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.
jeff brown, I totally agree with you. If circumstances are anywhere near those of 2007 a new record minimum extent is a very distinct possibility.
jeff brown May 18, 2010 at 12:51 pm:
“It seem that you don’t have any idea of how science is funded. Why not search NASA’s calls or NSF calls and see if you see AGW used in any of the titles of the funding calls.”
You framed the argument the way you wanted, then argued with your argument. Instead, just do a search for words like “carbon” or “climate change.” That’s where the money is. And there is also plenty of grant money being spread around by private foundations with a pro-CAGW agenda.
And Anu’s Beck posts are nothing but one big strawman of deliberate misdirection. Sneering at someone else’s achievements is typical. Since Beck’s compilation of the work of numerous Nobel laureates and their contemporaries hasn’t been falsified, the response devolves into odious ad hominem attacks denigrating Dr Beck personally.
What Dr Beck did was to compile 90,000 CO2 readings. His findings are published here.
I wonder why Anu is so scared of anyone seeing Becks results…..
hehe.
OK, well out of curiosity I looked at the Beck paper, and I can see right off why it was not published in a peer-reviewed journal. I’ll skip all the grammatical problems. But right off the bat, he lets the reader know his ideological bias.
Statements such as “The data accepted by Callendar and Keeling had to be sufficiently low to be consistent with the greenhouse hypothesis of climate change controlled by rising CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning.”, and “choosing only few (measurements) which fit the assumption of a climate CO2 connection.” push the AGW conspiracy start back to 1938 (and basically label these men as dishonest).
Ice core measurements, and those by post-1938 scientist working in remote locations, are part of the CO2 conspiracy, and instead early measurements in various Northern European cities are said to be more accurate in their chemical measurement, and more representative of the historical Northern Hemisphere CO2 levels. So he pieces these together for a nice that graph that shows CO2 concentration bouncing wildly up and down between 280 and 480 ppm, until Bam! it settles down in 1950…
Nice.
All that may play well to the readership of ENERGY &
ENVIRONMENT, but probably won’t get you published elsewhere.
Smokey, why don’t you take Jeff’s advice and do a search on NASA or NSF’s web sites? Your google search does not reveal the funding calls, which is what pays for the majority of science research.
I sure would like to know about private foundations funding AGW research. I could use some of that $$. Can you point me in that direction?
Neven, I looked at the daily values for today from NSIDC, and the extent is right now at 12.70 million sq-km. In 2007 on the same day it was 12.68. But last summer by the end of June the extent was about the same as in 2007 and then the ice loss slowed substantially. I don’t know yet what an earlier match up between the two years will mean as the summer continues, but to me it seems that the melt is more advanced this year at the same time with the warmer air temperatures (I can see this spatially by looking at the actual ice concentrations). Having more advanced melt early in the melt season would help to enhance the ice-albedo feedback since melt ponds, open water areas enhance lateral and basal melt.
But I still think the strength of the summer dipole and it’s persistence throughout the summer will be the main determinant of whether or not this year sees more ice loss than in 2007. Last summer a low pressure developed over the Arctic Ocean in mid-summer causing ice divergence that slowed the decreases in ice extent. But I remember a paper that came out last fall that compared surface observations to the passive microwave sea ice retrievals in the Beaufort region and found that the satellite data was overestimating the ice cover, since what they found was a lot of thin and rotten ice surrounded by open water. So looking at sea ice extent from NSIDC, while a useful metric, doesn’t really tell the full story.
jeff brown says:
And Neven, yes you are correct that it may not mean anything since summer circulation can result in a pattern that causes ice divergence (and hence an increase in extent). BUT…with an even thinner ice cover this year than last, ice divergence can also result in enhanced lateral melt that takes away more of that thin ice cover. My concern is that 2nd and 3rd year ice that was advected into the Beaufort this winter may not survive the transit through the Gyre this summer. And since a negative AO summer tends to follow a negative AO winter, that is actually worse news for ice in the Beaufort as the negative AO brings in even more warmth to that region (as well as cause ice advection away from the Alaska coast). Since we can’t predict the weather for the summer, we’ll just have to wait and see. But given the current warmth up there (right now temperature anomalies are nearly 8C in the Eurasian sector for the first 2 weeks of May), together with a strong Beaufort Sea High (yes the summer dipole pattern is back which also means clearer skies in the Beaufort), I’m betting on large ice loss this summer.
Neven says: May 19, 2010 at 5:33 am
jeff brown, I totally agree with you. If circumstances are anywhere near those of 2007 a new record minimum extent is a very distinct possibility.
You both sound a lot like an old troller we use to have here. Is this one of you?
Here’s her / his prediction. How’d that work out for her/him?
