By Steven Goddard,
In my last post, we discussed how there has been no visible change in the landfast ice near Barrow, AK. during the last week.
The University of Alaska has been tracking breakup of this ice for the past decade. The latest breakup was July 11 which occurred last year. The earliest breakup occurred in 2004 on June 16. They have devised a model which forecasts the breakup, based on solar radiation already received and forecast into the future by NCAR’s WRF weather model. Their current forecast has it breaking up after July 10, which would at a minimum tie the record.
http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_breakup
The current WRF forecast is predicting very cloudy conditions near Barrow through mid-July.
http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_breakup/Barrow_SW.png
Temperatures in Barrow have been running well below normal this summer.
http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/PABR/2010/6/25/MonthlyHistory.html#calendar
This has been largely due to cloudiness. The current view of Barrow is seen below.
http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_webcam
Long term weather forecasts change all the time. But for those of you expecting a big melt this summer, I hope you didn’t bet a lot of money on it.
Roald
Robbed or not, Germany dominated the match. Rooney looked like he was asleep for most of the last two weeks.
Gail Combs wrote:
“In all cases 2010 is show to be pretty much a solid block of ice compared to a bunch of ice bergs floating in the sea around the edges for the other years. I do not know if this is “true data” or an artifact.”
____________
You can be pretty assured it is at artifact. There are very few “solid blocks of ice” as in large expanses in the Arctic right now. This map shows it well:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
There is some the Arctic basin, NE of Greenland, and a bit more near the E. Siberian sea, but overall, we’ve got a lot of melt ponds working down into broken and rotten ice from last year. So far, the melt is very closely following the model proejection set out by the PIOMAS model, as one can observe here:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/IDAO/seasonal_outlook.html
But one needs to also look at Dr. Zhang’s assoicates web site and prediction (also based on PIOMAS, but also takes into account early seasson low sea ice exents in the Barants Sea, Beaufort Sea, and Kara Sea, which is of course exactlly what we saw this year, and he’s shown there to be high correlation between the early season extent in these areas, and the final extent. This is a great page to view, here:
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/lindsay/September_ice_extent.html
R. Gates says:
June 27, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Gail Combs wrote:
“In all cases 2010 is show to be pretty much a solid block of ice compared to a bunch of ice bergs floating in the sea around the edges for the other years. I do not know if this is “true data” or an artifact.”
___________
You can be pretty assured it is at artifact. There are very few “solid blocks of ice” as in large expanses in the Arctic right now. This map shows it well:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
You and others arguing for a record melt this year, are making a truly gigantic effort to ignore the data posted at Cryosphere Today. Do you consider the Cryosphere Today (“CT”) data wrong? If so, why, on what evidence (other than asking us to “be assured” – we’re not).
O yes I remember now, its because the CT concentration data varies so much from day to day that it cant be relied on. So I checked this, choosing the month of June for 2 year-year comparisons, 2010-2000 and 2010-2006. I looked at every day in these 2 June comparisons. Sure, there was significant day to day variation. But there was not a single day in either June comparison when the ratio of much higher sea ice concentration in 2010 than the other year was altered. Even parity between the year pairs was never approached.
We need to understand the difference between a single value and the ratio of two values. You argue for this highly consistent difference in concentration between years to be an artifact, by showing a single image from one year only at higher resolution. Elevated resolution does not make up for there being no comparator, no reference, no control. Remember, when you are talking about comparisons, errors associated with limited resolution have a tendency to come out in the wash.
2006 is an interesting comparison – according to the AMSR-E sea ice graphs shown here on WUWT, 2010 is tracking approximately parallel with 2006 only lower. 2006 continued lowest of all measured years till sometime in early July when it started cutting across the other years and ended up at the September minimum among the highest extents of the decade. If 2010 has higher concentration than 2006, why could it not follow a similar path?
phlogiston,
In looking at the comparison charts on the cryosphere today web site, check the version on the main page. If you punch in the most recent data into the comparison page and compare the image that comes up with the image on the main page, you will see that they are very different. Which is right? Well, I tend to think that the main page version is the one that is correct – I think that there are resolution issues with the version in the comparison dataset. This makes it hard to make a comparison using these images, unfortunately.
