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.
Smokey,
I’ve mentioned the Antarctic several times here on WUWT, and even posted this excellent article as to why sea ice in the S. Hemisphere might increase with GW:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/Pubs/Zhang_Antarctic_20-11-2515.pdf
But of course, do continue to post your incorrect assumptions about me as it provides an interesting look inside the psyche of a hardened skeptic…
REPLY: Earth to Gates, Earth to Gates, TOPIC of this post: ARCTIC – take a break, both of you, I’m getting tired of moderating the sniping -A
John G says:
May 28, 2010 at 6:21 am
Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a United States agency, show that globally, this winter was the fifth warmest in history
We’ve already seen how the various agencies have adjusted recent temperatures upwards with various tricks and lowered past temperatures to support the agenda. I’m just saying.
Milwaukee Bob says:
May 28, 2010 at 11:30 am
Anu said at 8:42 am
Of course, models must be compared to measured ground truth to see how good they are doing. PIPS doesn’t attempt to show how good their “ice thickness” model works……
Why would or should they? It’s the US Navy! If I was in charge, I wouldn’t be telling anyone how good I am at predicting ice depth.
Looks like they don’t want your type in charge at NAVO, seeing as how they put their forecasts on the Web and publicly explain how they will do better soon.
It’s the Naval Oceanographic Office, not some secretive military information:
http://www.navo.hpc.mil/
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/index.html
If they don’t want to explain how they verify their model, you are free to ignore it as GIGO.
Tom P. above, found a paper detailing how they plan to have a better model soon:
http://www.nrl.navy.mil/content_images/09_Ocean_Posey.pdf
Great.
Sounds like they will soon have something like PIOMAS.
… not so bad for a simple 1990′s model….. but to be fair to the old Naval sea ice thickness computer model – models weren’t that good in the 1990′s.
Now who’s “disparaging” computer models? Could it be the Navy knows something about their model that YOU don’t?
Admitting that these kinds of computer models gets better every decade is not “disparaging”. Note above – the NAVO admits PIPS 3.0 will be better than PIPS 2.0.
If I were a submarine Captain and I was going to “bet” my life and the lives of my crew on one of two models, the Navy’s or the Unv. of Washington’s, which do you think I would choose?
And what possible scenario would that be, Bob ?
Russian roulette with a climatologist ?
Because a real submarine Captain would be using sonar to see how thick the ice above him was, not some low resolution sea ice thickness model.
And/or if I was the Navy why wouldn’t I just “deep six” PIPS and use that whiz-bang 21st century PIOMAS model?
Gee Bob, if you were the Navy would you try to save the taxpayers money, or would you try to do everything in-house to protect your turf ? Would you spend $60 billion on a plane and let the Air Force spend $65 billion on a similar plane, for instance, or would you have thought of something like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter decades ago ?
“Ours is better for our needs”.
Oh, and about that ….. plus other satellite, airplane, and field expedition data I don’t see it except for some summarized mostly 1990’s (phew, 20th century stuff!) sub data. Where is it? I’ve looked everywhere on the UW site.
“Everywhere”, Bob ?
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/IDAO/index.html
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/IceVolume.php
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/lindsay/pdf_files/Lindsay_Zhang_ic_assimilation_2006.pdf
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/lindsay/pdf_files/Zhang_GRL2008_Ensemble_prediction_for_2008.pdf
Also see NASA’s IceBridge program, aircraft flights filling some gaps before IceSat-2:
http://www.espo.nasa.gov/oib/
And as for “our” criticizing of computer models here at WUWT, you couldn’t possibly be more inaccurate or disingenuous. I’ve been reading this blog almost daily from it’s first day and surfacestations.org before that and almost everyone that has pointed out deficiency’s in the GLOBAL ATMOSPHERIC MODELS (NOT computer models in general) …
Ah yes, I should have qualified that:
Here’s a quick recap of some WUWT computer model opinions:
Didn’t the Catlin “Ex-perdition” group pass through that area?
Really nice animation of the 2007 melt. Shows how melting begin in the Bering sea, then penetrate the Bering Strait into Chuckchi Sea and turn east towards East Siberia Sea because of prevailing winds. Clearly the cause of the melt is warm water entering the Arctic through the Bering Strait, augmented by the southerly winds that year. I can say that because none of the Arctic warming is caused by any greenhouse effect, and much less is it influenced by a mythical “Arctic acceleration” of the warmists. It began abruptly at the turn of the twentieth century after a two thousand year cooling trend. This sudden start immediately rules out carbon dioxide as a causative factor. The true cause of this warming was a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system at the turn of the century which directed the Gulf Stream to its present northerly course. There was a pause in warming between 1940 and 1960 but warming resumed and continues today. The Gulf Stream today keeps the Russian Arctic ports ice free in the summer and has eaten away approximately a third of the arctic ice that would exist in its absence. If you look at the animation carefully you notice that almost all of the melt takes place on the Bering Strait side of the Arctic and the Gulf Stream side changes very little. That is because the flow of warm water through the Bering Strait is variable and winds can modulate it strongly as happened in 2007. For more info see “What Warming?” available on Amazon.com.
