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.
Brilliant work Steve.
In related news, while the credibility of the AGW proponents is shrinking, their resistance to logic and evidence appears to be thickening.
David Ball says:
May 28, 2010 at 6:36 pm
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
Do you ascribe the same reason to Steve G for doing the same?
As someone that has lived with frozen ponds, frozen lakes, frozen rivers and frozen seas. Let me assure you that water, in the wild, FREEZES from the TOP DOWN and MELTS from the BOTTOM UP. When the wind chill air temperature gets low enough energy loss from the water surface gets fast enough the water freezes. As the energy loss decreases the bottom of the ice melts. No need for warm, above freezing, air temperatures. Liquid water at freezing temperature will not begin freezing until it loses more energy to make the phase change and will change back as soon as more energy comes up from below.
bubbagyro says:
May 28, 2010 at 5:56 pm
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).
I’ll ignore your reading comprehension difficulties for the moment, and go with the Aristotle notion…
Yes, Aristotle was quite the scientist, with his “logic” (where’s that Chinese logic student from a few months ago ? He was hilarious) :
Apparently sitting on a chair and just thinking “logically” does not a scientist make.
Of course, Aristotle lived in the 4th century BC, so he had an excuse for getting some things very, very wrong. An excuse nobody here has.
Okay, IARC-JAXA just posted the new Arctic sea ice extent number (AMSR-E):
That’s the lowest for this date since 2003.
Alright, games over, time to go home. Anu, you can pick up your little plastic trophy over at the desk. See you in September!
P.G. Sharrow
Sea ice is a little different. As it approaches the freezing point, it becomes more dense and sinks. As a result, several tens of metres of ice have to reach the freezing point before any starts to freeze. As a result, there can never be any warm water under the ice during the autumn and winter when the ice is thickening.
Phil Clarke
Walt Meier has personally apologized to me for his remarks, and he shortly thereafter recognized that there was a discrepancy between NSIDC and UIUC maps just as I said.
UIUC made two corrections as a result of what I noticed. They corrected the eye altitude of their maps, and added this disclaimer “Sea ice concentrations less than 30% are not displayed in these images.”
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh
It appears that my observations are putting you on edge. I wonder why?
Ok, since this is evidently a hot topic, here’s my take:
2007 minimum – the ice area/extent was certainly down, but no big deal. Main reason losses due to winds blowing vast chunks down the Fram Strait (and smaller chunks down Kennedy). Compaction also played a part. But warmer incoming sea currents also a factor. So these are all effectively weather events, rather than anything to do with the alleged global CO2 induced average temperature increase. But I don’t dispute that the Arctic warmed a little in the late 20th Century. Just like it did in 1922, the 1940s, and in 1817, the MWP, and many other periods further back in the holocene. As I said, the very slight warming of the late 20th C is no big deal. The Arctic sea ice melts/sublimes/disappears for 6 brief weeks in summer, and starts to freeze again PDQ in late August/early September, even in warm decades.
Given how the Arctic is supposed to be in it’s death spiral, and yet the whole of the NH (except West Greenland and Eastern Canada) has just had one of the coldest winters for many years, I think much more time and money should directed towards investigation of the AO and the related jet streams, which appear to have much more significance to the climate most people on the planet experience.
I am reminded of what Joe Bastardi said in one of his video broadcasts (and I paraphrase): “Arctic ice extent? – wake me up if the summer minimum gets below 2 million square miles…”
The Wegener Institute found 12m thick ice piled up against Ellesmere Island last year:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/28/inconvenient-eisdicken/
“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.”
You have to correlate that information with their host populations, and the character of the ground cover. Female ticks are obligate feeders for reproduction, and have modest host species specificity for fecundity. Depending on which species you normally encounter, look at the local populations of rabbits and lagomorphs, coyotes, dogs etc (or deer if you’re talking about deer ticks). Land use practices are a big factor – reduction of old-field conditions, plowing, grass and forest fires, especially in successive years will drop tick numbers dramatically, as will repetitive spring dry spells.
In the late ’60s we used to use a square metre of white flannel cloth to sweep test pasture fields in June to census for the dog tick Dermacentor sp. (a particularly loathesome tick genus), using the fact that females climbed to the top of grass blades in early morning in order to hitch a ride on passing furry bellies. Spring grass fires can remove tick populations dramatically in the local area of the fires. (That research was interesting – the rationale was sociological, but Defence was also very interested in rickettsial infections as biological weapons at that time…) I still itch and twitch every time I recall those two summers… 🙂
As an aside to the aside, do that kind of research for a bit and you’ll come to fully appreciate the cute pictures of chimpanzees mutally grooming one another in African forests and plains… LOL!
stevengoddard says:
May 29, 2010 at 12:04 am
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh
*
*
Steven,
I have a question regarding the pictures shown in the above URL: What’s the deal with those lines radiating rather equidistantly from the pole, extending about 500 miles each?
It’s like a great big asterisk.
The date shown is for May 28, 1980.
Gail Combs says:
May 28, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Steve Keohane says:
May 28, 2010 at 6:21 am
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.
