By Steve Goddard
CIRES photo of an Arctic ice pressure ridge
I generated an animation of 2007 sea ice thickness from the US Navy’s PIP database, and noticed something remarkable. Watch the video below, particularly inside the red square – the animation runs from May through October, 2007. The color scale on the left indicates the thickness of the ice. Watch:
At the beginning of May, ice thickness was about three metres in the center of the red square. By mid-June it was getting thicker, and by early September it was close to five metres thick! During the notorious summer of “record melt” which we have been told about ad nauseum, the ice thickness near the most affected area increased by 60%. What could have caused this? Simple – the ice was compacting to the north as it was pushed by southerly winds. It lost area – while it gained thickness.
The NSIDC news from September, 2007 touched peripherally on this idea, without actually mentioning the critical point.
The region over Siberia experienced fairly low pressure during the same time period. Winds blow clockwise around high-pressure areas and anticlockwise around low-pressure areas. The combination of high- and low-pressure areas thus fostered fairly strong winds over coastal Siberia that were partly from the south, pumping warm air into the region and also contributing to a warming Arctic. At the same time, these winds from the south acted to push ice away from the coast and into the central Arctic Ocean, further reducing ice extent in the coastal areas
Ice thickness in May 2007 was ~3 metres
Ice thickness in September, 2007 was ~5 metres
Exaggerated animation of thickness gain from compression. For effect only.
A good analogy would be shoveling the snow off your driveway. As you push the shovel forwards, the area of snow decreases – but the thickness of the snow increases in front of the shovel.
Now on to 2010. Note in the images below that ice in the Chukchi and East Siberian seas is thicker this year than it was on this date in 2007. In some locations it is as much as 5 metres thick in 2010.
May 27, 2007 Ice inside the vulnerable square (where much of the anomalous 2007 “melt” occurred) was 0.5 to 3 metres thick
May 27, 2010 Ice inside the vulnerable square is 0.5 to 5 metres thick
The AGW chameleon changes it’s colours constantly. It complains about area and extent when convenient, and about thickness when convenient. I am coming to the conclusion that the 2007 melt was more of a marketing event than a climatological event. The graph below gives a feel for just how much of a non-event it was. 2007 was 1.5 standard deviations off the 30 year extent trend, but apparently a lot of the supposedly “melted” ice just crumpled up into more survivable thick ice.
One of the ice experts must have known this. Surprising that it took the “breathtakingly ignorant” WUWT to point it out.
ADDENDUM for clarity:
Currently the NIC uses the Polar Ice Prediction System (PIPS) version 2.0 as the basis for its “operational” short-term (24–120 h) sea ice forecasts. These forecasts are evaluated daily and amended by skilled analysts using reconnaissance data (if available), the most recent weather charts and data, and historical knowledge of the conditions in the area to provide the highest quality forecasts possible out to 120 h. Special emphasis in these forecasts is placed on the location of the ice edge and the conditions in the marginal ice zone (MIZ), as these are the most critical operational areas for marine transportation and safety.
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Steven,
If the this truth ever got out, you know the mantra will morph into CAGW causing unusual tidal gyres or air circulation patterns in the Arctic that in turn drive the ice loss. A chameleon can change his colors at the drop of a hat and doesn’t feel the worse for it!
The SOTC press release on the 2007 sea ice minimum does note the effect of the wind pushing the ice away from Siberia, but emphasizes melting.
If these thickness estimates are reliable, it should be possible to calculate the one important parameter in this process: sea ice volume. Now I really wonder how September 2007 compares to other autumns in this respect!
Steve,
That is amazing!
Meaning Atmospheric pressure has an effect on ice formations.
Very nice analysis, Willis!
Now prepare for the AGW motor boaters with their ‘But-but-but-but-but …’
Breathtakingly intelligent WUWT 😉
theres NO way, they also didnt manage to figure this out..but telling people was NOT on their agenda was it?
Now, whenever I hear a single warmie statement I am so close to screaming! so much has proved to be falsified, intentional untruths aka LIES! and most is unverifiable.
australias CSIRO coastal survey advert here is just another money wasting govt con.
they want to limit tenure and be able to set a sea level they? consider unsafe and reposess land…
the CSIRO climate warming fightback..15 million when we are in debt? for a fictitous issue?
sooner KRudd and W(r)ong and garrotte and R guano are OUT the better for us all!
As a long time snow shoveler it’s very clear that matter doesn’t just magically disappear otherwise snow shoveling would be a lot easier to do.
Wow, it’s nice to find the evidence of this reduction of area without it all being a reduction in volume. I wonder how this might apply to other years?