Maybe there is a reason arctic residents refer to spring breakup, not melt up.
SG I’m not sure what “normal” means,
That’s a little odd Steve. You seemed fairly sure a few weeks back …. <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/31/arctic-sea-ice-about-to-hit-normal-what-will-the-news-say/" Back in March there seemed to be little or no confusion.
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.
There we have it – ‘normal’ is the mean used by NSIDC. Or, on Planet Goddard, when the observations drift beyond 2 standard deviations of ‘normal’, hey – it is still ‘very close to normal’. Nothing to see here.
BTW .. One of the ice experts must have known this [some of the 2007 extent reduction was due to compression and wind effects].
One presumes a writer on the Arctic ice has done his homework and is familiar with the publications of Son Nghiem?
This is one of my favorite ice sites. It was put together for the walrus hunting locals. They even refer to “local experts”. I wonder if that means Inuit?
http://www.arcus.org/search/siwo
With all this talk of models, let’s listen to what an internationally esteemed physicist says about them:
Prof Dyson, FRS, NAS, APS, has 21 degrees from various universities. He worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied. He is the author of numerous books, and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics. [Wiki bio] [YouTube, Dyson deconstructs climate models]
Phil Clarke
You seem to be determined to discuss anything but the topic of the article. Why is that?
Last time I said anything about Ice it was that Lake Huron was clear of it by me, then the next day instead of water I saw wind blown ice piled up 3 feet above the water level; The same thing in the arctic shouldn’t be a surprise.
Brad says:
May 28, 2010 at 5:44 am
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!
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This sounds like a “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Did the oceans “burp” because they became warmer and released CO2?
glacierman says:
May 28, 2010 at 5:56 am
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.
__________________________________________________________________________
I have a question for these sorry excuses for human beings:
How can you keep lying like this KNOWING it is going to devastate entire economies, KNOWING this will ultimately leading to a large number of deaths? How can you still sleep at night KNOWING you have been a traitor to your fellow human beings?
Steve, congratulations on a nice bit of research. I am waiting for R. Gates to try and refute this as usual. I some times wonder if he is actually paid for his obfuscating.
Smokey: Prof Dyson, FRS, NAS, APS, has 21 degrees from various universities. He worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied. He is the author of numerous books, and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics
Steve Goddard : You may have noticed that appeals to authority don’t carry much weight around here.
What’s Up With That? More seriously, as a physicist I yield to no-one in my admiration, in that field, to Freeman Dyson. However, anyone can over-reach.
Dr. John M. Ware said on May 28, 2010 at 11:29 am:
That is the best place to be asking a question from, shows you want to get out of there.
Ice may be incompressible, but sea ice effectively can be compressed. Extent numbers use a minimum Concentration of Sea Ice, usually 15%, so for a given area what is reported may be up to 85% water. Like with a mug filled with slush, the ice part can be squashed together, squeezing out the water part. When done, you have a dense block of ice, which for extent figures is much smaller as the water part, having less that 15% sea ice, is no longer considered.
So real world, you could mash together two regions of 20% concentration, and end up with 50% concentration having less extent but greater ice “density.”
When shoveling snow, you can pack it and squeeze out the air. With sea ice, especially with low concentrations, you can basically pack it and squeeze out the water.
Steve Keohane says:
May 28, 2010 at 6:21 am
“….On another note, I made a joke a few weeks back about the dearth of ticks. Seriously, after nearly forty years in Colorado, I have seen 2-4 ticks per week until things dry out in June. In 2009 I saw 3-4 ticks total. This year none, and I’ve been clearing brush for weeks and should see a higher than normal incidence. It seems odd to me.”
________________________________________________________________________
I know where all your ticks went Steve, they all packed up their bags and headed for North Carolina. I am picking off 2 or three a DAY and my poor animals need to be inspected and picked clean this year too. Try taking ticks off a horse’s inner thighs when he really wants to kick your head off or a billy goat with two foot long horns who resents having ticks removed from his eye lids.