I also ask this queston regarding those comparison images: how credible is it that the ice in 1980 was in a worse condition than the ice of today? Not very.
Compared the June 26 2007-to-2010 & Cryosphere and ijis/AMSR-E.
CRYO (both) http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=06&fd=26&fy=2007&sm=06&sd=26&sy=2010
Jun 26, 2007
Jun 26, 2010
— WHY does Cryosphere 2010 show so much less Open Water off Russia than the other 3 ?
To be clear, look at the image on the right:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=06&fd=26&fy=1980&sm=06&sd=26&sy=2010
and compare it with this image:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
The differences are fairly obvious.
stevengoddard says:
June 26, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Phil,
You are really turning into a comedian. I particularly liked this one.
“Last year the yachts entered the NW Passage from the west before the first icebreaker.”
Glad you liked it, I guess fact is stranger than fiction sometimes!
FWIW, here in California we are having a generally cooler and cloudier than “usual” spring / early summer.
My take on it all is that we are in Lava Lamp World, and California is under a cold blob sinking back toward the equator (thus the cool and overcast) while the east coast is under a hot blob moving north (to radiate away all the accumulated heat via an open window in the Ozone part of the spectrum – as the UV from a quiet sun as dropped a lot, and thus the UV window blocked by ozone has less ozone to ‘do the deed’… )
So in about 5 years we ought to start noticing the impact of all this loss of heat in the world temperature averages (until then, it’s just the vast ocean heat sink keeping things more or less constant as the heat leaves from the poles, modulo a few snowy coasts in the South of France and a generally cold England… )
So we likely have a few more years of endless bickering with the Global Warming folks until the heat balance has shifted enough that it’s clear in Lava Lamp World that things have been cooling since 1998. But it takes time. And folks are not good and realizing that in geologic time, a century is nothing and a decade is not even on the clock…
But I’m pretty sure we’ll see the result in total snowfall numbers and ice formation long before we see it in temperature. After all, first you form a LOT of ice (at 32 F or 0 C ) before the temperature changes…
David Gould says:
June 27, 2010 at 7:42 pm
To be clear, look at the image on the right:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=06&fd=26&fy=1980&sm=06&sd=26&sy=2010
and compare it with this image:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
The differences are fairly obvious.
___________________________________________________________
The differences are obvious, and I’ve emailed CT asking for an explanation.
You’ll also notice that the black hole at the NP is filled in and that some sort of “smearing” is done in addition to just filling in th NP hole. It’s like the NP is the hub of a many spoked wheel, as you can see a radial orientation to this “smearing.”
See also;
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/ (which has all the imagery in different files/folders
And see;
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/ANIMATE.ARCTIC.0/
Which is a directory of medium sized images (must be scaled down from the daily high resolution file, but I can’t find the originals anywhere in the above file structure) showing the NP black hole and most of the detail of the original high resolution daily colored imagery. Note these medium sized files go back ~2 years, however the color scale was changed, to the current one, in March of 2009.
Oops, the last link above are the “smeared” imagery, not the “unsmeared” medium sized color inages which are here;
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/NEWANIM.ARCTIC.0/
3rd times a charm?
Also if you look at the “smeared” versus the “unsmeared” you’ll notice less open ice areas for the “smeared” imagery. The open water areas/boundaries in the “unsmeared” imagery look much more similar to the JAXA daily imagery.
So for the moment, I must give the “unsmeared” imagery more weight, in terms of an accurate representation of the actual sea ice concentration and open water areas.
Fudge.
“less open ice areas” should be “less open water areas” in the 1st paragraph.
Those looking at Cryosphere Today (“CT”) maps need to be aware that the scales on the side-by-side comparison page (70% = light purple) is not the same scale as what appears to be a higher resolution on the main page (70% = bright green)!
The color scales are totally different so it can make the map on the main page to appear to have less ice.
“”” norah4you says:
June 26, 2010 at 8:07 am
Well well. Had they only been up to date up to 2000 with education-documentaries for students in ordinary school age 14-16, which of course their teachers must have missed to show in their classes. Or had didn’t they attend class?
Eitherwhich. I am 61 years old and when we back in late 50′s and early 60′s were shown 8-mm films regarding the Ice breakups in Arctic, the now told story was what was told back then. When my diseased father, born 1915, studied what we call ‘Naturlära’ = Science of Nature their books from 1920′s contain same information.
