By Steven Goddard
Break out the Speedos and Bikinis. Springtime has finally arrived in the Arctic!
Temperatures have risen about 15C, and are now averaging a balmy -15C (5F) north of latitude 80N – with sunshine 24 hours a day. Under those conditions, you can get frostbite and a tan at the same time.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
But despite the balmy weather, NORSEX ice area continues to run above the 1979-2006 mean – as it has for the entire month of April.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_area.png
Since the melt season started, the Arctic has lost about one million km2 of sea ice. Below is a composite graph showing all of the popular (NSIDC, JAXA, NORSEX, DMI) extent measurements, superimposed on the NSIDC mean and two standard deviation region. The thin blue line is NSIDC extent from 2009. Note that all measurements have been nudging up against the mean line – for the entire month of April.
Disclaimer: All maps below are taken from NSIDC maps, and modified by the “breathtakingly ignorant” writers at WUWT.
During the last three weeks ice has melted mainly at lower latitudes, as seen below in red. Areas in green have actually increased in extent, due to drift. Ice is probably still getting thicker in much of the Arctic, because temperatures remain well below freezing.
The map below shows changes over the past week.
And the map below shows changes since the same date in 2007. Green indicates ice growth.
The next map shows current areas of deficient ice (relative to the median) in red, and excess ice in green. The total amount of excess minus deficient ice is close to zero. In other words – Arctic ice extent is normal.
The Arctic Oscillation remains negative, so circulation is clockwise – as seen below in the buoy drift map. This pattern is keeping older, thicker ice from the Canadian side inside the Arctic Basin, and bodes well for another summer of increased ice thickness and extent – relative to the record melt of 2007.
http://iabp.apl.washington.edu/maps_daily_track-map.html
People counting on bad news from the Arctic to keep their agenda alive are staring at a long, (rhetorically) cold summer……. The good news is that they can keep raising the red flags about Montana glaciers, if the Arctic refuses to melt.
It has now been over 41 years since the New York Times headlined “Expert Says Arctic Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea.” triggering the Arctic Death Spiral. After 41 years of dangerous and increasing melt, ice area is again above normal.
My failure to understand this is surely a sign of “breathtaking ignorance.” But don’t call me Shirley.
The fact that warming alarmists are not trumpeting this ‘good news’ in polar ice recovery tells me everything I need to know about them. It’s all about the size of their wallets and NOT AT ALL about polar bears.
About the Danish ice:
The Danish climate debate takes place in this link. I think the thread below has more on this ice issue. Machine translation, sorry. The debate is in Danish so you fine folks can’t participate. Only read: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=da&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.klimadebat.dk%2Fforum%2Fpart-2-opdaterede-sol-is-temp-hav-data-d12-e1066-s160.php%23post_20960&sl=da&tl=en
stevengoddard says:
April 28, 2010 at 8:40 am
I see a slow sloshing of ice towards and away from the North Atlantic, with a half-hearted spin motion to it.
More slosh than spin.
The North Pacific is stuck in Cold and the North Atlantic is stuck in Warm.
Flash News: Climate patterns in N. Hemisphere stuck in massive rut.
The whole thing is going nowhere faster than previously observed.
Maybe I should did up my Nostradamus Quatrain on this and really give them something to go frantic over.
Lars, from the “Baltic sea ice traps ships” Thread on March 5, posted this about ice on the Baltic (with the comment that their winter in the area had broken some 20-year records):
http://www.smhi.se/oceanografi/istjanst/produkter/sstcolor.pdf
The map of Balctic sea ice is current.
The Baltic is largely fresh water, (Vistula and Oder Rivers), so, it is more inclined to ice formation.
MONTPELIER – A late-season snowstorm dumped 2 feet of heavy, wet snow on northern New York, Vermont and New Hampshire by Wednesday morning, cutting off power to thousands, closing some schools and making roads slippery.
In New York, scattered outages were reported near the Canadian border. In Vermont, more than 20,000 customers were without power, most in the northwestern corner of the state. Outages were reported in northern New Hampshire as well. Utility officials said it could be Thursday before everyone gets their power back.
“We’ve been hammered all night,” said New York State Police Trooper Eric LaValley of the Ray Brook barracks, in the Adirondack Mountains.
The Vermont Agency of Transportation said about 2 feet of snow had fallen in some northern areas. “It definitely caught people off guard, considering we had 80 degrees back in March. It’s a problem because some people swapped their (snow) tires out already,” said Vermont highway dispatcher Greg Fox.
Kinda shoots down the summer heat arriving in new England earlier this month.