Mary Hinge (03:51:46) :
If you want to know where the red line will go, there is a way to predict it. I predicted it would start to freeze up again, about what, 3 weeks ago, and it did. That seems a safe bet, considering its mid January! Another prediction, it will keep freezing up there until mid March and then it will start melting again! As the Pacific PDO has now switched to a neutral state http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.1.15.2009.gif
I expect another record or near record ice melt in the summer.
The War Against Ernst-Georg Beck
From Anu:
Beck already has two actual scientific peer-reviewed papers that were published in Energy & Environment (link goes to publisher’s description), first is 180 years of atmospheric CO2 gas analysis by chemical methods (PDF) in 2007, second is 50 Years of Continuous Measurement of CO2 on Mauna Loa (PDF) in 2008.
As to Energy & Environment, EBSCO Publishing lists E&E as a peer-reviewed academic journal, as can be seen in their Title Lists: Colleges and Universities section, “Environment Complete (TM)” being one example.
Note the following from the Wikipedia article:
Note: If viewing the Wikipedia article, click on the Discussion tab, and note the great effort to label E&E as trash because it does publish papers that disagree with (C)AGW “theory” thus it angers (C)AGW proponents. Then consider the rest of the article I did not quote.
From Anu:
See above. That is two papers published, not just one, E&E is at 41 libraries, universities, and the Library of Congress, besides in electronic form at an additional 81, not just 25 libraries.
And why the complaints about Beck having his own website for his own work? You are on a site owned by Anthony Watts where he posts his own work. Dr.Leif Svalgaard has his, so does Dr. Roy Spencer, Dr. Roger Pielke Sr, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr… Come on, this is the internet! What stigma can there be to having your own site for your own stuff period, let alone having one while publishing scientific work?
From Anu, in reference to a paper presented at a conference:
Things To Know:
1. The paper is available here (pdf).
2. Dr. Francis Massen of Luxembourg is the lead author with Beck as a co-author.
3. Dr. Massen’s work can be found here, which is the website of the “Meteorological Station of the Lycée Classique de Diekirch [Luxembourg]” where he is listed as the Head of the station.
4. Following the Papers, Reports & Comments link, You will find #51 of the list, “Accurate estimation of CO2 background level from near ground measurements at non-mixed environments” with the following description:
Papers were submitted for the online conference, peer reviewed, those accepted were presented during the online conference. Check out the Klima/Climate site. The page the word “paper” in the description goes to announces “All papers will be placed online at 00:00 on Monday 1st November 2010.” so that part of it is “in progress.” But the scientific paper was written, by Dr. Massen with Beck included, peer reviewed, accepted, and put up for consideration by collegues and is now available for citation. How much more “published” can one want?
Still from Anu:
Beck has two peer reviewed published papers. Dr. Massen has a bunch published, with the co-authored piece “published” at Klima2009. And is just me, or did Anu just basically state she’s not an expert on CO2 measurement but definitely knows Beck has made errors and/or has mistaken assumptions about it?
Not an “ad hominem” attack when one continues saying he has an unpublished paper when he has two published papers and another he was a co-author on was “published” at a conference, this is true.
Does this sound familiar? He has published, thus has invited refutation.
True, Real Climate et al, don’t think much about Dr. Roy Spencer, despite his noted accomplishments, and they likely don’t care much for Beck at all.
Beck’s work frightens them.
Those people understand his work and his methodology, which includes people who are experts at atmospheric CO2 measurements. He’s had two peer reviewed papers published so far that he was the sole author on.
Now can we look at people who can count papers, know the difference between published and unpublished, understand peer review, know what it means when individuals have their own sites for their own work…?
I could be wrong, but based on jet stream, surface winds, AO, and pictures, it looks like ridging is taking place IN towards the pole, which means that ice is being compacted towards the pole instead of riding out of the Arctic through the Strait. If the winds are strong enough, both extent and area would be below average but not because of melting, it is because of compaction INTO the Arctic basin. Eventually the downward trend on the graphs will come to a halt as compaction nears its “can’t compact anymore” state.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?mosaic=Arctic
Further investigation confirms that wind is blowing from the South to the North at both East and West angles in Fram Strait. Ridging with compaction towards the pole would clearly be the result.
http://www.athropolis.com/map2.htm
Therefore, I think it is possible that ice extent and area are indicative of ice moving towards the pole, not away from it.
Pamela, thinner ice does move more easily and also ridges easier. But where the main changes are occurring in the ice extent at the moment are not in the central Arctic Basin and it is not a result of flow towards the pole. Why discount the anomalously warm temperatures that encompass the entire Arctic? What I believe is happening is that the thin ice is melting out under these warm temperatures, temperatures that have been warm all winter and slowed ice growth during winter. You can look at the ocean buoy data yourself and check the ice growth rates this winter. I know you probably don’t want to believe the PIOMASS modeling efforts of ice volume, but if they are even remotely correct, then thin ice is behind this rapid ice extent change during the last couple of weeks. By the time Anthony posts his next update, I bet the extent will have dropped below that of 2007 and perhaps even that of 2006. With projections for a warm summer this year, I think 2007 will no longer be the record minimum sea ice extent.
