the Pole somewhere around Valentine’s Day next year.
Only 243.75 statute miles to go.
Only 211.81 nautical miles to go.
Only 392.27 klicks to go.
Only 1,286,981.76 feet to go.
R. Gates (11:52:03) :
“First, in regards to the arctic: Regardless of whether you like the colors chosen or how the map is projected, data show that we’ve seen warming in the arctic, more so than any other region of the earth over the past 30 years. Not only do the data support this, but ground evidence does as well with permafrost melting, etc.”
No, sorry R. Gates, data do not support this. Look here, no increase in summer max temps since 1958:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Summertime temps are the only ones having any (limited) effect at all with respect to melting of ice and permafrost. Do you have a credible source for permafrost melting? (Watch out for nonsensical alarmist assertions of death spirals and evaporating tundra.)
Re. sea ice minimum for 2010, please give a number to make the competition more interesting.
The Catlin Arctic Survey public information film.
Cam_S (12:39:11) :
“It is not the end of global warming,” said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder.
Researcher says sea ice growth a fluke outcome
Which one, the flatfish or the liver parasite?
I also agree that this increase will have little effect on the final summer extent. I’m thinking the more important factors will:
1) wind
2) ocean temperatures
3) high ice concentration this year.
Right now they are all favoring a large summer extent. Of course, the top two items can be affected by weather so we’ll all see how it works out in 5-6 months.
JAN,
Northern hemisphere sea ice minimum this year will be approximately -1.5 million sq. km. This appears to be the trend and a likely with the disappearance of the El Nino this year.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
David Alan Evans (13:29:39) :
Anyone else notice that in the early days the land masks were wrong and they were counting ice on land as sea ice?
DaveE.
I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the time to review the bullet points posted below the graph at the IJIS site linked in the sidebar above. My favorite has always been thus one.
In principle, SIC data could have errors of 10% at most, particularly for the area of thin sea ice seen around the edge of sea-ice cover and melted sea ice seen in summer. Also, SIC along coastal lines could also have errors due to sub-pixel contamination of land cover in an instantaneous field of view of AMSR-E data.
This one is also interesting.
Numeric data of sea-ice extent in the Arctic Ocean from June 2002 to the present are contained in a CSV file. Please note that only the sea-ice pixels in the browse image are counted for estimating the values of sea-ice extent, and thus sea ice outside the image is not taken into account in this data.
And they wrap it all up in a pretty bow with this finisher
The area of sea-ice cover is often defined in two ways, i.e., sea-ice “extent” and sea-ice “area.” These multiple definitions of sea-ice cover may sometimes confuse data users. The former is defined as the areal sum of sea ice covering the ocean (sea ice + open ocean), whereas the latter “area” definition counts only sea ice covering a fraction of the ocean (sea ice only). Thus, the sea-ice extent is always larger than the sea-ice area. Because of the possible errors in SIC mentioned above, satellite-derived sea-ice concentration can be underestimated, particularly in summer. In such a case, the sea-ice area is more susceptible to errors than the sea-ice extent. Thus, we adopt the definition of sea-ice extent to monitor the variation of the Arctic sea ice on this site.
All in all quite confidence inspiring, don’t you think?
Jan,
First, think we need to agree on which data set we’ll use. But using IJIS, I’d put this years minimum in the 4.5 million sq. km range. Below 2008 & 2009, but not at the 2007 level.
I see a big melt from the Atlantic & Siberian side later in the summer.
BTW, for those as acronym challenged as I am, SIC is sea ice concentration.
“This is weather,” said Serreze. “Don’t conflate this with climate.”
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20100401/sea_ice_100401/20100401?hub=SciTech
So when it melts it’s climate change but when it freezes it’s weather.
Well that makes perfect sense and perfectly good climate science as done by Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. with no apparent bias towards a pet hypothesis there.
Of course it’s weather, all climate change is weather as “climate change” is just a mathematical averaging of WEATHER over the longer term of 10 to 30 years. In other words you can’t have “climate change” without weather actually happening in the objective reality of Nature. It takes weather for the climate to change, or the falsification of data, that tends to change the climate of science too. As math is an abstraction thus weather averaged into climate is an abstraction. Weather is what is real.
