Wikipedia : Traditional Santa Claus
Arctic ice extent continues downwards on the trend line started at the end of March, having lost a little over 1,000,000 km2 during April. If that linear rate continues, the Arctic will be ice free around January 1, 2011. That would be a complete disaster for Santa Claus and the billions of people who depend on him.
During the past month, Arctic sea ice has straddled between the NSIDC 1979-2000 average (wide black line) and the NSIDC 1979-2009 average (wide turquoise line.) The composite image below shows all four commonly used extent graphs – NSIDC/NORSEX/DMI/JAXA . The thin turquoise line is NSIDC 2009. Note that the melt season is about three weeks behind the 2007 extent (dashed) line.
During the last few days, ice has begun to disappear from the Barents Sea. The modified NSIDC map below shows loss of ice from one week ago, marked in red. I wonder if any soot from Iceland is dirtying the ice? Hansen says that soot may be responsible for 25% of all global warming.
The UIUC graph below provides a more detailed blow by blow of what is happening to ice area in the Barents Sea.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.6.html
The modified NSIDC map below shows loss of ice since the first week in April, marked in red.
The modified NSIDC map below shows changes in ice since May 2, 2007. Green areas have more ice, and red areas have less ice.
The modified NSIDC map below shows areas of above “normal” (green) and below “normal” (red) ice. The western Arctic is above average, and the eastern Arctic is below average. Perhaps all the hot air from Copenhagen in December thinned the ice?
During the past few summers, the low anomalies have been on the western side of the Arctic. Note in the SST map below, that ocean temperatures are abnormally cold on the western side, which is likely to slow melt this summer.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
The Arctic Oscillation is forecast to go negative again, which should inhibit melt in the Arctic and growth in my garden.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao.sprd2.gif
We are still about eight weeks away from the beginning of the really interesting melt season. Stay tuned. The Antarctic remains boring, staying average to slightly above. No meltdowns or collapsing ice sheets to report this week.
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I disagree that the Antarctic is boring at the moment, the past trend has been for much increased ice gain from the minima due to wind patterns associated with the increased southern ocean wind circulation, see
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png
for a snap shot. This has not happened this year.
Andy
The Big Bang ? Hey, that cosmic microwave background radiation was there already, it’s natural. I don’t have to explain what caused it, you do. But your explanation is wrong.
It’s just natural variability in background radiation.
I suppose this is meant to prove something, but I blowed if I can work out what.
Our theory is that the PDO was in a 30-year warm cycle, and other multi-decadal oceanic cycles were also warming. Now the warm is turning.
I Always read Smokey’s posts, and most times agree. Smokey, I think that ANU looks at your posts but does not know how to read.
Arctic ice extent continues downwards on the trend line started at the end of March, having lost a little over 1,000,000 km2 during April. If that linear rate continues, the Arctic will be ice free around January 1, 2011. That would be a complete disaster for Santa Claus and the billions of people who depend on him.
stevengoddard says:
May 3, 2010 at 10:00 pm
Anu
The climate has changed. Chicago is no longer buried under a mile of ice.
—————-
Reply: Not only that, but someday, in the not too distant future (I’m SWAGing between 500 and 5,000 years from now) it will AGAIN be buried under a pile of ice. Now that’s (climate) change you can believe in.
slightly off topic, but it seems rather funny to me …
from the catlin arctic survey 2010 ( http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/news.aspx?newsId=112 )
“1. 03/05/2010 – Explorer Team position at 12:00 BST: 88.36.35 N / 63.00.48 W.
2. The team decided to call it a night and decide what to do the next morning. In the clearer light of day, seeing there was no obvious route around it, they had no option but to try and cross, giving Ann another opportunity to climb into her immersion suit and test her “jelly baby crawling skills” across the thin ice”
I’m no specialist, but … “clearer light of day” ?
It appears my mind experiment about winds producing those cold waters off the Bering Strait has been thought of before. It has been proposed that wind patterns encouraging upwelling of cold waters in the Northern Pacific is causing the SST’s to precipitously drop in the regions along the coastal Northern, Western and Eastern upper Pacific. It is not ice melt.
http://hmsc.oregonstate.edu/HsO/PDF/peterson%20schwing.pdf
addendum
It is certainly true that as these icy waters lose their ice to the Sun’s warmth, the seas are cold. However, these heavy waters normally sink as they melt. Under warm conditions, the cold water drops below the surface layer. The only thing that can keep them at the surface are winds that promote upwelling. Papers I have recently read propose that this contributes to, or is even the cause of, the decadal shift between warm and cool phases of the PDO.