Well norah4you; your post reminds me also of annual celebration of such an event; pretty much the way Americans today celebrate “Groundhog Day.” The “Annual Ice Breakup. ” But for the life of me, I can’t recall; just where that event was supposed to take place. Of course today, there are all kinds of visited calving glaciers and places; so I have no idea where the big event was supposed to happen.
And not meaning any ill will to your family; either living or dearly departed; I assume when you said:- “”” When my diseased father, born 1915, “”” That you were not reporting on some family pestilence; but intended to say ” deceased” rather than “diseased”.
And that is offered to be helpful; not critical; I can assure you that my “Swedish” is about as extensive as my “Sanskrit.”
George
R. Gates says:June 26, 2010 at 8:55 am
Steve,
If any posting of your would cause me to loose all repect for your scientific objectivity and honesty, this would be it.
ROFLMAO!
Gates, all pedantic rantings of yours give warmers everywhere the opportunity to lose all repect.
Moderator: I intentionally misspelled words in my previous post to duplicate Gates original post. It doesn’t bother me that you corrected them, I just wanted you to know it was intentional so your wouldn’t loose repect for me. ;~P
George,
I do have spelling problems when writing. That and my problems with the grammar is my dyslectic problem no matter which language I use writing…. Not the same when speaking nor when reading. But if two words looks alike or sounds alike – I do have problems.
Anyhow here is a link to one page in one of my bloggs: Environment, Norah4history
R. Gates says:
June 26, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Keith G said: (about Steve Goddard)
“You make a lot of sense to a layman…”
_______________
That’s why people with a little more knowledge must come here to actually give the facts, versus a bit o’ cherry picked data…
*************************************
R. Gates, from your answer you are presumably a climate scientist. Why not ask Anthony to allow you to guest-post some kind of thesis or engage in an on-line debate? He is certainly more open to debate and differing attitudes than many blogs. Lots of people have their minds made up on either side, but many would also welcome some kind of reasonable debate.
You would also have a much better chance of convincing a skeptical public of your views. The current system of arranging apocalyptic articles in newspapers and popular magazines is not working. A layman like myself reads the article below and is struck by the fact that it was apparently warmer during the Bronze Age and Roman era in the Alps, and that the current retreat of glaciers may just be some kind of correction to these past times. This is a “worrying fact” to the scientist quoted in the article. There are other silly articles I could post, this is just one of my favorites.
http://www.swisster.ch/news/education-health/swiss-glacier-melt-reveals-secrets-past.html
Despite my lack of scientific training, don’t dismiss my opinion, because it is honed in one area. And that is being able to detect b.s. Why AGW strikes me as b.s.:
1) We are being asked to completely revise our way of living, to ward off impending disaster. The United Nations is taking the lead. Heard that one, during the Cold War.
2) This is going to be very expensive. Spend money now, the end is near. Heard that one, during the Y2K scam.
3) The key spokesperson for AGW, Al Gore, is tainted. His soon-to-be ex-wife was a key player in the Parents Music Resource Center. With Al’s career so important to the two of them, this was either with his permission or at his request. PMRC had the worst kind of junk science, including mind control through “backward masking”. They even compiled a sort of worst offenders (enemies list?) that included Cyndi Lauper and Sheena Easton. This went on for years!
4) All of this is being supported by an absolute swarm of scare stories, each one trying to top the other, with no one questioning the basic premise. Heard that before, it was the WMD ramp-up to the Second Gulf War.
5) Those who question AGW have had veiled and not-so-veiled threats of prosecution made against them. More memories of the Cold War.
6) There is a lot of money to be had in the battle to control AGW. There are subsidies for green energy, and all stripes are going along for the goodies. I think much of the cooperation of unions, manufacturers, insurance companies, etc is a way to eliminate competition. They are just jockeying for the best seat at a new table. This sort of money (cap and trade, government subsidies for green energy) is a big inducement for everyone to just go along with the story.
