By Steve Goddard
Over the last three years, Arctic Ice has gained significantly in thickness. The graph above was generated by image processing and analysis of PIPS maps, and shows the thickness histogram for June 1 of each year since 2007.
The blue line represents 2008, and the most abundant ice that year was less than 1.5 metres thick. That thin ice was famously described by NSIDC as “rotten ice.” In 2009 (red) the most common ice had increased to more than 2.0 metres, and by 2010 (orange) the most common ice had increased to in excess of 2.75 metres thick.
We have seen a steady year over year thickening of the ice since the 2007 melt season. Thinner ice is more likely to melt during the summer, so the prognosis for a big melt looks much less likely than either of the previous two summers. More than 70% of the ice this year is thicker than 2.25 metres thick. By contrast, more than half of the ice was thinner than 2.0 metres in 2008.
So why did 2008 start out with so little thick ice? Because during the summer of 2007 much of the ice melted or was compressed by the wind. During the winter of 2007-2008, much of the remaining thick ice blew out into the North Atlantic and melted. So by the time that summer 2008 arrived, there was very little ice left besides rotten, thin ice. Which led to Mark Serreze’ famous “ice free North Pole bet.”
Can we find another year with similar ice distribution as 2010? I can see Russian ice in my Windows. Note in the graph below that 2010 is very similar to 2006.
2006 on the left. 2010 on the right.
2006 had the highest minimum (and smallest maximum) in the DMI record. Like 2010, the ice was compressed and thick in 2006.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_2010.png
Conclusion : Should we expect a nice recovery this summer due to the thicker ice? You bet ya. Even if all the ice less than 2.5 metres thick melted this summer, we would still see a record high minimum in the DMI charts.
Mark Serreze has a different take for 2010:
“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.
Bookmark this post for reference in September.
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“The report of my death was an exaggeration”
– Mark Twain
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Addendum By Steve Goddard 6/3/10:
Anyone betting on the minimum extent needs to recognize that summer weather can dramatically effect the behaviour of the ice. The fact that the ice is thicker now is no guarantee that it won’t shrink substantially if the summer turns out to be very warm, windy or sunny. Joe Bastardi believes that it will be a warm summer in the Arctic. I’m not a weather forecaster and won’t make any weather predictions.
Tom P
Sorry, made a mistake in the 2007 average thickness calculation. Should read “average thickness in 2010 of 2.4 metres and 2.2 for 2007”
It’ll come down to the weather during the summer as to whether we have lower minimum or not. 2007 was a weather related event with the unusual winds. Barring that, the Arctic ice should survive a deep minimum.
The Atlantic side has taken a good hit causing the lower numbers in area and extent. The Barents helped cause the late bump in extent and a big factor in the quick fall off. These are generally ice-free seas during the minimum anyway, so what going on inside the basin will be more important. Seems to be holding it own for now.
2010 melt was already interesting. Now it seems we’ve got record May ice loss, suggesting melting needs to slow down a lot to avoid another 2007, versus this data on ice thickness. But ice thickness is also in dispute – see R. Gates’s comment.
Will we be able to use the September outcome to help us determine which of PIPS 2.0, 3.0, and PIOMASS is really the most accurate? Steve G: do you have reasons for trusting your graphs from PIPS 2.0?
The other interesting thing is how important this year’s melt appears to be to 95% of correspondents both here and at Climate Progress. Yet change in arctic albedo is already figured in to IPCC estimates of sensitivity to warming from CO2. So I’m in the 5% who think the longer term trends are more important.
Still heck, life’s too short not to make unwarranted conclusions from yearly events, which is what I see at Climate Progress.
Rich.
I find it hard to get very excited about whether more (or less) ice than “usual” will melt in the Arctic this Summer.
Such evidence as there is suggests strongly that Arctic sea ice has fluctuated widely for ever.
And if it all melts (which seems exceptionally improbable), I don’t think it will be a big deal.
