By Steve Goddard
I like to watch the sea ice graphs as much as anyone, and have wondered how much value they have in forecasting the summer minimum. So I researched it a bit and discovered that their predictive power this early in the melt season is very poor. The DMI graph below highlights the problem:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Note that 2006 had the highest summer minimum, yet was lowest most of the winter and through part of the spring. The graph below shows the rsquared correlation between relative monthly ranking and September ranking, and indicates poor correlation prior to August 1.
Conclusion: Prior to August 1, the graphs tell us just about nothing about how the summer minimum is likely to turn out. The fact that April, 2010 had the highest extent in the DMI record tells us little or nothing about the summer minimum. There are too many dependencies on ice thickness and summer weather to make a meaningful prediction based solely on the extent graphs. NSIDC has used other methods of prediction, and done poorly – such as this forecast of a record low made in May, 2008.
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/200805_Figure4.png
The Barrow Ice Observatory has studied the relationships between cloud cover and ice breakup date, and found some correlation, seen below. They believe breakup occurs after the ice has received 700 MJ/m² of solar energy. A sunny summer means an earlier breakup date. A cloudy summer means the ice will break up later. The three earliest breakup years occurred in 2002, 2003, and 2004. The last two years were among the latest.
It is also interesting to note how dirty the snow and ice is around Barrow. No doubt this is a contributing factor.
http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_webcam
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Has Phil given us his prediction for 2010 minimum yet, or is he just doing his braying jackass impersonation re any barndoor in sight?
stevengoddard says:
May 15, 2010 at 8:45 pm
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.
——————–
Fair enough…though I of course disagree on how strong of influence those will be as multi-year ice has less volume than it hjstorically has. And what is your forecast for the summer low sea ice extent in September in millions of sq. km. (greater or less than 2009?) and which data set will you use?
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:
My prediction: the first CryoSat-2 data will show the Arctic ice volume continues to trend down.”
The satellite will be in orbit for only a few years and cannot therefore establish a climatic trend (about 30 years necessary).
As Polar 5 showed last year, the thickness of the ice is not well known (was up to twice as thick as thought). Therefore the published volumes are not much more than guesswork.
The volume is only being discussed because the extent did not do as wished.
Alexej Buergin, May 16, 2010 at 11:56 am:
“The volume is only being discussed because the extent did not do as wished.”
Yes. And the Arctic ice extent is only being discussed because the Antarctic is not doing as they wish.
And the current natural fluctuation is only being discussed because the Arctic has been ice free repeatedly in recent, pre-SUV times.
And sea ice is only being discussed because hurricane frequency and intensity have diminished, not increased as repeatedly predicted by the alarmist crowd.
And because the coral bleaching turned out to have nothing to do with CO2.
And because sea level rise is at or below normal.
And because Himalayan glaciers are not receding as predicted.
And because ocean “acidification” is another failed prediction.
And because there is no real world evidence that CO2 has anything to do with the either planet’s temperature or local climates.
And because CO2 is highly beneficial; more is better.
And because rather than CO2 causing warming, CO2 is the result of warming.
And because the ARGO buoys show that the deep ocean is cooling, not warming as predicted.
And because warm is beneficial, while cold kills.
Alarmist scientists and their cognitive dissonance-afflicted followers tell lies because the government pays the scientists to tell lies; the followers are what used to be known as useful fools.
So now the alarmist contingent has just one scare story left: temporarily decreasing Arctic ice. Every other scare has been debunked, and the Arctic ice scare will be debunked within a couple more years, if not this year.
The bought and paid for climate industry has cried “Wolf!” long enough. They have lost their credibility. And the Arctic ice cover scare is not going to bring it back.
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
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?
Anu says:
May 16, 2010 at 10:04 am
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. . . .
++++
Anu, this is the most gross strawman I’ve seen at WUWT in some time. Please provide some evidence/context for this claim. There have been a lot of articles at WUWT on Arctic sea ice over the last few years, and since the 2007 minimum –so you should have a target rich environment to prove your claim. Please provide even one article that used the modifier “full” or comparable modifer in this context.
Yes, yes. . . I know. You won’t believe in any kind of “recovery” until it is “full” or nearly so. But so far as I can tell, you’re projecting on that issue, and no WUWT article has claimed “full” recovery for 2008 or 2009. . .nor any suggestion that further increase in 2010 would constitute “full” recovery. My prediction for 2010 is higher than Steve and Anthony’s, yet I wouldn’t (and haven’t) suggested, let alone stated, that it would constitute “full” recovery (and I’m not a WUWT contributor of articles anyway).
So put up or retract your claim. What is your basis in actual history of WUWT articles on Arctic sea ice that would lead any reasonable fair-minded person to believe that WUWT would claim “full recovery” of Arctic sea ice if 2010 extent minimum is higher than 2009?
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.
Smokey says:
May 16, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Smokey, sir, you are a pseudoscientific prostitute and an idiot.
Anu,
I provided seventeen links and citations to support my comments. Your emotional response amuses me.☺
Anu says:
May 16, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Smokey says:
May 16, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Smokey, sir, you are a pseudoscientific prostitute and an idiot.
================================
Do you have to pay extra for a: pseudoscientific prostitute.
