By Steve Goddard
The Catlin Arctic Survey arrived at the North Pole this week.
Described as three of ‘the world’s toughest’ explorers, Ann Daniels, Charlie Paton and Martin Hartley reached the Geographic North Pole at on 12th May, ending a grueling 60-day trek across the floating sea ice of the Arctic Ocean…They made it with only hours to spare before a Twin Otter plane was scheduled to land on the ice to collect them.
Congratulations to them on completing a difficult journey against the Beaufort Gyre. They can now compare their Oceanic pH data vs. the non-existent database from past years, and predictably conclude that pH might be lower than it used to be – due to CO2.
The spring melt season continues to eat away at the periphery of the ice pack. The animation below (made from Cryosphere Today images) shows the changes since the first of the month.
Figure 2
As you can see, not much has changed during the last two weeks. The image below, made from NSIDC images, shows areas of anomalously high extent in green, and anomalously low extent in red.
Figure 3
As in past weeks there is excess ice in the Bering Sea and Sea of Okhotsk, and a deficiency in the Barents Sea – which are all always ice free during the summer anyway.
To keep the death spiral in perspective, the image below (made from Cryosphere Today images) compares mid-September 30% concentration ice from the years 2009 and 1990. Red shows areas of ice loss since 1990 and green shows areas of ice gain. I’m guessing that the Arctic will probably not be ice free by 2013, as predicted by researchers at the Naval Post-Graduate School.
Figure 4
The image below shows mid-September ice gain from 2007-2009 in green, and loss in red.
Figure 5
There continues to be a significant divergence in the extent graphs. Norsex in red is close to the 30 year mean, while NSIDC (blue) DMI (stippled) and JAXA (green) are closer to two standard deviations from the mean. The deficiency is almost entirely located in the Barents Sea, as seen above in Figure 3.
Figure 6
The modified NSIDC image below shows ice loss since early April in red.
Figure 7
The modified NSIDC image below compares April 14 2007 and 2010 ice. Areas in green have gained ice since 2007, and areas in red have lost ice since 2007.
Figure 8
It is still too early in the year to see much interesting. Still about six weeks before significant melting begins in the interior of the Arctic. Stay tuned.
It appears there is a direct correlation between the Arctic temperature and the Arctic geomagnetic field.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC1.htm
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC-CETfiles.htm
While perusing the link to Timeline at the Met Office provided by mostlyharmless (nice Douglas Adams reference BTW) I was reminded of something that has rattled about my brain for a while.
The Met Office claims that 386 ppmv is the highest CO2 concentration for last 850K years. This and similar numbers have been bandied about for while now and are based on ice cores from Vostok and Greenland. Since the numbers represent gas trapped in ice bubbles, and since these take approximately 800 years to be sealed off from atmosphere as the ice compacts, these numbers actually represent an average rather than an absolute value.
So if past glaciations produced ice bubbles of 300 ppmv, who is to say that during the 800 or years it took to trap the bubbles CO2 concentration didn’t vary both above and below the measured concentration?
This does not take into account any diffusion in either direction during the ice’s history or during the known decompression when the ice core was collected. Still, its something to think about when looking at the data.
PJP says:
May 16, 2010 at 12:38 pm
“Hawaii always struck me as a poor choice of location from which to measure atmospheric CO2.
Volcanoes are well know for spewing out vast quantities of the gas.
Sitting on top of one of the world’s largest volcanoes, and particularly one which has been actively erupting for the last 20+ years to make your measurements seems more than a bit silly to me.”
________________________________________________________________________
When I brought that point up to a scientist at the Mauna Loa research site, he assured me they removed the contribution from the volcano and had very good quality procedures. As a Quality Engineer/Chemist who has been fired three times for refusing to falsify Certificates of Analysis, I found this very reassuring. /sarc
Solomon Green says:
May 16, 2010 at 12:05 pm
1. Measurements used prior to 1958 are ice core measurements. Beck has written about other measurements, but they are all over the place, varying by tens or even hundreds of ppmv in a very short time. I personally doubt that they are a good indication of global background CO2, which varies very little.
2. The ice core measurements are spliced to the Mauna Loa data based on about a decade of overlap between the Greenland GISP ice cores and the ML data. They are in good agreement.
