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.
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“Henry Pool (04:57:56) :
[…]
how much cooling and how much warming is caused by the CO2? How was the experiment done to determine this and where are the test results?”
There were measurements taken under a program called TIGR, looking up and down from an aircraft with a spectrometer if i understand correctly. These measurements NASA offered for analysis to researchers. Ferenc Miskolczi has done such an analysis during contract work for NASA.
Please take a look at these slides, specifically slide 69. SU is surface upward radiation, OLR is outgoing radiation (leaving the troposphere upwards i think, but it’s explained in the earlier slides, e.g. slide 32 – here, confusingly, SU is called SG).
http://miskolczi.webs.com/ZM_v10_eng.pdf
Maybe this can help you with your question.
Tenuc (06:55:56) :
“It’s good that the Arctic sea ice is now back to ‘normal’, although only using 1979 – 2000 as a base period is a nonsense.”
=========================
Exactly! A blip in geological time.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Phil. (05:19:51) :
“It’s nothing to do with science, it’s about the habitual misquoting of that speech on here and elsewhere. Now that the original isn’t on line anymore you’ll be able to continue to misquote him with impunity.”
The video is available here:
“He didn’t say what Anthony put in this headline:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/14/gore-entire-north-polar-ice-cap-will-be-gone-in-5-years/:
What Al said was, “There is a 75% chance that the entire North polar ice cap, during summer; during some of the summer months could be completely ice free within the next 5 to 7 years.”
Any way you spin this, Al was presenting an obviously erroneous prediction of potentially rapidly disappearing arctic sea ice in order to mislead and alarm his audience. The Al Gore and Warmists have been caught in a blatant lie and no amount of equivocating is going to change that…
Jerker Andersson (23:10:31) :
And 8 of the highest 8 recorded extents for this date happened in the last 8 years, for the dataset that started in June 2002.
Surely this is statistically significant…
Given the situation in the rest of the political sphere–I’ll take the bet on the camel.
Vincent (02:28:23) :
Scientists at the LHC aren’t threatening to harm civilization with futile policies to control the earth’s climate.
Do you think only the scientists who’s work might affect your way of life are incompetent ? What about the ones who affect it in a good way ? Or, perhaps they are all incompetent, but you don’t care about the ones who aren’t going to be making policy recommendations ?
It’s curious how only very small subfields of Science are criticized by the Public.
Based on IJIS data, the N. Hemisphere arctic sea ice pack likely saw it’s annual winter peak on March 31st at 14,407,344 sq. km. My guess is, we’ll shave about 10,000,000 sq. km off that to reach the summer minimum in mid-Sept. at around 4,500,000 sq. km. Look for big melting from the Siberian side and Atlantic side.
Did anybody notice that the NSIDC curve today is different than on the April 1st curve that Anthony pasted above? The slope was accelerating at the end of the curve on April 1st, but today’s image shows a decelerating slope at the end, even for the period that was accelerating on the graph above.
One last little quip about this little March “bump” upward in Arctic sea ice. We may indeed see the first positive arctic sea ice anomaly since 2004, and this is significant in the short term, as it breaks a 6 year drought in positive anomalies. However, it is only significant in the longer term if it continues in the longer term. If the arctic sea ice quickly dips back down into a negative anomaly range, and then we see a summer sea ice minimum below 2009’s minimum, (around what I’m predicting of 4,500,000 sq. km), then this March “bump” upward will become insignifcant, as the longer term trend of lower year-to-year arctic sea ice will continue.
My guess is that 2008, 2009, and perhpas even this little bump award in March 2010 arctic sea ice are still the result to varying degrees of effects from:
1) The long deep solar minimum (now ended)
2) The La Nina of 2008-2009 (now ended)
3) The mutliple extreme negative AO index (and related shifts in winds, currents) of winter 2010.