Or does a liberal vote get you the rebate.
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
fullgreat/strong/promising recovery of Arctic sea ice.Smokey says:
May 16, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Anu,
I provided seventeen links and citations to support my comments. Your emotional response amuses me.☺
Well, I stand corrected.
I expected the Moderator would snip that comment, as I argued here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/13/now-its-lizards-going-extinct-due-to-climate-change/#comment-39058
Congratulations, you’re being treated like an actual scientist.
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.
kwik says:
May 16, 2010 at 3:50 pm
I forgot to include the “gentle death slope” graph:
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20091005_Figure3.png
Seriously, I think the “death spiral” idea is about when the thinning ice meets the warming ocean one summer, and the sea ice extent shrinkage falls off its linear downslope. I’m waiting for CryoSat-2 data to show where things stand this summer…
and the PIOMAS graph is getting outdated:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
There’s a small chance 2010 could bounce up to lower than 2006 before dropping below the trendline again in 2011, but I’ll stick with my prediction of 2010 < 2009.
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.
Ice minimum extent has (up to now) never increased 3 years in a row, so if 2010 is a bit smaller than 2009 is not of great importance. The question is: Is there a trend towands zero in the next few years, or towards normal.
[snip]
I protest against Anu’s use of words like prostitute or idiot; that is not nice.
Alexej Buergin says:
May 17, 2010 at 2:16 am
Ice minimum extent has (up to now) never increased 3 years in a row, so if 2010 is a bit smaller than 2009 is not of great importance.
++++
That’s true. However, the anomalous nature of 2007 shouldn’t be ignored, and contributes to the possibility of creating an anomaly on the rebound.
What the AGWers *should* be arguing is that even a modest third year rebound will merely return Arctic ice decrease to around the downward linear trend before 2007. But so many of them seem wedded to the “worse than we thought!” meme, that they just can’t bring themselves to do it.
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.
Alexej Buergin says:
“The question is: Is there a trend [of arctic sea ice] towands zero in the next few years, or towards normal.”
————
No, really, that’s not the question. The question is whether or not there is a downward spiral of arctic sea ice to a summer free arctic over the next several decades AND if that trend is as a result of the build-up of human generated GH gases.
Some of you may want to look at this graph:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi_2008.fig3.png
And really stop and consider whether some vast left-wing tree Al Gore conspiracy really exists, of if a few scientists made some bad judgement calls, but that underlying all that, CO2 science and physics is pretty solid, and that we are seeing real effects in the Arctic and elsewhere. I myself am not 100% convinced, and probably won’t be until I’m sailing on cruise ship in the open arctic when I’m 80, but I’m about 75% convinced. Finally, if you think that it’s all about the money to be made, consider how much The Heartland Institute is making from their little get together this week attended by our humble WUWT founder. If you don’t think that money flows on both sides of this issue, think again. My suggestion: always go back to the pure science and your own intelligence and put your politics aside if you can…
The amateurs (?) have set the most recent odds of this year’s minimum extent exceeding last year’s at only 30%, as of the last trade on the topic at https://www.intrade.com . It’s easy to enter a bid against them, as I just have.
I see that R. Gates has beamed down from the mother ship to pontificate about the “downward spiral” of Arctic sea ice. As usual, he ignores the Antarctic. Cognitive dissonance will make a person ignore inconvenient facts like that.
Gates’ latest alarmism comes in the form of a chart with a ridiculous y-axis, deliberately intended to make it appear scary. For instance, when a normal y-axis is used, without tiny fractions of a degree, the planet’s temperature doesn’t look so scary. In fact, it looks completely normal.
And after his usual but unbelievable disclaimer about his percentage of skepticism vs alarmism [which in truth is closer to 0% & 100%], our entertaining R. Gates instructs us to put our politics aside – “if you can” – as he proceeds to get political by presuming to know how much profit, if any, that Heartland is making on this conference. Gates gives no numbers, of course, because as with most everything he says, he doesn’t know. He’s just blindly speculating as usual, based on his fact-free beliefs.
R. Gates wants us to think about all the loot he believes is being made, pointing out that “money flows on both sides of the issue.” But that’s not saying anything, since money flows everywhere and all the time on every issue. The real question is: how much funding does each side receive? What is the ratio of alarmist funding versus funding provided to scientists skeptical of Mr Gates’ Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming? The answer explains the rampant corruption in the government climate industry. For every thousand dollars a skeptical scientist receives, an alarmist scientist get a million dollars.
Gates wants us to go back to “pure science.” But skeptics never left pure science; without skepticism, there is no scientific method. It is the alarmists pushing their repeatedly falsified CO2=CAGW conjecture who have abandoned science for politics and pseudo-science. The demonization of CO2 has nothing to do with science, it is simply a means to tax the air. But R. Gates already has his mind made up that “GH gases” are causing the Arctic to go into a “downward spiral” of melting due to AGWT: Anthropogenic Global Warming Thermogeddon.
The fact that the very same gases are not causing melting in the Southern Hemisphere remains unexplained by those afflicted with CD. Mr Gates would rather explain to us instead the immense profits he believes Heartland is making, because that is the alarmist contingent’s latest talking point – and it is much easier than explaining the Antarctic.
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