Pamela writes:
Eventually the downward trend on the graphs will come to a halt as compaction nears its “can’t compact anymore” state.
How do you get this? What is the amount of “can’t compact anymore”? Are you assuming that ocean temperatures, air temperatures, cloud cover do not have an influence on the summer ice cover? Since the winter ice cover covers the entire Arctic Basin, how far do you estimate that it can compact? What sea ice rheology model are you including in your calculations and how does that change for thick versus thin ice?
I’m sorry but your comment does not make any sense. And Jeff is correct, the current ice loss is not happening in the central Arctic so it is not a result of movement towards the pole.
I agree, a rather strange post by Pamela Gray. The MODIS imagery she links to does not show ice motion. Probably would be better to link to sea level pressure patterns, or ice motion vectors, or wind fields if you want to make a case of compaction near the pole. The MODIS imagery just shows melt happening (note the gray values of ice along the ice edges indicating melt, as well as open water areas between the ice flows).
Also, Pamela you should understand that the AO doesn’t always imply high pressure over the Arctic, look at the January AO index and then look at the Arctic January SLP anomalies. You have a low pressure anomaly. The AO is a statistical index, the first EOF. The strength of the Beaufort Sea High, and the strength of the Arctic dipole are more indicative of ice motion towards the pole. And although the Beaufort Sea is dominated by a high pressure right now, the SLP gradients between the Siberian Low and the Beaufort Sea High are rather small right now, which would imply weak motion toward the pole. Please do your homework before you make such comments.
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.
Encroaching ice covers flora areas, reducing the bio-sink for CO2, and covers dead/dying plants at the edges of the ice. All it takes is one snowstorm to seal in dying plants. The reverse occurs when the ice recedes during warming, and all the dead foliage rots when exposed, increasing CO2 to the atmosphere. One of the many feedback processes in ice age dynamics. A negative feedback is the regrowth of foliage as the ice recedes, increasing the biotic sink for CO2, but it is overwhelmed by the positive processes, and CO2 accumulates.
I will stand by my post. I think it is possible that ice compaction is accounting for the downward trend. If my guess is right and as long as the Fram Strait conveyor belt of wind doesn’t kick up and head South again, we will not see a new minimum and the trend line will once again head towards normal before the new ice season begins. I have been right about ice minimum before and the conditions were similar. Wind was pushing ice North, not South.
We shall see. Let the debate continue. I prefer simple ice and wind mechanics compacting or spreading ice as the main cause of ice buildup and ice loss anomalies. The composite photos show ridging developing above Fram Strait in a way to be expected if ice were being pushed Northward by the wind. And indeed, the surface wind in this area is reported to be in that direction.
And yes, my prediction could turn out to be wrong. Good. Being wrong is as valuable a teacher as being right.
Pamela Gray says:
May 19, 2010 at 9:40 pm
I will stand by my post. I think it is possible that ice compaction is accounting for the downward trend. If my guess is right and as long as the Fram Strait conveyor belt of wind doesn’t kick up and head South again, we will not see a new minimum and the trend line will once again head towards normal before the new ice season begins. I have been right about ice minimum before and the conditions were similar. Wind was pushing ice North, not South.
Pamela’s been wrong about the ice drift for some time now but this is over the top. I guess we’re expected to believe that 300,000 Mm^2 lost over the last couple of weeks blew back in via the Bering St? Or 150,000 Mm^2 blew back into the Arctic basin, not to mention the east side of Hudson Bay blowing over to the other side?
To: Pamela Gray
Wow, you got three alarmists jumping on you, then Phil-dot chiming in about your reply.
Therefore I conclude you may be on to something, and it has them worried. Good job!
BTW, why is Phil-dot talking about mega-meters (10^6 meters) squared? That first figure he just gave of “300,000 Mm^2” would be 300,000,000,000 (3 x 10^11) km^2, and IARC-JAXA is reporting the entire Arctic extent as of May 19 2010 as only 11,730,938 km^2 total. That would be quite an impressive loss over just a couple of weeks!
jeff brown wrote:
By the time Anthony posts his next update, I bet the extent will have dropped below that of 2007 and perhaps even that of 2006. With projections for a warm summer this year, I think 2007 will no longer be the record minimum sea ice extent.
2010 just had its biggest melt for this season last night: 159K.
It now has passed 2007(107K difference) and was already in front of 2008 (254K) and 2009 (352K). It is trailing 2006 by 185K.
This was 2010’s 4th century break (a melt of 100K or more). Around this time 2009 had its first century break, 2008 also had had one (tomorrow’s date the second), 2006 had had 3 and 2007 none so far (but holds the record for total century breaks during one melt season: 19).