3. There are other sites than Hawaii (Barrow, Samoa, South Pole, etc.), all of which show the same gradual climb as in the ML data.
4. The background CO2 readings vary little with altitude, location, or humidity. Ground level readings can vary from these a lot, and over a very short period of time. That’s why the Beck data is not used.
MostlyHarmless says:
May 16, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Not true. The reason that they are ignored is that they vary widely year-t0-year. Since all available measurements of the background level (Barrow, Samoa, South Pole) do not show any such variations, they are assumed to be contaminated by ground level CO2 from a variety of sources.
Again, all of the isolated sites show little year-to-year fluctuation, just like Mauna Loa. The reason that the volcanic eruptions don’t show up in the Mauna Loa data is that it is relatively easy to distinguish them from the background signal, and they are not used in calculating the background levels.
Look, I’m as skeptical as any man on the planet, but the CO2 level is one of the few good datasets in the whole field. Keeling knew what he was doing when he chose the site. At night, you get descending air from the upper atmosphere, air which has traveled for thousands of miles across the Pacific. That’s why they measure it there, because you get a clean signal of the background CO2. It agrees with other isolated sites. Don’t waste your time looking for problems at ML, there far too many other bad datasets to worry about a good one.
There’s two ways (at least) of looking at ice wasting. The total volume of ice that is lost over a season, and the square miles of ice remaining after a melt season has ended. Obviously you can start with more ice and end with more ice than for other seasons and still have greater volume loss vs those seasons that didn’t have much to begin with and which ended with a typical volume remaining. The total loss represents total heat transport.
But I don’t recall this being discussed anywhere. And I wonder too if it is more helpful to consider the volume of ice created and lost between annual minima as being representative of Arctic health/energy conveyance. It is three-dimensional, after all.
I do expect though that later this year some alarmist somewhere is going to point out that despite a greater extent during the 2009/2010 winter, the total volume of ice lost to melting is what will be highlighted, even of the minimum is at or above recent years.
I watched the Catlin crew on a news report a few days ago. After making a big thing about being the first to do what they were doing and how much valuable new data would result, they showed a girl taking a water sample through a hole in the ice. “Yes, its definitely getting more acidic” she says (or words to that effect). I can’t help feeling they know the answers they are supposed to find and the whole thing is nothing but a publicity stunt.
Only *Arctic* ice news is being discussed, because the Antarctic refuses to follow the alarmist script. And since the scary claim is global warming, the whole CO2=CAGW conjecture fails; the Antarctic is part of the globe, no?
The current natural cycle is only being discussed due to the fact that the Arctic ice cover is fluctuating, and is currently in its natural down cycle. But the Arctic has also had low ice extent repeatedly in recent, pre-SUV times.
And Arctic sea ice is only being being pointed to [while studiously avoiding mentioning the Antarctic], because other false alarms like hurricane frequency and intensity have diminished, rather than increased — as was repeatedly predicted by the alarmist crowd.
Another false alarm is coral bleaching, which turned out to have nothing to do with CO2.
And sea level rise is not increasing at an alarming rate, as breathlessly predicted only a year ago.
And Himalayan glaciers are not receding, as predicted by the usual gang of conniving UN scam artists.
And ocean “acidification” is another failed prediction.
And there is no real world evidence that CO2 has anything to do with the either planet’s temperature, or its local climates.
And CO2 is highly beneficial trace gas; more CO2 is better, with no down side.
And rather than CO2 being the cause of warming, CO2 is the result of warming.
And the ARGO buoys show that the deep ocean is cooling, not warming as predicted.
And warmth is beneficial, while cold kills.
Alarmist scientists and their cognitive dissonance-afflicted acolytes continue to promote this false information, because the government pays these scientists to tell spread misinformation; their followers are what used to be known as useful fools. They are afflicted by cognitive dissonance — George Orwell’s Doublethink. Their impulse is to run like a herd of lemmings, to and fro, from one frantic scare to the next, as each scare is debunked in turn by rational skeptics.
So now the alarmist contingent has only one scare story left: temporarily decreasing Arctic ice. Every other global warming scare has been debunked, and the Arctic ice scare will be debunked by the planet soon enough; trees don’t grow to the moon, and cycles don’t continue on indefinitely.
