Sea Ice Graphs Have Limited Predictive Value

A curiosity is that May/June and Dec/Jan seem to have the smallest inter-annual variation. These are near maximum and minimum points for insolation, but not temperature. Any speculation on why the variances gets so small?

Gary
In June, the amount of ice is tightly constrained by the land surrounding it in the Arctic Basin and Hudson Bay.

“It is also interesting to note how dirty the snow and ice is around Barrow”
Dirty how, and dirty why?
Is all arctic ice so dirty?
Local dirt, or transported dirt?
Looks like local dirt.

I used to live in Boston and had a driveway to keep clear in the winter. Shovel early, shovel often.
Solar effects are very significant — get enough snow off the driveway that sun can get through the rest and warm the asphalt, and you’ll have dry pavement shortly after the next decent sunny hour or two. Just need to make sure meltwater from elsewhere doesn’t run across the cleared patch — it will freeze into a thin skating rink overnight.
If there’s dirt & sand mixed into the snow (common among crap kicked up by plows), it tends to concentrate on top of snow as the snow melts, which in turn accelerates the melting as it concentrates. I imagine you’ll get the same effect from soot.

The Next Big Thing to look for is what hapens at that second time tick in June – the summer solstice. That’s when the potential insolation for the high latitudes will be at maximum and the albedo effect most critical for the Arctic Ocean. So far on this record there has been little change at that stage from year to year. If there is a major departure one way or the other over the next two months the ocean surface will be receiving significantly more (less) solar radiation.
Caveats: There are obvious uncertainties in the ice cover numbers as given, and even after the radiation hits the water intricate feedback loops come into play.

So why is the snow so dirty?

Nice post Steve. Like any season of the year, each arctic ice season can be considered as weather, not climate, and the character of any individual melt season can’t be predicted from short term seasonal charts. However, longer term charts do have more robust predictive value, especially when used in combination with highly refined sea ice models. I would direct readers attention to three specific web sites. First, my favorite chart for looking at the long term state of arctic sea ice:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/sea.ice.anomaly.timeseries.jpg
If you study this graph you do see the longer term downtrend in arctic sea ice. This is predicted by AGW models, however, some of those models predicted sea ice gone by 2100 or so, and that date has been moved forward to between 2030 and 2050. But models do not predict the exact sea ice extent for any given year– despite the pronoucement by one scientist of an ice free arctic by 2013. The “recovery” of the arctic sea ice in 2008/2009 was encouraging, if that was all that one looked at. Though no direct link as been found, I would relate this quasi-recovery almost entirely to:
1. The La Nina of that time period
2. The long and deep solar minimum of that same period
But more predictive of long term arctic sea ice is the volume of ice present, not extent. As we’ve seen from March’s “bump up” in extent, followed by a similar “bump down” in April-May, sea ice extent is highly variable. But volume, which measures sea ice in three-dimensions is far more important a predictor of future sea ice conditions, and the best chart we currently have for that is here:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
Yes, this is a model, but if you read the page it explains the validity of the model, and while I think it has some minor flaws, I do think it is telling the general direction of arctic sea ice volume very well. Such negative volume anomaly shows that the predictions of general arctic sea ice models of declining arctic sea ice year-to-year seem to be valid. For more on the best of the sea ice models. go here:
http://oceans11.lanl.gov/trac/CICE
So in general, Steve is quite right, this years sea ice chart early in the melt season has very little predictive value for where we’ll be at September’s minimum, but my prediction of 4.5 million sq. km. based on IJIS/JAXA (less than 2008/2009 but more than 2007) is not based on the current chart, but is based on:
1. The end of the solar minimum
2. The negative AO index that brought warm temps to the arctic this winter and kept multi-year ice relatively thin (lower volume). Areas such as the Barants sea were especially warm this winter, and that is of course, exactly where we’ve seen such a dramatic melt already this spring.
3. The general declining arctic sea ice volume on a historic basis (as shown in the chart referenced above.
The fact that we are currently below 2008 & 2009 means nothing and wasn’t the basis for my prediction as I made my prediction of the 4.5 million sq. km. summer low during the March “bump” up, when the 2010 ice was way more than 2008/2009 levels for the same period…