Again, this doesn’t mean anything wrt minimum sea ice extent in September. It can go either way, but right now the melt is kicking *ss. 🙂
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
May 19, 2010 at 11:46 pm
To: Pamela Gray
BTW, why is Phil-dot talking about mega-meters (10^6 meters) squared? That first figure he just gave of “300,000 Mm^2″ would be 300,000,000,000 (3 x 10^11) km^2, and IARC-JAXA is reporting the entire Arctic extent as of May 19 2010 as only 11,730,938 km^2 total. That would be quite an impressive loss over just a couple of weeks!
I use Mm^2 because it’s the proper SI unit, (10^6 meters)^2 is 10^12 meter^2, however last night it was late and I omitted to include the decimal point! It should of course have been 0.3Mm^2 etc. Doesn’t change the argument though, Pamela is proposing inter alia that the loses in the Bering sea occurred by flowing into the Arctic Basin!
Kadaka and Pam, too bad you don’t have a good understanding of the drivers for Arctic sea ice loss. But that’s ok, the data is speaking for itself. The ice extent has fallen below that of 2007 and it is near the previous record minimum set in 2006. In the next few days there will likely be a new record minimum for May. Pam, I don’t know why you didn’t take nedheads suggestion that you should actually look at the wind fields, but I did, and you are incorrect. The wind vector fields show ice flow out of Fram Strait, weak movement towards the pole from the Alaskan coast and movement towards the Eurasian coasts (i.e. away from the pole). The MODIS imagery does not support any of the conclusions you tried to reach. Please do some fact checking before spouting off.
Kadaka, just because someone finds flaws in statements given by Pamela, that does not mean they are alarmists. I for one am not an alarmist.
Maybe there’s ridging at the pole, but zooming in on the Arctic basin north of Spitsbergen it looks like it’s all breaking up there. And the Kara Sea.
http://ice-map.appspot.com/
In today’s Winnipeg Free Press.
Here we go again:
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/greenpage/environment/scientists-say-arctic-sea-ice-on-track-to-match-record-low-set-in-2007-94275949.html
Arctic sea ice is on track to recede to a record low this year, suggesting that northern waters free of summer ice are coming faster than anyone thought.
The latest satellite data show ice coverage is equal to what it was in 2007, the lowest year on record, and is declining faster than it did that year.
“Could we break another record this year? I think it’s quite possible,” said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
“We are going to lose the summer sea-ice cover. We can’t go back.”
In April, the centre published data showing that sea ice had almost recovered to the 20-year average. That ignited a flurry of interest on climate change skeptic blogs.
But much of that ice was thin and new. The warmest April on record in the Arctic made short work of it.
Ice cover has already fallen back to where it was in 2007 at this time of year and is disappearing at a faster pace than it did then. Serreze said winds, cloud cover or other weather conditions could slow the melt, but he points out that the decline is likely to speed up even more in June and July.
“Will (thawing) this year be particularly fast?” asked Serreze. “We don’t know. We really don’t know.”
One of Canada’s top sea-ice experts suggests things might even be worse than Serreze thinks. His data could be underestimating the collapse of summer ice cover, said David Barber of the University of Manitoba. Researchers can’t learn anything from satellite data about the state or thickness of the ice.
“What we think is thick multi-year ice late in the summer is in fact not,” he said. “It’s heavily decayed first-year ice. When that stuff starts to reform in the fall, we think it’s multi-year ice, but it’s not.”
Arctic explorers and scientific expeditions are finding more open water and untrustworthy ice ever, said Barber.
He pointed out the Arctic continued to lose multi-year ice even in 2008 and 2009, when total ice coverage rebounded somewhat.
True multi-year ice — the thick, hard stuff that stops ships — now comprises about 18 per cent of the Arctic ice pack. In 1981, when Barber first went north, that figure was 90 per cent.
“This is all just part of a trajectory moving toward a seasonally ice-free Arctic,” he said. “That’s happening more quickly than we thought it would happen.”
Once northern waters are clear in the summer, there will be little difference between navigating the Northwest Passage and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Barber suggested.
He recounts sailing through degraded ice in an icebreaker. The ship’s top speed in open water was 13.7 knots. Its speed through the decayed ice was 13 knots.
“It was almost like it didn’t exist.”
Steve, isn’t it time to admit you were wrong in your earlier posts about the sea ice cover and what type of “boring” melt season we would be observing this year? I know it’s hard to admit you’re wrong, but let’s get past that and start talking about what is happening today. Purposefully ignoring the recent acceleration in ice loss make you and WUWT look bad….
Forget what I said about today’s melt figure. I wasn’t aware of the fact that they had substantially revised yesterday’s number, so no 4th century break for 2010.
2010 is still in 2nd position for the moment, trailing 2006 by 204K.