While everyone seems to be watching the Arctic extent with intense interest, it’s bipolar twin continues to make enough ice to keep the global sea ice balance near normal. These images from Cryosphere today provide the details. You won’t see any mention of this in the media. Google News returns no stories about Antarctic Sea Ice Extent.
Here’s the graph, see for yourself.
Here’s global sea ice:
click image to enlarge
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When December arrives in the N. Hemisphere, this is what to expect.
The stage is set for another round of ‘not to be outdone’ hopscotch effect.
As it happens, there is one article on Google news:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10450425.stm
Looks like we’ll be getting more accurate ice meaurements soon from this satellite. Their interpretation will probably be another matter altogether!
The mainstream media just rubs me the wrong way.
The Antarctic sea ice hasn’t peaked yet and it isn’t close to the record extent. However the sea ice anomoly is current the 3rd highest recorded. Antarctic sea ice typically peaks in September about 3 million km2 higher than it is currently.
I have to ask a question: Why is it, that in the top graph the trend appears to increase, where as the lower graphs the trend appears to be decreasing?
Weird …
The stability of the global ice is quite astounding.
Given that the area covered fluctuates by more than a third each year, from about 15 million to about 23 million sq km, it is surprising that the deviation from the recorded average is plus or minus 2 million sq km at the outside. If the expectations of the climate models that indicate maximum impact in the polar regions are correct, the lack of trend n the global ice coverage suggests modest impact to date.
899:
The top graph is southern hemisphere sea ice. The bottom graph is global sea ice.
So why the dodging of the arctic sea ice extent/volume.
Nice try at forcing focus away from anything that does not suite your agenda.
BTW how is your temperature station project going?
will we see results soon?
Haven’t updated this in a few weeks
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/seaice.anomaly.Ant_arctic.jpg
but it sure tells the story.
rbateman says:
July 3, 2010 at 8:39 pm
====================
I bookmarked that one, Robert….thanks.
It damn sure DOES tell the story.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Harvey – it might be because that’s the subject of several other posts over the last month and more, whereas this post is about the other end of the planet, as hinted at in the title. Nice troll though.
This rbateman graph poses a question that already crossed through my mind several times. The short term variation of ice from both poles seem to be linked in opposite directions. When the anomaly of one goes up the other one goes down. There’s some mechanism here that it’s not fully understood. For me it’s some astronomical effect related with short term tilt and precession variations of earth’s axis.
Trying to click on images but they do not enlarge.
harvey says:
July 3, 2010 at 8:39 pm
“So why the dodging of the arctic sea ice extent/volume.
Nice try at forcing focus away from anything that does not suite your agenda.
BTW how is your temperature station project going?
will we see results soon?”
This site has been covering arctic sea ice extent/volume all along.
Are there any reliable measurements of Earths’s nutation? Nutation is a very complex mechanism if conjugated with earth’s internal mass distribution. Surely even slight variations of earths nutation can make some influence, among dozens of other factors, in polar sea ice.
You can observe nutation simulation here. Now imagine that the investigator’s hand acts (in a figured way, of course) as the Moon and Sun conjugated gravity drag…
Sorry, here’s the link that is missing into my last post
June monthly data is out and the Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Anomaly is the highest on record for the month of June:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot_hires.png
This offers a good visualization of the current extent and anomaly:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_bm_extent_hires.png
Julienne pointed out in an earlier thread that this might have something to so with the Antarctic Oscillation (AAO), which has been in a strong positive state since mid-May;
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/aao/aao_index.html
Here is some background on the AAO:
http://fp.arizona.edu/kkh/climate/PPT-PDFs-09/indices/AAOReport.pdf
http://www.ecmwf.int/newsevents/meetings/annual_seminar/2006/Presentations/Wallace.pdf
This version of the chart above includes a cross section of the Polar Vortex;
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/hgt.aao.shtml
and here is some background on the Polar Vortex:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex
Here’s are several good visualizations of the AAO and its interrelation with the Polar Vortex;
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/z200anim.shtml
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/z500_sh_anim.shtml
http://www.cfm.brown.edu/people/sean/Vortex/
There seems to be some interrelation between the AAO and the ending El Nino (ENSO) per page two of this article;
http://www.earthgauge.net/wp-content/fact_sheets/CF_Antarctica.pdf
but my only conclusion thus far it that Earth’s climate system is absurdly complex…
Dear Harvey,
Perhaps you may not realise the nature of this blog I fear. WUWT is a science blog that deals with the whole planet including the North and South poles and everything in between.