Steve – below is your March 31, 2010 post. I may be getting the wrong impression, but you certainly seemed more positive about this data set when the graph was going up. Time will tell what the minimum ice extenct will be for 2010 and, as the NSIDC trend shows, it will most likely indicate a minimum extent well below the 1979-2000 marker used by the study.
Arctic Sea Ice about to hit ‘normal’ – what will the news say?
By Steven Goddard and Anthony Watts
Barring an about face by nature or adjustments, it appears that for the first time since 2001, Arctic Sea ice will hit the “normal” line as defined by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for this time of year.
NSIDC puts out an article about once a month called the Sea Ice News. It generally highlights any bad news they can find about the disappearance of Arctic ice. Last month’s news led with this sentence.
In February, Arctic sea ice extent continued to track below the average, and near the levels observed for February 2007.
But March brought good news for the Polar Bears, and bad news for the Catlin Expedition and any others looking for bad news. Instead of ice extent declining through March like it usually does, it continued to increase through the month and is now at the high (so far) for the year.
If it keeps this trend unabated, in a day or two it will likely cross the “normal” line.

Arctic Sea-ice melt makes no difference to sea-level but has now for some years become the flag waver for ‘proving’ Global Warming and quite illogically used as a popular ‘proof’ that it is all man made. But this is one of several hostages to fortune that can be found in the tabloid science of Global Warming hysteria. As normal fluctuations produce upswings as well as downswings in the extent of Arctic ice public scepticim will grow.
But be warned. The AGW crowd already have their excuses all prepared. If Arctic ice shows another uptick this year it will all be down to the Iceland volcano. Without that volcano there would have been so much less ice and we would all have been so much warmer, honest.

u.k.(us)
I flew over Greenland during the late summer 2007 Armageddon, and the ice was filthy for many miles on the western side. Dirty snow/ice plays a big part in Arctic melting.

That is the dirtiest I have seen the snow around Barrow. Wonder if the volcanic eruption in Iceland has resulted in more soot deposited this spring. Could also be related to earlier snow melt over the land and winds transporting dust over the ice. Either way, dirty snow speeds up melt…
Steve, there are several papers that discuss sea ice prediction and what variables give the most predictive skill. Winter ice extent is not one of them. Ice thickness and summer circulation patterns remain the main drivers defining the September ice extent, and since summer circulation patterns cannot be well-predicted, there really is no way of knowing right now what the summer ice extent will be. But model simulations do show that as the ice cover continues to thin, summer circulation becomes less important as a predictor variable. Might be good in your post to discuss some of these factors and reference some of the papers written on this topic…

GeoFlynx
My expectations for the summer minimum haven’t changed.

stevengoddard says:
May 15, 2010 at 4:37 pm
u.k.(us)
I flew over Greenland during the late summer 2007 Armageddon, and the ice was filthy for many miles on the western side. Dirty snow/ice plays a big part in Arctic melting.
=========
O.K. agreed I guess.
How far off might a long warming trend throw off the ice core timeline.
What about the Arctic “wind flushing”.
Did you fly over Greenland during the cooling scare of the 70’s.
Nothing personal, i’m just sick of this never ending AGW hype.
My comment came out wrong, not sure what i was trying to say.

There is a long-term trend of decreasing sea ice in the Arctic even if it does proceed chaotically. We have satellite records that show a steady decline of summer ice cover since 1978 when the records first became available. This is all part of Arctic warming that has been going on for well over a century now. Kaufman et al. (Science 325:1236-1239) have pinned its beginning down to the start of the twentieth century. It started very suddenly after a two thousand year cooling trend, paused for a few decades in mid-century, and has continued on to this day. Contrary to the AGW dogma it cannot be caused by the greenhouse of effect because of its sudden beginning. That is because laws of physics demand that carbon dioxide partial pressure has to jump when a sudden warming occurs, and this simply did not happen. We need a physical process that can suddenly deliver warmth to a large geographical area of the Arctic, one that is capable of retracting as happened in mid-century, and then continuing on as before. The only possible way to accomplish this is through a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system to direct warm water to the Arctic. Satellite views show that the Gulf Stream today carries huge amounts of warm water to the the Arctic and thereby keeps Russian Arctic ports ice free. It is likely that it assumed this northerly course at the turn of the century when Arctic warming began. Smaller amounts of warm water enter the Western Arctic Ocean through the Bering Strait. Usually that is enough to keep the Chuckchi Sea, just north of the strait ice free, but it may extend to the north coast of Alaska, depending upon the pattern of winds in the area. The big melt of 2007 was all on the Bering Strait side of the ocean, implicating warm water coming through the strait as the culprit. Together these currents are sufficient to explain all observations of Arctic warming and thereby make any greenhouse theories of warming doubly superfluous.

R. Gates
Same criteria I based it on when I made the forecasts. Main factors are the retention of multi-year ice this winter due to the negative AO, and the cold water in the North Pacific.