I wonder if the shift in winds in this interesting area could be due to shifts in the AO. Might the AO have a multi-decadal position shift regardless of whether it is positive or negative? So far, pressure changes from positive to negative don’t seem to have a multi-decadal or even decadal oscillation but the PDO does. I wonder if the position of the AO pressure cell changes on such a time scale.
addendum
Would be interesting to compare AO data to PDO data (which would include AO cell location as well as pressure changes) to see if there are correlations. Maybe ENSO has less influence on the PDO than the AO does, or that some combination of the two produces phase changes in the PDO.
jeff brown
This graph shows AO negative for all months in the early 1980s, not just winter.
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/AO_NAO
bad link….
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/AO_NAO_files/image005.jpg
The cover story about Santa’s workshop being at the North Pole is obviously misdirection, for security purposes. Let’s just say that one pole has land under it, while the other does not. Santa’s been a little sloppy, letting photos like this one leak out:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/5973572/2/istockphoto_5973572-santa-and-the-penguins.jpg
#
Smokey says:
May 3, 2010 at 8:27 pm
nedhead says:
“Name the natural variability affects [sic] that explain this decline…”
This is so exasperating. For the umpteenth time: skeptics have nothing to prove. Why does the alarmist contingent keep turning the scientific method on its head?
It is the job of the alarmist crowd to falsify natural climate variability: the null hypothesis. So far, they have failed. The null hypothesis stands.
.
Oh wait, I get it. Because you cannot explain it with any of your natural variability tenets, you don’t actually have to educate yourself on the processes at work, or think outside the box. It’s like shutting yourself in a closet with the lights off and telling everyone to go away because you don’t understand what’s happening.
Maybe someone else out there can explain why when you run climate models with the observed record of GHGs you are able to simulate the observed warming trend and the trend towards reduced Arctic sea ice cover, but when you don’t put the observed GHGs in and instead leave them fixed at pre-industrial warming, none of the models show any decline in Arctic sea ice whatsoever.
stevengoddard says:
May 4, 2010 at 6:58 am
jeff brown
This graph shows AO negative for all months in the early 1980s, not just winter.
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/AO_NAO
Steve, all I’m trying to say is that during summer a negative AO state actually favors ice loss, and since a negative winter AO tends to be followed by a negative summer AO, it is likely we’ll have a negative summer AO state.
Some reasons why this matters more now than it did in the past. If you go back to the 1980s during the thick ice regime, anomalously warm temperatures (ocean or air) could cause a lot of ice melt, but the ice was still rather thick, so that melt was expresses as anomalous volume loss, not as extent loss. Today because the ice is thinner, similar anomalously warm conditions will actually be expressed as ice extent loss as the thinner ice melts out entirely.
The Rigor and Wallace 2004 paper discusses the warming in the Beaufort during a negative AO summer. Also recent papers by Overland et al. also discuss the summer AO and its impacts on the ice cover…
#
Roger Knights says:
May 4, 2010 at 3:30 am
nedhead says:
“Name the natural variability affects [sic] that explain this decline…”
Our theory is that the PDO was in a 30-year warm cycle, and other multi-decadal oceanic cycles were also warming. Now the warm is turning.
Ok…well then I guess this summer is an important one for you to watch then. Solar activity is also low so it should be cold too right, further helping to keep the ice around.
I have a bad feeling that won’t be the case because of how thin the ice is, but we’ll all know by the end of September….Happy watching!
Joe Bastardi – AccuWeather prediction: SUNDAY MAY 2
Ice melt forecast idea for summer.
I have been making a big deal about the arctic sea ice returning to levels that are more comfortable, and yet I see people simply in denial over it. I try to be objective about it. I will tell you this. It should be a big summer for ice melt, and while I dont expect it to reach levels we saw in 007, my forecast is for it to bottom out lower than it did last year. We have had an el nino, and the summers after that are the big ones for ice melt. However we are starting at a higher level than we did in 07.