Mike Haseler says:
As for the press describing WUWT as “polluting the bollocksphere” (joke – does that translate in US?)
It does to US farmers – chuckle
Now that the Arctic sea ice extent is back to normal, and global warming has been cancelled because Dr. Mann prefers thermometer measurements to tree ring proxy calculations, I suppose the summer melt season will be back to “normal” as well.
Why wouldn’t it ?
What would cause the Arctic sea ice to continue to be more than 2 standard deviations from normal summer minimum extent values ? Are those mischievous ‘winds’ still playing around in the Arctic this season ?
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20091005_Figure2.png
Of course, when it is more than 2 std devs from the 1979-2000 average come October, people here will argue that that was just “natural”.
Basically, Nature does exactly what the climate scientists predict, but for different (unknown, unknowable) reasons.
Is that the current argument ? Or are we still claiming that NASA doesn’t know how to measure sea ice (or temperature, or ice thickness, or glacier melt, or ocean heat…) Or have we moved on to say that global warming will unfold exactly as Hansen et al predicted, but now it’s because of Intelligent Cloudcover Design ? (courtesy of Dr. Spencer) I’m losing track of why Arctic summer melt doesn’t matter anymore…
Is anybody here predicting the summer minimum sea ice extent will be back to normal this year ? Area ? Anybody care to take on minimum sea ice volume for 2010 ? Is that going to go back to normal too, or we don’t care about volume ? Shall we just argue that CryoSat-2 will be too different from ICESat to say anything definitive ? Or should we go with “incompetent design” of CryoSat, and their measurements won’t mean anything, based on some folksy observation of a kayak, or a novelty ice cube someone saw last July…
Ammonite says:
April 28, 2010 at 4:42 am
Remote concentrations of ice do not melt due to political affiliation, desire to form a world government or Urban Heat Island effects. They melt due to increased temperature – and they are melting at both ends of the globe and in all the high mountain chains. Global melting = global warming.
Nice straw men! Did you think of those yourself, or did you have help?
As far as why ice melts, it appears your knowledge, like a lot of warmists is half-vast. For example, have you ever heard of sublimation? Now, that isn’t a melting process, and has nothing to do with temperature. There are, in fact many factors which go into both the creation and disappearance of ice. You might try reading a bit beyond the usual warmist claptrap.
Yes, we know there has been some warming since the LIA, which is certainly a good thing, and in no way unusual or alarming, despite the cries from the alarmists. And UHI has certainly created a falsely-high temperature record, meaning the actual warming has been about half of what’s been reported.
Curiousgeorge says:
April 28, 2010 at 2:52 am
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold….
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I love that poem. First time I heard it was camping out looking at the big dipper “pouring out” the Devils Tower in Wyoming http://z.about.com/d/geology/1/0/u/9/devilstower.jpg
Steve,
How real is that top Guardian image; apart from the sunbabes.
In particular those clouds over the top of the snow covered mountains; is that real. That would suggest that there is plenty of cloud cover available in the Arctic despite the low temperatures; maybe it is all that open water that is a ready source of evaporation. So one would infer, that cloud negative feedback is quite active even at sub zero temperatures.
So how far north was that picture taken; or where was it taken.
Don’t worry Iceland’s Katla is coming:
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/stodvaplott.html
@ur momisugly leif: this article shows photos of snow in several places inland on the 12.th of April and the headline asks: why is there still snow in Denmark?
I honestly don’t see why there could not be ice at sea a fortnight later. It’s been pretty cold the last 2 weeks. Machine translation of Danish article: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=da&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjp.dk%2Findland%2Ftrafik%2Farticle2035090.ece&sl=da&tl=en
Phil. says:
April 28, 2010 at 9:08 am
Ice has predominantly been flowing out of the Fram this year, see all that ice down the Eastern Greenland coast, that’s how it got there.
Yes, Phil, see all that sea ice down the Eastern Greenland coast in 1979 and 2010?
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/New%20Image.GIF
I don’t see what is so special about sea ice down the Eastern Greenland or Eastern Canadian coast.
Ammonite says:
April 28, 2010 at 4:42 am
You must be new to this site. I suggest you do a search on this site for some of the information you just stated.
For example
“Oh snap! CO2 causes some ocean critters to build more shells”
Posted on December 1, 2009 by Anthony Watts
And some thought ocean acidification would destroy everything. “We were surprised that some organisms didn’t behave in the way we expected under elevated CO2″…“They were somehow able to manipulate CO2…to build their skeletons.” From the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institute press ….” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/01/oh-snap-co2-causes-ocean-critters-to-build-more-shells/
Without CO2 we would all be dead. People seem to keep forgetting that.