And it certainly won’t demonstrate that a trivial increase in a harmless trace gas has anything to do with it. And it is not even certain that human emissions are the main cause of that increase.
Yawn.
Gneiss says:
June 2, 2010 at 11:57 am
Steve Goddard writes,
“Conclusion : Should we expect a nice recovery this summer due to the thicker ice? You bet ya. Even if all the ice less than 2.5 metres thick melted this summer, we would still see a record high minimum in the DMI charts.”
I’m impressed by how unequivocally and often WUWT has committed to the proposition that Arctic sea ice is recovering, in disagreement with most Arctic researchers. As you say, these will be pages to bookmark.
___________________________________________________________________________
WUWT is not begging for government funding from politicians who want an excuse to institute more taxes and tighter controls on “their” people. Just reading that the BBC suggested it is time to “suspend democracy” because of the CAGW crisis explains why CAGW is all about power.
The betting odds on this year’s Arctic being icier than last year’s are 45% at https://www.intrade.com (Odds are set by warmists and contrarians betting against each other.)
I see Al Gore has been affected by climate change
Phil. says:
June 2, 2010 at 2:03 pm
I was focusing on the error roughly doubling in my simplistic example. You are right, in certain circumstances, but it depends on the degrees of freedom you have allowed in the data sets.
My point was they are using contrived stats to predict a trend, and the PIOMAS grey error bar range is not appropriate for assigning probability of a trend not being “normal”. Their use of the word “normal” lacks descriptive assignation.
Ian W says:
June 2, 2010 at 1:46 pm
You and others have described the futility of ascribing the word “normal” to climate. When I see normal used to say whether we are in an ‘event” or not, it is to me like scraping of nails on a backboard.
Maybe I’m not normal?
Brian D
Given that temperatures inside the Arctic Basin are still well below freezing, it is not particularly surprising that the ice is “holding it’s own.”
“Joe Bastardi, who once was quite popular on here. . . ”
And Joe still is. But no one is so popular here as to be unquestioned on all issues at all times. Anthony would probably shoot root beer out his nose if you tried to say he gets that kind of respect “in his own house”. Vive le democracy!
Put 5 skeptics in the same room and there will be 7 opinions (well, if you limit the subject matter to just one topic, of course).
I read Joe’s blog from time to time and I have read his weather prognostications and generally agree. I can’t say that I have seen him make any Arctic ice predictions, though I could have missed it.
And just to clarify my previous comment, Arctic ice has very little to do with air temperature. The air temperature in the Arctic is stunningly consistent from one year to the next as it would not rise much above freezing unless all the ice melted.
How did it get twisted around that warmer and less ice is a bad thing………
colder and more ice and more polar bears is a good thing?
Personally, I’m for warmer
Gneiss says:
June 2, 2010 at 11:57 am
“I’m impressed by how unequivocally and often WUWT has committed to the proposition that Arctic sea ice is recovering, in disagreement with most Arctic researchers. As you say, these will be pages to bookmark.”
Since most arctic researchers who disagree with WUWT have consistently been shown to be wrong, very wrong, in just about everything, from causes to effects and outcomes, partly because they’ve been consistently seeing what they believe, and not believing what they see. Thats not research, its religion. True science is inherently skeptical.
Gail Combs says:
June 2, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Yes, we dig into raw data and do our very own analysis, without the benefit of supercomputers and millions in grant $$$.
Holy smokes, are we economically correct or what?
Can’t say that I see any evidence of Fire-breather dragons parked in the Arctic lately,
melting vast seas of ice, catastrophically driving up Sea Levels and singing the hide off of hapless Polar Bears.
Steve,
ImageJ, with the 3D Color Inspector plugin using Wu quantization unambiguously assigns the pixels of the PIPS 2 maps to the thickness bins. All this software is publicly available.
I now understand why you can no longer rely on external funding for your private software endeavours.