The bought and paid for climate scientists have cried “Wolf!” long enough. They have sold their credibility. And their Arctic ice cover alarmism is not going to get it back.
pat says:
May 16, 2010 at 2:38 pm
(my emphasis)
Can these people really call themselves scientists? So, let’s examine this hodge podge theory:
1. Plants grow extremely well given more CO2. Every single study seems to demonstrate this, and practical studies in the commercial field (ie when people are doing this for real, not some research grant) demonstrate this trend clearly. More CO2 means more growth.
2. (and this is the beaut) Insect outbreaks will become more intensive as the food decreases. Let’s look at that again, slowly. More insects because of less food. Sorry, guys, that’s a ‘D-‘. I’d give you an ‘F’, but you are obviously trying hard, and oddly you are right as there may be more insects because of more food.
This is interesting, have a look at the “N.H. PV on Middleworld Isentropes”
on here and see at 375K wisps coming through the warm N.E. Canada region, towards the N. Scandinavian warm spot.
Then on 290k, a daily “pumping” between the two regions.
http://www.pa.op.dlr.de/arctic/index.html
Thanks for the update Steve, however, regarding the current negative anomaly in arctic sea ice you state:
“The deficiency is almost entirely located in the Barents Sea, as seen above in Figure 3.”
In fact, the current deficiency arctic wide is over 900,000 sq. km. and the Barants sea is only just over 300,000 sq. km deficient. Other areas that are deficient include: Hudson Bay, the Kara Sea, the Laptev Sea, the New Foundland Sea, and the Greenland Sea. Together these make up the other 600,000 sq. km of “deficiency”.
Also, I think your temperature trend chart is a bit misleading at best. I think this graphic tells the story much better:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/detect/detection-images/global-temps-2009_10year.gif
And of course, you really shouldn’t be talking about an arctic sea ice update without just a quick glance at the arctic anomaly graph using the most widely available data:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
You are right of course, that the real story of the 2010 melt season is still several weeks ahead of us, and if this volume model is even close to being accurate:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
Then we’ve got less volume to start the melt season then we had last year at this time, (meaning thinner ice arctic wide), and since melt is really an issue more to do with volume than extent, we should have a very healthy melt. The point you raised on another post about the lack of “multi-year ice” getting flushed out this winter because of the negative AO index was true, until about the middle of March, when we saw a big uptick in ice flushing through the Fram Strait, as can be seen in this photo:
http://ice-map.appspot.com/?map=Arc&sat=aqa&lvl=7&lat=79.872668&lon=-0.499634&yir=2010&day=135
But that very same negative AO also caused the warm temps over the arctic which led to the thinner multi-year ice, so even though it wasn’t being flushed out, it also was not thickening up the way it might have been without the negative AO.
If youre going to use data please use the latest
The temperature plot I assume is for 60N to 90N. Including the years from 2004 to 2009 you get this plot:
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/2947/64n90ngisstemp.png
\harry
I’m a bit sceptical of the ice core CO2 data. The Vostok data shows the CO2 level dropping to as low as 180 ppm at the depth of the last ice age. Most plants nearly stop photosynthesizing at that level. Wouldn’t the rotting of dying plants hold CO2 at a higher level? I suspect the Vostok core data is about 70 ppm too low.
Steve also forgot to mention the rate of ice loss these past couple of weeks (faster than normal), and unfortunately Steve has not done the ice transport calculations during this extremely negative AO winter. I have, and they are not unusual in any way compared to other negative AO years. And in fact, the ice pack is more vulnerable this summer to ice loss than last…so summer weather is becoming less and less important in shaping the September ice extent. I agree with Steve though that the next few weeks will be very telling…
R. Gates says:
May 16, 2010 at 4:00 pm
===============
I still like your comments, they make ME step back and think.
But what is this supposed to mean???
“But that very same negative AO also caused the warm temps over the arctic which led to the thinner multi-year ice, so even though it wasn’t being flushed out, it also was not thickening up the way it might have been without the negative AO.”
Sounds rather desperate, considering the timing of the melt cycle.
NASA Study Links “Smog” to Arctic Warming
Mar. 14, 2006
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20060314/
It’s not just about CO2.