7) The behavior of those who advocate it the most does NOT mesh with the behavior of someone who actually believes we are approaching a tipping point. I mean, if we were all about to enter an era of mass extinctions, wouldn’t Al Gore have a smaller, more energy efficient house? Wouldn’t some government somewhere build dykes around their low-lying cities? Or ban construction along the coast? Wouldn’t one country ditch fossil fuels just to shame everyone else into it? Ban airplanes except in emergencies? Tax vehicles in an effort to get everyone onto busses? To repeat, we are supposedly rapidly approaching a tipping point. If millions or billions of people are going to die, then no cost is too great. But I can’t think of ONE example of anything more than minor concessions to keep the story alive.
So, I’d love for someone to enlighten me. Right now I’m in the skeptic camp for the reasons listed above. If we are all about to die, though, I could quickly become an AGW fanatic. I have three young children who I’d love to see have grandkids some day. So those who support AGW, please prepare coherent arguments that rebut, line by line, the many skeptical questions posed. Millions/billions of lives are at stake if you are right, and they are going to die unless you convince the public to go along with you. Also, trillions of dollars are going to be needlessly poured into the public trough if you are wrong…the quicker we get this resolved the less will go into the trough.
“”” norah4you says:
June 28, 2010 at 1:40 pm
George,
I do have spelling problems when writing. That and my problems with the grammar is my dyslectic problem no matter which language I use writing…. Not the same when speaking nor when reading. But if two words looks alike or sounds alike – I do have problems.
Anyhow here is a link to one page in one of my bloggs: Environment, Norah4history “””
Well Norah4you; here we are about communication; not verbal asphyxiation so however you can spit it out works for me. I have a mechanical typing dylsexia myself where I flip pairs of letters; including space bars; so “this, and that” invariably comes out as “this,a nd that”, and for some reason “the” often ends up as “teh”.
I actually had a very interesting experience once with a very pretty young lady who came right from the heart of Communist Red China in Beijing, and had only been in the USA for three years, and was never in any class in the USA. She spoke English with virtually NO detectable Oriental accent; and she worked for our IT and support department. I had a problem with some Micro$oft program, and she was sent to help me fix it; which she did. A few days later I got an e-mail from her asking if everything was OK. It was, so I didn’t reply. But I noticed that her e-mail was “interesting reading”.
A week later we met going into the cafeteria for lunch, and she asked why I hadn’t responded to her e-mail. I told her that everything was ok and I didn’t want to bother her; then I jokingly added; that her e-mail read like a “Japanese Transistor Radio manual.”
She looked at me quizzically, and asked me what that meant. So I explained that a lot of ESL folks did tend to write English that showed it wasn’t their native tongue, and was a bit avant garde in the translation. As soon as she got the message; she smiled; and then after a couple of seconds, she said; well George; why don’t you fix it up for me and send it back; she thought for another few seconds, then added:- Why don’t I put you on my mailing list, so I can send you anything that isn’t personal so you can correct it for me. ”
So I told her:- “here’s the deal; I’m not going to edit it for you; you will have to send it out cold turkey. But I will look at it when I get a chance and make suggestions or corrections; but if you don’t learn it, then I won’t be correcting it for you.”
So she did just that; and I would suggest spelling or word changes; different sentence construction etc, and send it back to her.
We did that for about a year; and as far as I can recall; she never ever repeated a “mistake”, once I had offered corrections; and our communications petered out for lack of errors on her part.
You won’t believe the biggest problem I had to fix with her English. She spoke, and wrote British English with all the “harbour” spellings, and the like; and I had to tell her:- Mary; this is NOT incorrect; but it is NOT American; so if you don’t change it, it will still read like a Japanese Transistor Radio Manual. Mary of course is not her real name; her mother was a famous Chinese Stage Actress; and she was a delight to teach. I later attended her wedding to an Engineer, and won the privilege of having the first dance with the new bride.
Language is strange.
I’m not surprised that people who are multi-lingual have problems with grammatical construction, since that seems to vary quite a bit from one language to another. I’m either lucky, or unlucky, in that English is the only language I speak; although I am making an effort to learn some Maori.
George
Steve’s post: 06/26/2010.
The following image: 6/27/2010, presumably at 04:15 local time Point Barrow
Shore Ice Cam
Enough said.
There’s even less left today. (Yeah, there’s probably still shorefast ice off to the right of the camera view, but the “one day later” aspect of this is just hilarious.)