John from CA
There is clear evidence that man is raising the temperature, particularly in cities with UHI effects.
Real time Satellite Images of North American ice is available from HRPT (NOAA polar orbiting) bottom of page here:
http://www.weatheroffice.gc.ca/satellite/index_e.html
It shows east side of Hudson Bay and James Bay opening. Also there appears to be open water north of Banks Island, otherwise it is pretty solid.
Universalgeni : You have dared to contradict the Holy Inquisition. A stake is already being prepared for you!. There is no snow in Denmark!.Period!
Pray to our mother climate warming church to forgive your sins.
Anu,
Mann loved tree rings, until 1960 when they stopped giving him the numbers he wanted.
Pre-1960 tree rings are good, but post 1960 tree rings are evil. Makes perfect sense form a scientific point of view, given the proliferation of mind-altering drugs which occurred in the 1960s.
#
SteveE says:
April 28, 2010 at 6:00 am
What’s people’s opinion of the data that suggest while the Arctic sea ice extent is growing the actual volume is decreasing?
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
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That there are 60 year cycles ( ocean) and the seventies were at the lower half of a cycle and we seem to be at the top of the cycle now.
There are also 200 year cycles. see http://virtualacademia.com/pdf/cli267_293.pdf
and 1500 year cycles. see http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/85007975/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Just to name a few. The cycles are observed in the data, scientists just try to figure out what is causing them.
Dave Wendt, JJB 4:36 am
I was being ironic. A single year of hot weather is no more indicative of global warming any more than a single good year for the ice cap falsifies global warming. In order to separate “weather” from “climate” you need to plot trends over about 30 years. Sure there has been less warming in the last 10 years, however if you look at the 30 year trend temperatures are rising.
Stephen, 3:20 am
If you look at the link below you will see that the UAH temperature data is moving in line with the surface temperature records pretty well.
Now are you saying that all temperature records are wrong? Including all three terrestrial and both satellite sets? That would take a major leap of paranoia!
http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing global temperature estimates
(probably won’t link directly as spaces in a link upset this blog – copy and paste full link into browser).
Talking of trends and getting back on topic. Sure 2009-2010 has been a good year for the ice, but two things to remember.
1. being close to the average is no great shakes, bearing in mind it is the average of a declining area. Now if it were close to the average of 1970-1979 that would be interesting, but we don’t have data for those years.
2. the linear trend is still clearly downwards over the long term. Again, a couple of good years does not make a “recovery” any more than one hot year makes for global warming.
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100406_Figure3.png
Meanwhile…it’s snowing here in New Hampshire! No sea ice though…
This just in…Daily Telegraph reveals break in laws of physics!…
“If all the floating ice in the world melted it would cause sea levels to rise by just 4cm.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7645112/Melting-sea-ice-would-cause-sea-levels-to-rise-by-hairs-breadth.html
Amazing, because I thought floating ice actually lowers a fluid level when it melts – I thought ice displaces a greater volume, so my science teacher must have been wrong! Still, science has changed nowadays.
REPLY: Post normal science doesn’t need physics. -A
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley
The Telegraph article is based on the idea that glacial ice is sliding into the oceans and melting faster than it is being formed. It assumes that Greenland and Antarctica are melting. The author just didn’t understand what the researchers were saying.
Enneagram says:
April 28, 2010 at 9:59 am
Don’t worry Iceland’s Katla is coming:
http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/Katla2009/stodvaplott.html
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OH (self snip) Just in time for spring planting season. Al Gore and Brown and Rudd won’t have to worry about Global Warming for a while, we will all be too worried about the food supply.
TLM: I’m believe the Stevenson box data is all wrong (UHI etc..just ask Anthony) and all derived data from GISS, CRU etc) so yes its all unbelievable. I’m think the satellite data is probably correct (+0.4C anomaly 4 months now) rising temps . I’m don’t believe it means anything in relation to a +/-2C SD bandwidth in global temps.. basically not recordable, registrable, meaningful etc.. That’s why you ain’t seeing any changes in ice, cold weather, warm weather etc its meaningless. Its becoming obvious in my view that the world’s “average temperature” is not a useful parameter to measure climate change (proviso within ~+/- 2C margin) especially in short periods 30-100 years. There are far too many factors: sea temp, sea movements, wind, solar, cosmic ray, geomagnetic index and so on. Due to our short life span it is highly unlikely that anyone here or even there offspring will see any “climate change”. Fortunately.. otherwise we would be extinct long time ago!