By my count the number of of posts regarding the Northern polar region have been quite numerous and the Antarctic few. The story about the Southern polar region is interesting to say the least, at least to some. The NPR is certainly interesting but it isn’t telling us the whole story about global sea ice, is it?
I fully realise that the SPR is a very uncomfortable subject for some right now and they would rather concentrate on variables that may support a certain narrative.
It’s obvious by now that the polar regions do not opperate in isolation but are somehow linked, the question has to be asked and the evidence looked at, or this blog would simply be just another ‘real climate’ blog peddling a set narrative and excluding dissident voices.
The Arctic situation is highly fluid, the melt season is by no means certain and no amount of wishful thinking will make it so, let’s wait and see what the next months bring, but in the meantime let’s cast our eyes over the bigger picture.
Interesting that the 2008 record didn’t rate a mention in the MSM yet at the time the bed was very wet from arctic ice melt.
Anthony,
Lovely to catch with you in Surfers Paradise and thanks for your great work.
Ignoring, conveniently that this is exactly as the AGW theory predicts…
spangled drongo says:
July 3, 2010 at 9:41 pm
Interesting that the 2008 record didn’t rate a mention in the MSM yet at the time the bed was very wet from arctic ice melt.
What record?
http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/ice_ext_s.png
Interesting choice of title, it’s obviously not true though.
The Artic and Antarctic (besides being at the exteme latitudes of the planet) are vastly different systems. One is sea ice that surrounds a continent and is fully open to multiple oceans, and the other is an ocean surrounded by continents with only a few access points to other oceans. More importantly, Antarctic sea ice has a far less of an impact on our N. Hemisphere weather. Also, while we have seen a general increase in year-to-year amounts in the Antarctic, we have also seen plenty of negative anomalies over the past 6 years:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
But in the Arctic, we’ve not seen any positive anomalies since 2004 (though we came very close to at least to even this spring during the great “bump up”:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
Some of you also ought to read this excellent study for why Antarctic sea ice might increase under AGW: (and it’s got nothing to do with the thinning ozone)
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/Pubs/Zhang_Antarctic_20-11-2515.pdf
Also, it should be pointed out that because of the large heat sink of the southern Pacific ocean, AGW climate models have long showed that the Antarctic will display far less effects (initially) from any forcings from CO2. This is simple physics, but for some reason, the AGW skeptics love to simply ignore it. Whereas in the N. Hemisphere, with the Arctic Ocean being surrounded by land, there is no real heat sink, and so any warming will be amplified. Again, this has long been forecast by AGW models, but once more, the uninformed or perhaps intentionally ignorant skeptic (and I am NOT referring to Anthony here) always wants to point to the Antarctic as proof that AGW models are garbage, when in fact, the general trends of the Arctic and Antarctic and not out of line with many AGW models.
Having said that, it is unfortunate that the main stream press doesn’t take a more active interest in the southern sea ice, even though it is not rising in as a dramatic fashion as the the nothern sea ice is declining, is is still worth a mention now and then, and though there may be very few journalists up to the task, it would be nice to see some general education by the main stream press as to the very big differences in the dynamics of southern versus nothern sea ice.
Seems we have seen that the northern polar winds move the polar ice sheet. Thus, and as we have observed, depending on the prevailing wind circumstance, north pole ice can be moved allowing for open water to be exposed. This gives the impression that there is less ice, when in fact the may just be piling up as we see in rivers and lakes. This is not the case for antartic ice. The prevailing winds may change where the ice becomes thicker or thinner; however the winds will not move the antartic ice off the land as we see the ice move about the sea in artic regions.
harvey says: July 3, 2010 at 8:39 pm
. . . BTW how is your temperature station project going? will we see results soon?
We’re still waiting to get a survey of Indianola, Iowa.
Perhaps you could oblige us.