I generally agree with you, Steve. But I’d back it up to July 1 rather than August 1. I look at the last few years and July 1-July 15 has some value, I think.
I’ve said it a few times in the last month or so. . . but I think ice concentration in the “core” as shown in the comparative tool at Cryosphere is much more indicative of eventual minimum at this time of year. We’ll see if that stays true this year –but I’m betting it will.
What we know is that areas outside the core are going to melt. They just are. To the degree they have predictive value, it could be those areas that are natural exits to the south. To the degree those areas are gummed up with higher concentrations during early melt season they could delay the exit of some ice and contribute to a higher minimum.
But outside of that, from Spring Max to July 1 I’m sitting on the concentration values of the core as the most important indicator of eventual Fall minimum.
Still sitting on 6.0-6.2M minimum.

I did a phase plot of the sea ice extent. What I found was that there is no correlation between the maximum extent and minimum extent as stated in the initial post. However, there is a way to predict the minimum extent a few months in advance. Between the points of 10e6 and 8e6 sqkm, high derivatives lead to low minimum extents. It’s a pretty easy thing to do. Just plot dA/dt vs. A and take a look at what happens when A ~= 9e7 sqkm.

Steve,what retention of MYI are you talking about? What ice age category? Because the ice 5 years or older actually declined even further this winter, and the 2nd and 3rd year ice that was advected into the Beaufort Sea this winter is likely not going to survive the transit through the Gyre. What exactly are you basing your prediction on? Doing some hand-waving? Statistical correlation analysis? Running a physical coupled atmosphere-ocean model? I would love to know what you use to back up your statements. Scientists could not make base their predictions on the negative AO and MYI ice cover. Data has shown again and again that it doesn’t work.

u.k.(us) says:
May 15, 2010 at 1:05 pm
“It is also interesting to note how dirty the snow and ice is around Barrow”
Dirty how, and dirty why?
Is all arctic ice so dirty?
Local dirt, or transported dirt?
Looks like local dirt.
________________________________________________________________________
No it is not local dirt. It is soot from the Chinese coal fired generators. I have a friend in Alaska who about fou/five years ago was complaining about the amount of SMOG now seen in Alaska blowing in from China.
“From 500 miles in space, satellites track brown clouds of dust, soot and other toxic pollutants from China and elsewhere in Asia as they stream across the Pacific and take dead aim at the western U.S.
A fleet of tiny, specially equipped unmanned aerial vehicles, launched from an island in the East China Sea 700 or so miles downwind of Beijing, are flying through the projected paths of the pollution taking chemical samples and recording temperatures, humidity levels and sunlight intensity in the clouds of smog.
On the summit of 9,000-foot Mt. Bachelor in central Oregon and near sea level at Cheeka Peak on Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula, monitors track the pollution as it arrives in America.
By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach the U.S. annually. The problem is only expected to worsen: Some Chinese officials have warned that pollution in their country could quadruple in the next 15 years….
“East Asia pollution aerosols could impose far reaching environmental impacts at continental, hemispheric and global scales because of long-range transport,” according to a report earlier this year in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The report said that a “warm conveyor belt” lifts the pollutants into the upper troposphere — the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere — over Asia, where winds can bring it to the U.S. in a week or less….”
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/08/31/51148/scientists-fear-impact-of-asian.html#ixzz0o5c2E5ed

I should have added to my above post that I am talking about sea ice and wilderness snow cover that would not be effected much by local human activity.

Gail Combs says:
May 16, 2010 at 4:07 am
No it is not local dirt. It is soot from the Chinese coal fired generators.
You mean to say soot might be melting the ice and not massive AGW???
Let’s see wood stoves, coal burning, diesels generators(electricity in northern communities), vehicles (planes, trains, and automobiles), forest fires, volcanoes, fires, explosives, controled and uncontroled burns, grass fires, oil well fires…hmmm.
Now let’s see..winds carry soot so far (unless an up draft can carry them further),but water particulates in clouds can carry them much further before depositing them.
Black absorbs more solar heat…hmmm.
The science says, you could be right.
But it is not peered reviewed or published so… sorry you lose.
It is therefore incorrect!

Has Phil given us his prediction for 2010 minimum yet, or is he just doing his braying jackass impersonation re any barndoor in sight?