Gail, try a quick dabbing with vaseline, just enough to coat the tick. The tick then can’t breath and will back out and die, no extraction need be done. Plus there is no risk of leaving the head behind. Maybe neo/polysporin or the like would be even better to help prevent infection if that is a concern.
Andrew P. says:
May 29, 2010 at 12:21 am
I am reminded of what Joe Bastardi said in one of his video broadcasts (and I paraphrase): “Arctic ice extent? – wake me up if the summer minimum gets below 2 million square miles…”
It must get annoying for people to keep waking him up every September –
2007, 2008, 2009:
http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/20071001_pressrelease.html
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20081002_seaice_pressrelease.html
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2009/091709.html
Who’s going to wake him this summer ? Does he have a live-in nurse or something ?
Maybe he should change it to “wake me up if the summer minimum doesn’t get below 2 million square miles…”
Excerpted from: Anu on May 29, 2010 at 9:03 pm
1 square mile = 2.58998811 square kilometers
2 million mi^2 = 5,180,000km^2, to keep it to 3 significant digits.
IARC-JAXA extent data:
2007: 5,166,250km^2 on August 18. September would have been too late.
2008: 5,178,281 on August 27. Too late again.
2009: Nope! Never got that low all year. Joe Bastardi could’ve slept in. Hit 5,249,844
at the lowest.
But wait! Anu is using NSIDC numbers! And at the 2009 link it clearly says: “On September 12, 2009 sea ice extent dropped to 5.10 million square kilometers (1.97 million square miles).”
Which brings up an interesting observation. 2007 and 2008, links are to the wrap-up press releases. 2009, link is to an Arctic Sea Ice News, not the press release. Why?
The browser says the press release page is titled “2009 Arctic sea ice minimum” but a text search can’t even find “mini” in it, “minimum” isn’t mentioned. When you look for that date in the Sea Ice Index archives you find this:
Back at that linked 2009 Arctic Sea Ice News, way at the bottom we find this section (emphasis added in the text body):
This goes along with what is stated in the 2009 press release (emphasis added):
So NSIDC isn’t worried about any particular daily number when considering the yearly low. So why should there be a big fuss over one?
Re: kadaka (KD Knoebel) on May 28, 2010 at 10:14 pm
I hereby take that back.
The number must have been revised later, the big data file now says May 28 had 11,211,719 km², so the 2006 record of 11,199,844 km² hasn’t been broken.
The games are still on. Oh, and Anu, they’d like a word with you at the desk…
Ever tried wart remover on a tick? Or that new freeze stuff in a tube? Works well too. But not on inner thighs. No thanks on that one. Me or a horse.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
May 30, 2010 at 2:09 am
But wait! Anu is using NSIDC numbers! And at the 2009 link it clearly says: “On September 12, 2009 sea ice extent dropped to 5.10 million square kilometers (1.97 million square miles).”
Yes, that would be less than 2 million square miles.
So NSIDC isn’t worried about any particular daily number when considering the yearly low. So why should there be a big fuss over one?
The data is the data.
There are different ways to report it – whether someone is “worried” about one aspect or another is a separate issue. I was just showing years that went below 2 million square miles – an event important enough to wake up Joe Bastardi over; whoever he is.
I was responding to the (paraphrased) quote by Andrew P. – just scroll up.
“Arctic ice extent? – wake me up if the summer minimum gets below 2 million square miles…”
I’m saying each of the last 3 years had Arctic ice extent minimums below 2 million square miles.
I only spent about 1 minute looking in the NSIDC data for lowest day of the year for 2007 and 2008; it was quicker to find the average for the entire month of September. Since the average sea ice extent for the entire month of September met the requirement, there had to be at least one day that met the requirement.
You’re free to do the additional 3 minutes search to find the days in 2007 and 2008 with the minimum extent for the year – they will both be less than 2 million square miles.
QED.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
May 30, 2010 at 2:38 am
Sorry, that plastic trophy is rightfully mine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hamm#Gold_medal_controversy
The long-standing “Rules of Play” doctrine has prohibited sports officials from changing after a competition the decisions of officials during the competition.
⌘ ♂☎ Ψ
Pamela Gray says:
May 30, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Ever tried wart remover on a tick? Or that new freeze stuff in a tube? Works well too. But not on inner thighs. No thanks on that one. Me or a horse.
Have you thought about using nail polish?
From: Anu on May 30, 2010 at 8:21 pm
A. This is Anthony Watts’ site thus Anthony Watts’ rules. He is final arbiter. “Rules of play” do not apply unless he lets them.
B. I called it early, my mistake. I learned later that was a preliminary result, one needs to wait for the official “fixed” result.
C. I have no authority to call an end anyway, I’m just an ordinary commentator. Like a baseball fan who leaves the park in the eighth inning certain his team has lost, thus missing the ninth inning comeback and win, I’m no official so I can’t call a winner.
Now if you, who watches Arctic sea ice a lot, knew that wasn’t the final result but still grabbed the little plastic trophy and ran, well then….