By Steven Goddard,
In order to better visualize what is happening in the Arctic this summer, I generated an animation of satellite photos over the area of open water west of Barrow, AK. It reveals a very dynamic ice edge – with the ice moving as it is blown around by winds associated with the Beaufort Gyre.
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/archive/mag/2010/mag_2010062200.gif
The region of ice in the video is shown in blue below.
Here is what I see.
- The ice edge is moving left to right about 10 miles per day.
- Ice is being torn off the main ice sheet north of Barrow.
- A large chunk of ice in the center of the open water (on June 18) moves northwest, crashes into the main mass of ice, and disintegrates.
- Little evidence of melting.
- The landfast ice is not showing any changes.
- Lakes are still frozen solid.
What do you see?
Reading some of the comments on here, the cultists seem to have a lot invested in the melting of the arctic ice cap this year. What are they going to do if it doesn’t meet their expections? Drink more cool aid?
@Ian H.
That “gyre” affect on the ice definitely crossed my two brain cells. I have seen these gyre vortices cut the most perfect hole in river ice. It makes one wonder if it is a heat transfer mechanism at the very edge of the gyre (Faster velocity = faster heat removal).
At least it will keep Steve out of 30 year trendlines 😉 Ouch!
(Just playing Steve, we all enjoy your investigations, just sometimes the opinion of “fair” are landmines.)
To Anu:
I see Arctic Sea Ice below average, Antarctic Sea Ice above average, Total Global Sea Ice virtually at average (for decades), and hence no signal for global climate change, only for regional climate change.
The total heat content of the oceans and the various oceanic oscillations are of sufficient magnitude to be the prime suspects for the regional changes seen.
KW
stevengoddard says:
June 25, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Phil,
You must have X-Ray vision – like Superman.
Another of those content-free responses that we have come to expect from you Steve, par for the course. You don’t need X-ray vision, you just need to open your eyes. It’s unfortunate for your propagandizing that the reality on the ground doesn’t match you spiel.
Phil says: “Another of those content-free responses…”
Here’s Phil’s complete response to Pamela Gray’s comment on the “Trend” thread @3:55 pm:
“Repeat it all you like you’re still wrong.”
Pot/kettle.
Ian H says:
What does `rotten’ mean anyway? Perhaps those using the term would like to explain what they mean. If the suggestion is that the ice is not as dense or mechanically strong as usual, then is there any core sample data to bear this out?
_________
Essentially that is correct, “rotten” ice is that is a mixture of older multi-year ice that has partially melted both from above and below, combined with newer less dense ice, that often has a “top glaze” on it, so from a satellite image, you might think you have continuous solid piece of ice that is all the same density and volume, when it fact you’ve got a weakened mixture of ice. A good and very recent video presentation on this, right from the team that studied this “rotten ice” over the past winter can be found here:
http://video.hint.no/mmt201v10/osc/?vid=55
I think at least some of the mystery of how supposedly this years 40% greater volume (according to Steve’s analysis, but other models such as PIOMAS strongly disagree) ice could be melting so fast this year can be found in the “rotten ice” scenario. There may be other factors as well, such as increased heat flux from the West Spitzbergen Current or just the warm temps the Arctic saw during the extreme negative AO from this past winter.
Also, in looking back at the sea ice extent charts (that Steve says we ought not look at until July), but let’s look at them anyway, we see that during this past winter, the sea ice extent was actually running very close to 2007’s level until the “bump up” in March/April. This bump up, which happened rapidly and was primarily concentrated in the Bering Sea and Sea of Okhotsk, was new and thin ice, which physics would tell us, because it came late in the season and was thin and not very dense, was bound to melt very fast. The March/April bump up led the sea ice extent to approach almost back to the long term average (and Steve made much of this and used sea ice extent graphs at the time to do so, though now we are told by him to ignore the extent graphs until next week), it was clear that what inflated so fast was bound to melt fast, and sure enough, we had the rapid melt of May and June, and here we are, getting ready to see what July brings.