Now that all these short term effects have ened, the longer term forcing of CO2 can once more be the dominant signal, and 2010 will likely be the warmest year on instrument record. (unless a large Iceland volcano decides to get nasty)
Based on Jan., Feb, and soon March’s global temperature data, 2010 is indeed shaping up to be very warm.
Looks like NSIDC chart has been modified a little. It no longer hits the mean line. Slight downward adjustment was made.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice
source: Cryosphere Today
04/01/10: -.189 1979-2008 mean [13.660 million sq. km]
04/03/10: -.132 [13.700]
04/03/10: -.090 [13.732]
Increasing at a rate of approximately 30,000 sq. km a day. It must be due to manmade cooling.
NASA Earth Observatory
Aerosols & Climate Change”
“Aerosols tend to have a cooling effect on the Earth’s surface by reflecting the Sun’s light back into Space.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Aerosols/
Related Articles:
“Changing Our Weather One Smokestack at a Time”
Tenuc (06:55:56) :
“It’s good that the Arctic sea ice is now back to ‘normal’, although only using 1979 – 2000 as a base period is a nonsense.”
Better than Roy Spencer’s 79-98!
sorry, second value s/b 04/02/10: -.132 [13.700]
JAN (02:29:08) :
Another intriguing aspect of the DMI graphs, is that there seem to be much higher variability and even increased temps (?) in the seasons covered by days 0-120 and 260-365 compared to the 1958-2002 average. If there indeed is increased average temps during these seasons in later years compared to 1958-2002 ave., can that be attributed to increased atmospheric CO2? After all, winter season in the arctic is dark, with little LWR to be reradiated, compared to summer with more sunshine and more LWR from the ground. Any thoughts? Thanks.
I think the reasoning goes like this:
since the Earth’s climate is an integrated system, if increased CO2 worldwide causes the radiative balance to change (more heat retained), the system as a whole is “heating up”. The ocean currents, winds, melting ice, hurricanes, etc. take this somewhat increased heat and mix it up in very complicated ways. From measurements, most of this increased, retained heat has gone into the oceans, in complicated patterns down to 3000 meters.
The rising temperatures, even in the 80° N circle at the Arctic, could be caused by either slightly warmer ocean currents (such as the “conveyor belt” bringing more heat Northward) or winds with slightly more heat, even in the dead of winter. You don’t need CO2 “acting” in every region to affect the climate there.
Yes, I haven’t looked into how this particular site gets temps for that far north, by the “pole hole” unseen by satellites. Maybe buoys or airplanes, they can go anywhere.
p.s. Svalbard sounds beautiful. I haven’t been to the Arctic, or ever seen the Northern Lights, but it’s on my To Do list 🙂
Thats a good article… would use it and link back.
Aerosols are a logical factor but the result is cooling in the Arctic? How can Aerosols contribute to warming?
Asia Oceanic Geosciences Society
Asia Oceanic Geosciences Society will be organizing its 7th Annual Meeting in Hyderabad, India during July 5-9, 2010.
source: http://aerosols.blogspot.com/
How Aerosols Contribute To Climate Change
source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090619203520.htm
ScienceDaily (June 23, 2009) — What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens on the way there is a different story.
…
“Among these complex phenomena, the actions of aerosols are what some researchers consider the field’s holy grail, representing the biggest barrier to producing accurate representations of climate. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 specifically listed the effect of aerosols on cloud formation as the largest source of uncertainty in present-day climate models.”
…
“The Arctic Circle is one of the places in the world most sensitive to changes in the mix of aerosols. Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, scientists and explorers have noted the presence of the Arctic haze, a swirl of pollution that appears when sunlight returns after a winter of darkness. The presence of smog over a mostly uninhabited region leads many scientists to believe it is the reason the Arctic is experiencing the most rapid climate-related changes in the world. The haze now lingers for a longer period of time every year. It may be contributing to the forces now causing a meltdown of Arctic ice, a release of methane once stored in permafrost, and a host of ecological changes affecting the spectrum of organisms from mosquitoes to polar bears.”