The increase in the ice cap will be a 1 step back, 2 step forward function in the cold PDO. I fully expect by 2020 the low points we see to be running near the 30 year means, in other words its almost always above, rather than below, as the PDO rules.. When its warm there is a step down, when its cold, a step up, we just have not been able to observe it yet because we did not have a cold PDO develop until after the last warm Nino. But I have given you the sites to look at, so you can watch for yourself. Just understand… the product of the past years el nino should mean this does comes down more than it did last year, but the cold PDO overall will take care of that with bigger rebounds next year and the year after.
So the forecast is for summer ice to be bottom out lower than 09, but not as low as 07, however winter ice next year will be higher than it peaked at this year.
stevengoddard says:
May 3, 2010 at 10:00 pm
Anu
The climate has changed. Chicago is no longer buried under a mile of ice.
I’m glad to see you agree with me now 🙂
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
Dropping. Like. A. Rock.
Anu
Would raising taxes 20,000 years ago have stopped the ice sheet from melting?
How does arctic average sea-ice extent for April compare with last 8 years?
Using AMSR-E data…
April averages…
2003 14.332Msqkm
2004 13.918Msqkm
2005 13.512Msqkm
2006 13.320Msqkm
2007 13.438Msqkm
2008 14.085Msqkm
2009 13.935Msqkm
2010 14.368Msqkm
2010 has highest average in 9 years. And from what I’ve seen of 2002 data, it’s very likely the highest in 10 years.
Anyone else doing averages so we can compare?
Awesome! After I posted, I realised I hadn’t updated my data since 26th April, so the 2010 average was likely wrong due to missing data. Groan. So I updated the data, re-ran my averager and got the same result ( to 5 sig fig )! kudos to my extrapolator which automatically estimated the missing data and got the right answer. Bit lucky.
Bah. Knew it was too good to be true. Re-ran it a 3rd time after I decided a 5 sig fig equality was far too unlikely, and that 0.03Msqkm didn’t seem to corelate with the Jaxa graph. There was another error. Which I’ve fixed now.
Final average for April arctic sea-ice extent.
2003 13.366Msqkm
2004 13.153Msqkm
2005 13.319Msqkm
2006 12.981Msqkm
2007 13.036Msqkm
2008 13.533Msqkm
2009 13.588Msqkm
2010 13.836Msqkm
2010 is now by far the highest average in 9 years, and is a 4th consecutive growth year.
Is it my monitor, or ancient eyes, but the colors in the SST graphic appear to repeat. +6 is about the same as -6.
Or have we uncovered “minusgate” ? (re: Finland or at least something up there)
nedhead says: [ … ]
May 4, 2010 at 8:08 am,
The models don’t do what you’re claiming they do. Further, the issue is global warming. By cherry-picking only the Arctic, while ignoring Antarctic ice cover, which is trending higher, you are simply selecting a convenient regional climate change.
The natural cycles you are selecting happen routinely, and are not indicative of catastrophic AGW. In fact, it refutes AGW, which by definition impacts global temperatures.
Climatologist Roy Spencer says: “No one has falsified the theory that the observed temperature changes are a consequence of natural variability.”
Natural climate variability is the null hypothesis. Unlike CAGW, it has never been falsified. The null hypothesis is the skeptical position in climate science.
The null hypothesis does not require a complete understanding of every facet of the climate in order to be the accepted theory, any more than the ancient Romans needed to understand nuclear physics in order to predict that the Sun would rise in the East every morning.
That is why the null hypothesis causes such consternation among alarmist contingent. They can not falsify it, so they try to belittle scientific skeptics — who, unlike the alarmist crowd, are operating according to the scientific method.
CAGW is as relevant to science as Scientology is. They are both driven by money, not by the scientific method.
nedhead says:
May 4, 2010 at 8:17 am
“Maybe someone else out there can explain why when you run climate models with the observed record of GHGs you are able to simulate the observed warming trend and the trend towards reduced Arctic sea ice cover, but when you don’t put the observed GHGs in and instead leave them fixed at pre-industrial warming, none of the models show any decline in Arctic sea ice whatsoever.”
Your main argument is that climate computer models do not work without incorporating estimated effects of GHGs. Are you serious?
And the Arctic sea ice is not declining.