Who is more correct? PIPS 2.0 or PIOMAS? How will the “rotten ice” respond, or is it really rotten anyway? What about the heat flux coming in from both the Atlantic and the Pacific side? How much is the ice being melted from below? And finally, how will those fickle winds and currents move the ice?
This is a such a wonderful time to be a cryo-nut! No matter what happens, it will be an interesting July-Sept period!
and yes, some direct “on the ice” data gathering last winter found much of the Arctic basin full
Phil,
Why do you waste so much of your highly valuable time responding to my “content free” posts?
stevengoddard,
As far as I can see, you are still yet to respond to my questions regarding the graphs that you posted on ice thickness and ice volume – you know, the graphs that indicate that current ice area is over 20 million square kilometres, something that is not possible. I had thought that you or I had made a simple error that could easily be corrected. If so, can you let me know what it is. Thanks. 🙂
Phil. says:
June 25, 2010 at 11:04 am
“Well you wouldn’t expect to except on the smallest fragments since you’re looking at flat sheets of ice with most of the area exposed on the top and bottom. The disintegration of that “large chunk of ice” shows how ‘rotten’ it really is.”
===============================
“Rotten” ?, Why rotten, the “large chunk of ice” was not solid, just a floating mass of ice. Fractured by wave/wind/collision with other ice floes, maybe, but “rotten?.
Define “rotten”.
Ian,
You asked “What does ‘rotten ice’ mean…?”. Where I grew up (Wisconsin), the term referred to the result of spring surface melt water on top of solid lake ice permeating the ice thickness along small fractures and flaws, resulting in an ice layer that is riddled with small through thickness melt holes. ‘Rotten ice’ or ‘honeycombed ice’ has little resistance to shear, bending, or compression loads and is easily fractured into slender icicles that make a wonderful glass-like tinkling sound when the wind and currents are giving it the Oster blender treatment!
When the lake ice started showing significant surface melting and the first indications of rotten ice (honeycombing) started to appear, ice fishing, ice boating, and skating were done!
26 June: Indian Express: War of words over glaciers: Jairam calls Gore ‘climate evangelist’
Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh is at loggerheads with an article (‘The Message from the Glaciers’ by Orville Schell) in the prestigious New York Review of Books which suggests that Ramesh and the Indian government are taking the issue of melting glaciers lightly.
Ramesh responded in a letter to the NYRB, saying there should be “less sermonising and sensationalising” on the Himalayan glaciers, calling Al Gore a ‘climate evangelist’, and adding that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was wrong on the glacier issue. ..
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/War-of-words-over–glaciers–Jairam-calls-Gore–climate-evangelist-/638523
It seems to me to be paradoxal to try to read anything into this week long clip. I looked up a map of Arctic SST’s and found this:
http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/sst/ophi/color_sst_NPS_ophi0.png
The current temps are at or below freezing, for fresh water, but probably above for the salt content. Then it dawned on me that where there is water it will of course be above freezing and where there ice it will be below. I know, Duh…. during the week of the clip I see ice moving out of the picture and ice moving into the picture, leaving the overall area about the same. The ice volume this year may indeed be below average, but so what? The “average” temperatures are really quite average, we’re coming off of an El Niño, and the ice is really active. I get a little perplexed when someone says “see, it’s proof of global warming”, when there just isn’t significant warming. Personally, I think that no matter what this year holds, we’re on our way to colder temps for the next couple of decades, but I can’t be sure…
stevengoddard,
Wow! You don’t trust NOAA now ?
Given your belief system, you might want to consider taking a vacation in October, to avoid the awkward questions and comments.
What is clear is that the Arctic and Antarctic are very different places. Both v.cold, but the North is ocean, the South is rock. The North has warm currents and wind shitting it; the South is surrounded by the “roaring forties” westerly winds that keeps most currents away from the ice land. The msot significant differentiator is that the North ocean is surrounded by land, while the southern pole is surrounded by water.
There’s all this talk of missing ice, or ice that is melted. Why are we sure it’s not still there, smaller in area but thicker? And if it’s gone then is that even a bad thing? That seems to me to be a lot of heat reduction taking place which in a so-called global warming world can’t be a bad thing. What else should polar ice caps do?