Ibrahim says: June 2, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Mercator Ice-thickness etc.
http://bulletin.mercator-ocean.fr/html/produits/psy3v2/ocean/regions/bull_ocean_arc_en.jsp?nom=psy3v2_20100526_22060
Have YOU looked at this ??? Plug in the last 2 years.
I’d say the Heavy Ice HALVED every year since 2008.
This makes PIOMAS positively Optimistic ! !
PS thank you Steve, because if this Mercator were the only Volume Measure I’d be digging my Grave right now.
Alas, as Pips is ONLY based on Concentration, Steve can only show RELATIVE Thickness and PIP is improper to use to compare year to year.
Ibrahim, I am writing Obama AND asking Limbaugh to impeach him if he does not act. Garry Owen.
Just a clarification to Xi Chin and meemoe_uk: the area under the curves is the total area of ice, not the ice volume. That’s why it looks roughly constant, since it is pretty much equal to the area of the Arctic Ocean. What may confuse you is that the Y axis is not actually an area, but a kind of derivative of area wrt height. The ice at exactly 2m thick is not an area, it’s a set of contour lines.
To get the volume of ice you have to integrate y*x.dx.
Standard Deviations are not additive.
Variances are additive.
So, subtract 10 ±5 from 20±10 and you get
10 ± Sq Rt (5^2 + 10^2) or
10 ± Sq Rt (125) or
10 ± 11.18034
I have a supercomputer.
My PC has two Nvidia 9800 GT cards, ($80 each) which deliver over 600 GFlops. It would have been one of the world’s top supercomputers 15 years ago.
Currently, every basin in the Arctic, from the Barants Sea to the Bering Sea is showing some level of negative anomaly,
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.2.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.14.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.13.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.3.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.4.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.5.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.6.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.1.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.8.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.9.html
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.10.html
And as one poster pointed out, the month of May was one of the fastest early ice melts on record, judged by the steepness of this curve:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Despite what some seem to want to post here, Arctic temps have been running quite high:
http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/maproom/.Global/.Atm_Temp/Persistence.html
Ocean Heat content is running quite high:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Probably even higher than that graph shows as can be found here:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-169
The first 4 months of 2010 were the warmest on instrument record:
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2010/05/17/NOAA-January-April-2010-warmest-on-record/UPI-74281274125050/
And yet, Steve (who is obviously brilliant, and I mean it) is using very dubious data (and I mean it), to try and tell us that the volume of sea ice has grown over the past few years, when every other bit of data is saying the exact opposite, including the current data as gathered by Navy, and used by one of their own instructors, who gave a presentation just a few months back, saying the exact opposite of what Steve has said, as can be found here:
http://soa.arcus.org/sites/soa.arcus.org/files/sessions/1-1-advances-understanding-arctic-system-components/pdf/1-1-7-maslowski-wieslaw.pdf
Now I know AGW can find fault with all the data and sources I’ve presented, but added all together they tell the same story…and hence, Steve does have a lot riding on his forecast for this September, and if he’s right, the experts need to be fired and he put in their place…and if he’s wrong…there’s always next year…
Careful there, Gates, you’re gonna scare yourself:
“Currently, every basin in the Arctic, from the Barants [sic] Sea to the Bering Sea is showing some level of negative anomaly…”
As usual, not one word about the Antarctic. Hint: the Arctic is a region. The effects seen there are regional, not global. If you were ever to admit there’s an Antarctic, you could see that the its ice growth is greater than the Arctic decline. They’re polar opposites, see?
And what about the really basic question: how is CO2 causing a decline in Arctic ice, and an increase in Antarctic ice?
I find it very humorous the confidence exuded by those who think this year’s melt will be significant. Having been wrong two years in a row you’d think they would have some humility. Nope, not a bit. Same old references to the same old science that got it wrong both years.
Of course, just like the blind squirrel, they could find the nut this year, but most likely it would be due to weather and nothing else.