Updated 13 August, 2004
Role of Aerosols in Climate Change
USGCRP Seminar, 25 April 1996
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/seminars/960425SM.html
Phil. (10:16:46) said:
Is that because Roy is a Christian? (Note, I am an atheist.)
It seems utter nonsense to defend the use of less data than we have on the basis that someone else used even less. (I do assume that the claim that A is better than B is a defence of A).
R. Gates (10:02:00) :
Ya suppose the Arctic has been cut off from it’s supply of C02 brand (r) anti-freeze?
R. Gates (09:39:49) :
Don’t we shave 10,000,000 off every year and if it only melts to 4,500,000, isn’t that a positive trend based on the last 3 seasons?
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.area.arctic.png
JAN (02:29:08)
Anu (10:48:24)
Curious you guys should be discussing this, as I’ve been considering the same questions.
I don’t like the DMI temps because they are from the ERA-40 reanalysis, which of course is the output of a computer model. That’s how they can estimate for the “polar hole” that’s not covered by satellites. There are known problems with the most recent version of ERA-40. However, as someone commented, they’re likely the best estimate we’ve got of arctic temps.
I’ve been (slowly) digitizing the DMI data, because the !@ur momisugly#$%^&* don’t make it available on their datasite. I wrote and asked for it … no joy, so I’ve been doing it the old fashioned way. I have the 1995-2010 data completed, and here are the averages:
Figure W1. Average temperatures 1995-2010 north of 80°N (red line), compared with the 1958-2002 average (gray line). Right scale shows differences in the averages. Dates are normalized onto a 360 day year.
JAN, your guess was good. The increased warmth is entirely in the fall and winter months (days 1-100 and 250-360), with spring and summer being right on the long-term average.
To check this, I looked at the so-called “North Pole” zonal temps from the UAH MSU satellite data. These don’t cover as far north, only to about 82.5°N, but I figured I’d see if the patterns were similar. They are similar, in that the warming is greatest in the winter and spring. Both show the peak at around day 100. Unlike the DMI results, there is also summer warming. As mentioned, they are not directly comparable, but the general patterns are quite similar.
What does all of this mean? Well … um … er …
Best to all,
w.
Willis Eschenbach (12:23:18) :
Decreased ice in the Arctic is causing warmer temperatures. Open water and heat released from seawater freezing is driving temperatures up in late summer through winter.
Anu (08:41:23) :
i knew someone would swallow the bait when someone would mention an insignificant data in the showing the ice going in the “wrong” direction, just as 2007 was “significant” proof for a death sprial for arctic. =)
Richard Sharpe (11:20:43) :
Phil. (10:16:46) said:
Tenuc (06:55:56) :
“It’s good that the Arctic sea ice is now back to ‘normal’, although only using 1979 – 2000 as a base period is a nonsense.”
Better than Roy Spencer’s 79-98!
Is that because Roy is a Christian? (Note, I am an atheist.)
It seems utter nonsense to defend the use of less data than we have on the basis that someone else used even less. (I do assume that the claim that A is better than B is a defence of A).
Just pointing out that friends of the site are not criticized for such practices, note that he’s rarely asked for his raw data or code here either.
The lack of decline in Arctic sea ice has made the MSM here in the UK. OK, the Daily Mail is a bit of a rag but it reaches an awful lot of voters!!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1263207/Increase-Arctic-ice-confounds-doomsayers.html
Thanks Willis Eschenbach, I’ve been trying to find data to compare seasons and wasn’t able to find it.
Questions:
– (0°C) or 273.15K is the freezing point of water so based on this data, the (I’m assuming air) temperature difference is unlikely to have much effect on the surface of sea ice?
– the end unit 360 doesn’t align with beginning unit 0-1; shouldn’t it since this red line is a 15 year average?
Thanks,
John