And I don’t see anything remarkable about the rate of change in the IARC-JAXA charts. The rate is pretty much what it is every year. The only significant thing I see is the timing, but nobody’s every claimed to be an expert on what time of year we should have this much ice, and how much ice there should be.
R. Gates says:
June 25, 2010 at 4:26 pm
That’s a lot of fuss just to prop up the idea that the Earth is headed for par-broiling, when the big picture is the switcheroo of climactic zones in the N. Hemisphere.
I’ll lend you a nickle so you can lay it on the table to see how much the oceans rose last year from catastrophic global warming.
David Gould
After you read all of my articles explaining how I measure the ice volume from PIPS maps, feel free to come back and ask questions. The explanations in those articles should help correct the error in your thinking.
Tom
The surface of sea ice is freshwater, because of snowfall and because the saltier ice tends to melt first.
Tom
This time of year, one week is a very long time. There are only going to be another eight or nine weeks potentially warm enough to melt ice north of 80N.
Anu
I ‘m fine with NOAA, I just don’t trust you.
I see a lot of clear skies over the Arctic in the satellite images (and surface photos linked). All that sun… I really do expect to break 2007’s record this year.
@kwik
Good point comparing arctic (floating) and antarctic (grounded) ice. One could also use Greenland in the latter or one could use the Antarctic Western Penninsula ice shelf for the former. It would end up the same.
Keep in mind the average temperature of the ocean isn’t much above ice water at about 40F. Only a relatively shallow surface layer is much warmer than that.
I wonder what the average ocean temperature was near the end of the last ice age when it had presumably been losing heat for 100,000 years. Another oddity in the ice age/interglacial oscillation is the slope of the ramps leading up and down. The warm-up period in the interglacial is pretty fast compared to the cool-down period. Morever, the glaciers rule for 100,000 years and the interglacial only lasts about 10-20,000 years.
One thing that can’t be denied (although the warmists appear to deny it) is that for the past many millions of years the “arctic ice cap” covers everything north of Virginia and stays that way year round with rather brief interludes where it retreats to where it is today. The conclusion is the earth is a planet struggling to become a giant snowball every 100,000 years and not quite getting there. Talking about purposely doing things to help it get colder is ignorant. Spending a significant fraction of global GDP to do isn’t ignorant it’s insane.
It is an official classification code for ice, used by the Army Corps of Engineers and local residents in areas where ice build up is common on waterways. It is a very weak ice structure that even though might be physically thick it has very little structural strength and low density due to changes in the crystal structure of the ice.
Rotten ice is described and pictured in this U.S. Army Corps of Engineers document, “OMNI ice codes” .
www2.mvr.usace.army.mil/WaterControl/Districts/MVR/presentations/OMNI_ICE_Manual.ppt
See slides 18 and 19
Larry
stevengoddard says:
June 25, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Phil,
Why do you waste so much of your highly valuable time responding to my “content free” posts?
The propaganda you produce needs rebutting in case anyone might be misled by it. Your response is usually a snarky remark and a complete failure to answer any questions, on other occasions you just run away and hide (like your failure to answer David Gould’s question about the arithmetic error above).
E.g.
David Gould says:
June 25, 2010 at 4:47 pm
stevengoddard,
As far as I can see, you are still yet to respond to my questions regarding the graphs that you posted on ice thickness and ice volume – you know, the graphs that indicate that current ice area is over 20 million square kilometres, something that is not possible. I had thought that you or I had made a simple error that could easily be corrected. If so, can you let me know what it is. Thanks. 🙂
Anu says on June 25, 2010 at 2:30 pm
“What do you see?”
I see a thin layer of warmth floating on a bucket of ice water struggling to stay warm through limited mixing with the icewater underneath. Evidently it doesn’t win the struggle for long as the ratio of glacial to interglacial periods is 10:1. Moreover I see that the current interglacial period is long in tooth and we should be figuring out how we’re going to eventually cope with glaciers covering Pennsylvania for 100,000 years.
I take it that isn’t what you see. Deny history much?