Jorge Kafkazar: Your “proctocraniosis” has herewith entered the canon. Combine with “encopresis” (involuntary defecation fleeing threats), and we sense a pattern to Climate Cultists’ ongoing hysteria.
Steve, why does your first graph end in 2004? Seems to ignore the recent anomalies in temperature that coincide with larger summer ice losses.
Another strong reason for the likelihood of a lower summer arctic sea ice minimum is the fact that January to April 2010 was the warmest first 4 months of any year in the lat 131 years. Look at this graph, and pay particular attention to the arctic regions:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
Hard for that multi-year ice to thicken up too much with temps like that. 2010 has been warmer so far than 1998, and warmer than 2005. No doubt El Nino played a role in this, and without the El Nino, this year would not have been as warm, but my suspicion is that it is strong support for AGWT. After looking at the graphics above, consider the what this best model available for artic sea ice volume is saying:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
I honestly just don’t see how we can’t have another summer arctic sea ice minimum that approaches 2007’s low, and certainly falls below 2008 and 2009.
Yes, I know anecdote is not evidence, but:
I have routinely flown along the North Pacific track system since Oct 2006.
There is far more ice between roughly St Paul Island (57N 170W) and the Alaskan coast than I have seen in the previous four years during May.
Not up to 85% coverage, but far closer to that than 0%.
jeff brown says:
May 16, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Steve, why does your first graph end in 2004? Seems to ignore the recent anomalies in temperature that coincide with larger summer ice losses.
I cannot speak to the matter of Steve’s choice of graphs in the context you ask.
However, does a graph of annual mean temperature for the Arctic reflect anything about seasonal ice loss / the melt season?
If you will note: in 2007, the year of extensive decline in sea ice during the melt season, the temperatures of the melt season were not unusually warm.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/meanT_2007.png
You can selectively compare to other years individually here:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Killer bees.
MostlyHarmless May 16, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Gail Combs May 16, 2010 at 3:12 pm
There is useful detail about the Mauna Loa measurements and analysis at
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
In particular, it appears that a sporadic CO2 emission from the volcano will trigger the “outlier detection” in the analysis, resulting in the replacement of the contaminated measurements with interpolations in the published curve.
The discussion there does not mention measurements elsewhere which jibe with the Mauna Loa figures, but there is a comparison to measurements at lower altitude which are strongly affected by local biological processes, providing a rationale for sampling at a biologically inactive location.
Harry Lu says:
May 16, 2010 at 4:26 pm
The GISS data extrapolates out to 1200 km from the nearest actual measurements, a procedure with no scientific justification. See my post “GISScapades” on the subject.
As a result, the GISS trend is larger than the satellite data by about 0.4°C/decade in their arctic trends, viz:
I don’t see anything in this graph to support the “unprecedented warming” claims for the Arctic.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/oimg?key=0AnKz9p_7fMvBdG9GR1FSLVlRM3lWcnZPNkg1ZERkdFE&oid=1&zx=q557ny-2h9vee
Russ Hatch says:
May 16, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Let’s see, according to the Met time line 1958 was the first year a direct measurment of CO2 in the atmosphere was made. Charles Keeling determined that there were 316 ppm. According to the time line in 2008 the CO2 concentration was 384 ppm. An increase of 68 ppm in fifty years. What am I missing here?
That it’s 2010 now ?
And CO2 is now at 390 ppm:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
This means another 6 ppm in 2.25 years, which means CO2 is rising much faster now than its’ average over those 50 years: 68/50 = 1.36 ppm/year.
Now at 2.66 ppm/yr, this reflects the increasing earth population, industrialization, and loss of carbon sink efficiency (such as the oceans) that will probably all accelerate into the future.
Before the Industrial Revolution (say 1750) the CO2 was at 280 ppm:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/current_ghg.html
At 390, the CO2 for the entire planetary atmosphere has grown by 39.3%
Doubling 280 is 560 – 170 ppm from now. How quickly we reach that milestone depends on future emissions and future carbon sink efficiency. If the average ppm value (ramping up from 2.66 to … 5.32 ?) is 4 during this period, then 560 will be reached in 42.5 years. 2052.