I don’t think anybody at WUWT is foolish enough to predict the Arctic summer sea ice minimum extent will be larger than average, whether the average is from 1972-2008:
http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/ice_ext_n.png
or 1979-2000:
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20091005_Figure2.png
The big question is: will the minimum extent be greater than in 2009 ?
If it is, I expect most people at WUWT will trumpet this as a full recovery of Arctic sea ice. If not, I expect they will dismiss it as insignificant.
My prediction: it will be less than in 2009.
And if the CryoSat-2 data is in by the summer minimum, showing that the Arctic ice volume continues to shrink as expected:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
I expect most people here will dismiss it as not being correctly calibrated yet. Or fundamentally flawed. Or manipulated data.
My prediction: the first CryoSat-2 data will show the Arctic ice volume continues to trend down.
This is why Arctic sea ice is the most interesting of the climate change arenas – arguing about the climate in 2100 might be important for government leaders and corporate planners, but few if any of us reading today will be around to see it.
But the Arctic sea ice minimum this September ? You’d have to be pretty unhealthy/unlucky not to be around to see that.
Here’s hoping everyone here will be around come October.

Anu says:
May 16, 2010 at 10:04 am
The big question is: will the minimum extent be greater than in 2009 ?
Anu, if it gets larger than 2009, I think you can agree on the following;
-There is no death spiral.
-The world isnt going under.
-Gordon Browns 50 days until the tipping point was just another AGW foolishness.
-The arctic ice coverage is doing its cyclic thing, now probably going up for a while.
-Al Gore and Stoere made fools of themselves in Copenhagen.
Agree?

stevengoddard says:
May 16, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Anu
The Arctic will be ice free before 1980
https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/nyt_arctic_77442757.pdf

Thanks Steven, interesting article.
Personally, I wouldn’t call Colonel Bernt Balchen, “polar explorer and flier” (and at the time retired from the Air Force and working for General Dynamics) an expert on Arctic sea ice trends, even in 1969 – and he was the only one in the article proposing that the “ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two.” But it is nice to see how quaint the writing from that era sounds today : the use of giant computers to simulate the world’s weather patterns to see what would happen when the Arctic Ocean is free of ice, and actually spelling out carbon dioxide all the time.
I think the Rand Corporation research (see the chart) showing how important the heat from the Gulf Stream currents in the Atlantic is to melting ice in the Arctic is still accurate – all the talk here about “Arctic surface temperatures – above the ice – being constant for x decades” misses the point of the warming oceans beneath causing the downward trend of Arctic summer sea ice. The sea ice is melted from both above and below. This ocean warming is also causing the overall thinning – the decreasing sea ice volume over the recent decades.

geo says:
May 16, 2010 at 5:47 pm
I’m glad to see you scrutinize every single word of my Comment – I could use a good editor, especially on Comments in which I am interrupted by my children. Perhaps “full” was the wrong adjective; I should have used “great” or “strong” or “promising”:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/22/sea-ice-approaching-the-edge-of-normal-standard-deviation/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/03/arctic-sea-ice-increases-at-record-rate/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/31/arctic-sea-ice-about-to-hit-normal-what-will-the-news-say/
(search for “recovery” to see these adjectives in use)
Or perhaps I should have said people will claim Arctic sea ice is back to “normal” – as in this thread:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/27/wuwt-sea-ice-news-2/
But I’ll keep in mind that “recovery” means “partial recovery” at WUWT, not “full recovery”.
I still think the actual value of this summer’s minimum sea ice extent in million km^2 is of less importance than the big question: will this value be greater than in 2009 ? If it is, I expect most people at WUWT will trumpet this as a full great/strong/promising recovery of Arctic sea ice.

kwik says:
May 16, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Anu says:
May 16, 2010 at 10:04 am
The big question is: will the minimum extent be greater than in 2009 ?
Anu, if it gets larger than 2009, I think you can agree on the following;
Shouldn’t it be “we can agree on the following” ?
-There is no death spiral.
Death spiral delayed a bit – ok.
-The world isnt going under.
You mean ocean levels ? I think those problems are many decades away – 8 or 9, and at first will just be inconveniences for coastal cities. Nobody cares about tiny islands going under (except the people living there). I bet insurance companies are very interested in this stuff…
-Gordon Browns 50 days until the tipping point was just another AGW foolishness.
I don’t follow British politics – but I do read the Guardian online once in awhile.
-The arctic ice coverage is doing its cyclic thing, now probably going up for a while.
I would look at this more closely – I would probably read more about PDO and ocean warming, currents, oscillations.
-Al Gore and Stoere made fools of themselves in Copenhagen.
You must read a lot of “news” – I don’t even know Stoere. Didn’t follow Copenhagen too closely, since it was DOA.
Agree?
As stipulated above, sure.
And if it’s lower than 2009 ?
Would you agree that there is a “gentle death slope” with annual random weather superimposed on the trendline ?
And here’s a nice image of the Arctic ice, updated daily:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_bm_conc.png
Stay tuned.