In the tradition of Winston Smith… the Youtube clip of Al Gore opening a German dinosaur museum in December 2008 is now an “unvideo”. It has been removed from Youtube. That’s the one where he talks about the entire Arctic ice cap disappearing in 5 years. I hope that people have hung on to copies of it.
Today, according to Mr. Serreze, I had the most weather in 82 years.
That’s 3+” of snow. Record was 82 years ago, 6″, for the entire month of April.
The day is not over yet.
Having has 24 years of snowless April’s from 1975 to 1999, and having 5 April’s with snow since then, plus 7 before 1975, I’d say that regional warming ended here 11 years ago. Seems to me we’re headed in the opposite direction, in full natural defiance of the climate models. Poor anomalous Rhode Island, I feel your pain as I scrape the deck.
How trendy is that?
I find it hilarious to see no explanation coming out of the supposedly “know it all” IPCC and climate scientists of the world as to why the sea ice extent is continuing. I thought they knew everything there is to know about climate change, and that they can predict it to withing 1 degree or so over the next 100 years. Why are they so silent with an event that’s occurring right now, not 100 years from now? Oh, I know. They are too busy concocting more evidence of AGW thanks to the millions of dollars of handouts they receive, but not busy on real research to find the truth as any decent scientist must do. I’m sorry but I wish I never was a scientist – it’s now totally ruined as a profession thanks to AGW alarmists.
The NSIDC comment is predictable … maybe they will have to hide the Arctic data from the front page of their web site, the same way they hide the Antarctic ?
“March 3, 2010
In February, Arctic sea ice extent continued to track below the average…”
This post and comment thread sent me to look at Cryosphere Today, just as a cross-check of the graphic data above. While there, I suddenly noticed something funny, that has been there for a couple years, but I never really paid attention to it.
Go look at the top far right graph, of the four at the top of the page. When you click and enlarge it, it is titled “Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent”. Each dot represents a calendar quarter of data and each colored line represents the quarterly data for a given season. For two years, I have seen that this chart ends with steep drops in each seasonal line of data, spring, summer, etc. No more perfect picture of recent, steep, unprecedented decline of sea ice could you ask for. All the lines end on values that are the lowest in the whole series, by a substantial amount, in a series of data that goes back to 1900.
And it seems that when the people who run that site saw this perfect picture, they just decided to keep it. Newer data be damned. Go count the quarters of information, starting with the dots that line up to 2005. When I did this, I found that the last quarters of info represented in this chart are 2008 (3 seasons) and 2007 (!) (1 season plus the annual total). While every other graphic on this page is updated almost daily, this one graphic with the “picture perfect decline over the last 100 years” hasn’t been updated for almost three years! WUWT? Here’s a link to this graphic
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
Readers of this site know plenty about the recovery in arctic sea ice are since the deep minimum in 2007-2008. But, readers of Cryosphere Today who look at this graphic, the main long term picture on that site for arctic sea ice extent, still are seeing the 2007 -2008 minimum as the most recent, latest picture of arctic sea ice extent. How do these people do this with a straight face?
I have emailed the site administrator pointing this out, and asking him to update the data presented. I think if more of us do this, we can embarrass them into fixing at least this one small distorted picture of arctic sea ice, on this widely viewed web site.
pwl said:
“…all climate change is weather as “climate change” is just a mathematical averaging of WEATHER over the longer term of 10 to 30 years…”
_______
I don’t think so. Climate change may been SEEN in the mathematical averaging of the weather over long periods of time, but that’s not what climate change IS. Climate change is a fundamental shift in energy balances, transfers, and energy circulation patterns bewteen sun, atmosphere, oceans, and land. Climate change is all about energy. It may be reflected in weather patterns, but it is not just some averaging of weather patterns. The reason why AGWT is so enticing is that it has a real physical basis to be potentially correct based on energy patterns and the very well known physics of GH gases and their behavior related to energy in the troposphere.