Models that predict sea ice are simplistic, with a minuscule amount of variables compared to trying to forecast global climate. The ice model is going back and extrapolating a linear trend that reproduces each season relatively well. If I wrote a model for my current weather in Florida, and only went back 5 or 10 years, I would probably be within a standard deviation of the mean for the last couple years going forward a year. That is like saying that my big toenail grows a millimeter a month, and now I will write an Excel regression and project that going forward the next six months. Wow! Just about right on! That must mean all models are good! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
And Anu – congratulations! Just when I thought that you had committed every logical fallacy know to Aristotle, you outdid yourself! You committed the fallacy called inappropriate generalization with your argument from the specific (Navy model good) to inferring from that the generalization (Ergo, All Models good).
Example:
I’ve seen a person shoot someone dead.
Therefore, all people are murderers.
Steve,
The subject seems to be the compression of Arctic ice and the effects of winds upon ice extent. Here you go: Enjoy”
Here’s a puzzle. Back in 2008 a writer named Steve Goddard penned a piece for a UK IT News and gossip website named The Register on the topic of Arctic ice. It was largely based on an observational fallacy. Dr Walt Meier wrote in to correct the fallacy and added:
the rest of the article consists almost entirely of misleading, irrelevant, or erroneous information about Arctic sea ice that add nothing to the understanding of the significant long-term decline that is being observed.
The puzzle is this: with that blot on one’s CV, how did one become apparently the inhouse authority on the topic of Arctic Sea Ice at WUWT?
REPLY: Phil, yes he made a mistake. By your reasoning then let’s make sure that any mistake ever made by anyone, follows them around forever, preventing them from ever doing anything elsewhere again. You are quite the arrogant load of bollocks, so unless you’ve never made a mistake in anything you’ve done and can document it, I suggest you bugger off. – Anthony
Phil Clarke,
I simply cut ‘n’ pasted Dyson’s bio from the NY Times for the benefit of anyone who isn’t familiar with the name, and to show that he is in fact an authority; certainly more so than Mann, Schmidt, Briffa and the rest. [An Appeal to Authority fallacy refers to the situation in which the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious.]
For a real appeal to authority, check out the guy in the funny hat from your link who says: “We already know that the global temperature sensitivity to equivalent CO2 doubling is near 3 degrees C.” A mere software engineer pretending to be a climatologist, or a physicist? Ri-i-i-i-ght.
Preaching that ‘we already know’ that sensitivity is around 3°C ceratinly comes across as ignorant. When he says ‘we,’ maybe he’s talking about himself and the gerbil in his pants pocket, but we “already know” no such thing. In fact, the planet itself is telling us the sensitivity number is almost certainly below 1°C, and very likely no more than half that.
What we do know is that every UN Assessment Report has ratcheted the sensitivity number downward. We also know that the UN/IPCC’s prognosticators are all political appointees, with marching orders that require a high sensitivity number for their agenda, so they keep the number as high as they think they can get away with.
The real world is different. With a 35% increase in CO2, the planet’s temperature has risen only about 0.7° — and a large part of that rise is due to the natural warming since the end of the LIA, which would occur with or without a change in CO2. It is entirely possible that the effect of CO2 is so close to zero that it can be entirely disregarded. It certainly is too small to measure.
I really tried to read your link, Phil. But I gave up at the point when the guy in the funny hat started tooting his horn about writing an article for RealClimate. With credibility that low, I’ll stick to reading what a genuine authority writes.
Hey there Phil Clarke. Freeman Dyson, Tim Ball, Richard Lindzen. Nobody is good enough for you. You have been spanked repeatedly, and yet you keep coming back for more. That is the actions of someone who is being paid to do that. I see no other explanation (by that I mean someone who is in fear of losing their grants). You nit pick and find the slightest chink in the armor, instead of arguing the given points. You are like a child. What are YOUR credentials, by the way?
Excerpted from: Phil Clarke on May 28, 2010 at 5:38 pm
So you demonstrate this by linking to a Michael Tobis piece with such wonderful insights as:
Nice.
To anyone but Phil Clarke: Remind me to never “admire” my parents in such a fashion.
Thank you Steven Goddard. Fascinating!
And thank you for the videos. 🙂
James Sexton says:
May 28, 2010 at 8:58 am
Wren says: “…I’m sorry Steve, but I don’t follow what you are saying about the 2007 melt being a non-event………”
It was a non-event. Here’s how it was a non-event; We didn’t all die……
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In the interest of saving space, I won’t repeat your entire post, but Webster’s says an event is a ” noteworthy happening.” Because the 2006-2007 decrease was the largest one-year decrease in sea ice in 30 years, it was a noteworthy happening.
stevengoddard says:
May 28, 2010 at 8:04 am
Wren
Here is 2009. A small pressure bump appeared in August, but quickly disappeared. Nothing like 2007.
—–
The year 2009 is only 1 year out of the 30 years in your chart. You haven’t shown 2007 had more crumpling than the 30-year average.