R. Gates, I believe this is the official WUWT CAGW (Centre for the Arctic by Goddard and Watts) forecast: “Steven Goddard writes below that he agrees with the prediction I made in late 2009 that we’d see another 500,000 km2 of Arctic sea ice recovery in 2010”.
Of course, no mention of any data set, but I guess they mean the one by IARC-JAXA as it is the only dataset they show in the right hand bar. That would come down to a minimum extent of around 5.75 million square km.
I’ll go for a minimum sea ice extent of less than 5 million square km. If the El Niño dies quickly we might get some prolonged periods of clear skies. But anything can happen.

I protest against Anu’s use of words like prostitute or idiot; that is not nice.

It seems to me that a carbon dioxide enhanced greenhouse effect would show up as a reduced tendency for arctic-ice to form in the winter because less heat would be escaping to outer-space. We do not appear to be seeing this.
On the other hand, black-carbon surface soot on the ice-pack might cause what could be called an ‘asphalt effect’ which would, conversely, lead to more melting in the summer and perhaps more heat loss in the long arctic night as a result of reduced albedo (reflectivity.) This more closely resembles the arctic ice loss pattern we have seen in recent years.
A study of arctic-ice surface pollution and estimation of the magnitude of any ‘asphalt effect’ should be worth a research grant for someone qualified to do the work.

Although “Sea Ice Graphs Have Limited Predictive Value”, they are interesting to look at during the long wait for the summer minimum:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Zoom in on the 2010 red line (save it locally, then zoom in): it quickly dropped down past the 2009 curve, then the 2008 curve, then more slowly crossed the 2003 curve, then the 2005 curve. Next up – 2007.
And keep in mind all these curves are way below the 1972-2008 average:
http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/ice_ext_n.png

Anu says:
May 17, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Although “Sea Ice Graphs Have Limited Predictive Value”, they are interesting to look at during the long wait for the summer minimum:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Zoom in on the 2010 red line (save it locally, then zoom in): it quickly dropped down past the 2009 curve, then the 2008 curve, then more slowly crossed the 2003 curve, then the 2005 curve. Next up – 2007.
++++
Uh huh. And look at 2007 vs 2006 for this date. How’d that work out for their respective extent minimums?
And where did the divergence really begin to show up for those two? July 1, right where I’ve been pointing for several weeks now.

I love it when some researcher or maybe it’s a reporter; says that the ice is twice as thick as they thought; or is disappearing twice as fast as they thought;
Why on earth are they thinking it is different from what it is. Why not observe what it is; and then report that; and cut out these faster than we knew silly statements. It is growing just as fast as it is; or now shrinking actually so that is what you should be thinking; not some other numbers.

George E. Smith says:
May 17, 2010 at 4:37 pm
That comment was twice as reasonable as I expected.

RE: Anu: (May 18, 2010 at 9:44 am) “And if it is an issue for now, it is important to understand why it is happening now. This is what Science does – attempts to understand the natural world. Pointing out that something similar happened a long, long time ago, for reasons unknown, is just marginally useful context for understanding what is happening now.”
Yes, that is all true. It is important to do all we can to understand what is happening to the Greenland ice-pack now and in the past. That is science. The report I linked (May 17, 2010 at 11:51 pm) does show valuable field research in progress. However, as reported, that study did not provide any evidence of man-caused pollution or contamination of the ice-surface which might be accelerating the melting process. The determination of the degree that human activity may have influenced the climate of the Modern Warm Period was beyond the scope of their study.
As far as I can see, there is, as yet, no convincing evidence that our modern global climate has been seriously impacted by human activity except in local urban heat concentration areas. I do not think we would be here today if the dangerously high positive feedback levels required to make carbon dioxide responsible for the modern warming of the last 100 years were in effect.

Anu says:
May 17, 2010 at 7:57 pm
geo says:
May 17, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Yes, it is not predictive, just interesting.
Interesting that it dropped below four previous years so quickly, and is now poised to drop below 2007.
That’s all.

Now it’s dropped below 2007, and is poised to drop below 2004, then 2006.
Nothing “predictive”, but it’s dropping like a rock, at a steeper rate than any of the IARC-JAXA years (which are all post-2000, when the Arctic ice really started worrisome summer melts).
Just interesting.

Do we have any information regarding sea ice volumes before or concurrent with NSIDC or JAXA? I think unless we have this information we have no way of knowing whether to prefer volume versus extent as a metric is valid. I’d appreciate an answer if anyone out there knows.