David Gould says:
June 27, 2010 at 7:01 pm
phlogiston,
In looking at the comparison charts on the cryosphere today web site, check the version on the main page. If you punch in the most recent data into the comparison page and compare the image that comes up with the image on the main page, you will see that they are very different. Which is right? Well, I tend to think that the main page version is the one that is correct – I think that there are resolution issues with the version in the comparison dataset. This makes it hard to make a comparison using these images, unfortunately.
I also ask this queston regarding those comparison images: how credible is it that the ice in 1980 was in a worse condition than the ice of today? Not very.
Resolution is a red herring raised repeatedly in this context. Sea ice in common with very many natural structures has fractal pattern so that the ability to visualise and qualtify differences between satellite images of the ice (please note emphasis on differences, not absolute values) is, in practice as has been demonstrated in may imaging studies, surprisingly well preserved with degraded resolution. Loss of resolution does NOT necessarily mean loss of ability to detect differences in a general quantitative parameter e.g. amount or concentration of ice. Structures are self-similar over a range of spatial scales.
Again the Cryosphere Today shows abnormally high ice concentration (likely correlated with thickness) currently in the Arctic ice, compared to most other recent years. If there is a reason why this image data is wrong then “please declare it now or forever hold your peace” (but it’s not resolution).
Fortunately for Steve the Barrow site was down over the weekend otherwise his comments would have almost immediately contradicted since the fast ice at Barrow broke up over the weekend. As I mentioned just before the site went down it was showing ice free off the beach (25th at 19:22) with a boat in close to shore, in the fog the only ice visible is to the northeast.
http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn107/Sprintstar400/ABCam.jpg
Now the fog is gone and a remnant of the fast ice can be seen drifting offshore:
http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn107/Sprintstar400/ABCam-1.jpg
Contrary to Steve’s claim that nothing was happening to the ice if you look at the radar over the last few days you can see small pieces breaking off until about the morning of the 25th when it totally disintegrated and blew offshore. Steve expects the fast ice to the northeast to hang around for another two weeks, doesn’t seem very likely.
http://ak.aoos.org/data/ice/radar/BRWICE/staging/radar/SIRwebanim_more.gif
phlogiston says:
June 28, 2010 at 6:11 pm
Again the Cryosphere Today shows abnormally high ice concentration (likely correlated with thickness) currently in the Arctic ice, compared to most other recent years. If there is a reason why this image data is wrong then “please declare it now or forever hold your peace” (but it’s not resolution).
As I and others have pointed out the comparator does not give a fair comparison with the images taken since the change in imager necessitated by the failure of the SSMI imager about a year ago.
Phil. says:
June 28, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Thanks. I thought the displayed high concentration seemed a little “too good to be true” from a skeptic point of view. Is there a consistent jump up in concentration in all months after this sensor replacement? I guess they would at least have tried to calibrate it to give results similar to the previous sensor (while it was working). In the coming months we will see how successful or otherwise they were. Was it faulty all the way back to 1990?
phlogiston says:
June 29, 2010 at 1:47 am
Phil. says:
June 28, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Thanks. I thought the displayed high concentration seemed a little “too good to be true” from a skeptic point of view. Is there a consistent jump up in concentration in all months after this sensor replacement? I guess they would at least have tried to calibrate it to give results similar to the previous sensor (while it was working). In the coming months we will see how successful or otherwise they were. Was it faulty all the way back to 1990?
The failure of the SSMI sensor that CT was using (and others such as NSIDC) became apparent early in 2009 (it was discussed on here at the time). CT stopped using that data and switched to the JAXA data which is what they show on there current front page. They developed an algorithm to produce a rescaled image for the comparator, most of 2009 is in fact missing. The impression is that the images since the changeover don’t have quite the same color palette. For recent years if you want to make a comparison it’s probably safer to use the JAXA archive, e.g. today’s map:
http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_nic.png
2007:
http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsredata/asi_daygrid_swath/l1a/n6250/2007/jun/asi-n6250-20070628-v5_nic.png
In that case you’re comparing like with like, the impression would be that today’s Arctic basin is at a lower concentration than on the same date in 2007. There’s a reason why Steve continues to use the comparator images for his posts rather than use the full resolution images!