How can the ice volume be computed? How accurate would such computations be? How do we know?
How were the ice depth measurements obtained? Satellite? Which? What is the “chain of custody” of that data?
Depending on how much ice volume crumpled up into the pile as opposed to melting this could invalidate the use of ice area alone as an indicator of how much ice there is in the arctic.
Oh, “open chain of custody” is an appropriate term and standard to use for all scientific data that is collected, processed (including all manipulations), and used in any conclusions presented to any politicians or to the public. Data can’t be or shouldn’t be trusted unless it has a high integrity in it’s “open chain of custody” that can be shown to any who ask for it.
[snip – I’ve warned you before about constantly posting under different names, Aka “Dick Chambers” aka “The Ford Prefect” pick one and stick with it, or don’t post here again. I’m not interested in your games. -Anthony]
It’s been said before – never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
CAGWists are running scared and trying every avenue to justify their position. Notably, the propaganda goes into ridiculous overdrive to create alarmism, which promotes attention. “Global Warming will cause more.. umm.. EVERYTHING!” they spout in ever increasing wails for lazy funding and a slack job to go to in the morning. It’s far more difficult for us Climate Realists to have our voice heard over the whining din, however the real truth shall never be silenced.
Curiously (or not), this corresponds to our friend Vuk graph of GMF:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AT-GMF.gif
Where Siberia decreased temperatures while Hudson Bay increased. Then we can have an idea what moves winds and climate.
I am coming to the conclusion that the 2007 melt was more of a marketing event than a climatological event
What AGWrs´Marketing managing will be planning for this year, as a preparation to achieve their goal of Global Socialist Governance in Cancun?
Better ice be 0 inches thick than 1 mile + thick.
Ice comes and Ice goes only where the wind blows.
The hot earthers are once again making much ado about nothing.
Damn drama queens.
In the interesting of fiscal responsibility, we need to cut their funding to zero as they are contributing to the burning of the federal treasury.
Should be interest in lieu of interesting.
Need an edit feature badly for those of us with alternatively slow and fast fingers.
Carbon burp from ocean ended last ice age, very nice article:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100527141959.htm
The paper:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1183627
So, the earth has cycles and changes and it isn’t all our fault? What a surprise!
Nice work…….
It would be very interesting to see the internal emails about this. They had to know, and therefore it can be inferred that the false, alarming impression was intentionally made. This is a clear and consistent pattern. How can so many supposedly smart people be so willing to go along with this stuff? More marketing the politics than analyzing the data.
An historic parallel….
As again real scientists prove that the earth, is indeed, not flat.
Well thank goodness that the science was settled before you discovered this . . . otherwise the science wouldn’t be settled.
No wait, that can’t be right . . . . that logic doesn’t hide any declines.
This is like the ACE readings for Hurricanes.
Area of ice coverage is like the count of named storms.
Mass of ice is like the amount of energy of the named.
Huh. That is interesting. I did not realize you could get that significant an increase in thickness over a significant area in size *during* melt season.
Extent has always been an imperfect metric –but it is what we have for a long enough period and great enuf granularity (daily) to be worthwhile saying anything about in historical terms (and even that, just barely –I’d much prefer we had it back to 1945 or so). Yes, volume would be better –and when we have 20 years of daily (or even weekly) volume data that’ll be worth saying something about. Even the snapshots from ICECAP did not have enough granularity to be all that useful for historical comparison even in the handful of years it operated.
So we should ignore ice extent, and instead emphasize ice volume?
Inconvenient “rotten ice” !
Just a thought, but it seems to me that if thickness can be measured and area can be measured then using volume as the measure for comparison would resolve the argument.
Steve, with thickness and area data it’s a simple calculation to get ice volume and that would be an interesting metric to compare over years.
Last night on “As it happens” (A CBC radio program) they interviewed the new climate person at the UN. She described Canada’s contributions to climate change as “not having reached their Kyoto commitment and their new targets are even lower.” Maybe Harper is not as bad as I usually find him.
I also contacted our Auditor General as well as Environment Canada to ask them how much of our tax dollars were being spent on carbon dioxide reduction and other AGW items. The AG replied that it was not an item that it verified and EC said that they had no budget for AGW so had spent no money on that item.
I will continue to ferret out how many of our (Canadian) tax dollars are being wasted on this “model” situation.
So what’s your take on the current ‘melt’ we hear so much about? Do we have evidence of persistence of the thickened and hence more survivable ice over the subsequent three years? More importantly, has ice volume changed substantially and if so in what direction?