I wrote this nine days ago :
stevengoddard says:
June 28, 2010 at 10:16 pm
In three days, the slope of the Arctic extent graph will begin to drop off.
Mark it on your calendar.
Anyone who doubts the correctness of the PIPS based methodology I have been using, should take a look for themselves.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Close up below :
The modified NSIDC map below shows ice loss since the first of the month in red. Where’s Waldo?
The decline in the slope of the area graph is even more dramatic. Area is a better indicator of melt, because it is not affected as much by wind shifting the ice around.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Area.png
The graph below of average ice thickness shows that 2010 is starting to follow a path more like 2006 than 2007. In 2006 the ice thinned vertically, but did not compress much horizontally. In 2007 the winds compressed the ice horizontally, which led to lots of incorrect news coverage (to this day) that the Arctic was having a meltdown. The average ice thickness actually increased through the summer of 2007.
The video below shows how the winds have changed since earlier in the summer. The ice is no longer being compressed inwards, it is now being stretched outwards by cold northerly winds.
The NCEP forecast for the next two weeks is shown below. Temperatures generally running well below normal in the Arctic. Note – I color shifted the images and scale to make them easier to differentiate. This does not change their data in any way, it just makes it easier to understand.
Temperatures in the high Arctic have been below normal this summer, and in a few days will start their decline towards winter. In 50 days, they will drop below freezing, and remain there.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Meltwater ponds at the North Pole are starting to freeze over.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/webphotos/noaa1.jpg
Julienne from NSIDC wrote this yesterday :
I am not surprised that the rate of decline has slowed a bit during the last week. In the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, the ice has essentially melted back to the lobe of old ice that was transported there over the winter (under the negative AO phase). Thus, this is slowing the ice loss in this region. In the Kara Sea, temperatures have been colder than normal and the winds are causing ice divergence (also helping to slow loss of ice extent in that region).
This is the same point I raised questioning PIOMAS back in April.
The computer model is predicting that 3+ year old ice (which is probably in excess of 10 feet thick) is going to melt by early August. That seems rather far fetched. Below is an overlay of the NSIDC map and the U of W simulation for August 18. Note all the multi-year ice that needs to melt.
Like myself, Julienne has forecast 5.5 million km² for the summer minimum.
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2010/june
Not everyone at NSIDC agrees. Mark Serreze has been quoted as predicting a possible record low, like he does almost every year.
Mark Serreze of the center forecast the ice decline this year would even break 2007’s record.
Conclusion : There is nothing going on in the Arctic which hints of a repeat of 2007, other than the highly suspect PIOMAS graph.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrent.png
R. Gates says:
July 7, 2010 at 1:32 pm
You are guessing what Steve’s reaction will be (if he is wrong) , but earlier provided us some insight to what your reaction WILL be if you are wrong.
“But I think that you’re still missing the far bigger picture with the Arctic, though you’ve hinted at it in a sarcastic way, that nothing that will happen this year will change the longer term DOWNWARD trend in Arctic Sea ice, and yes, the NSIDC will, and must report this truthful fact later on this summer, whether we a get 4 million sq. km. minimum or a 6 million sq. km. minimum. As I stated on another post, we’d have to see the average minimum bounce back to the 7 to 8 million sq. km. range for several years for even a hint of any declaration that a real recovery is underway.”
I find two things in that post, humor and you having some doubt about your prediction. That is all. We all shall find out soon enough. And yes I view it as a contest, but only because of the way you post and how you respond to all of Steve’s posts.
You sure have not mentioned PIOMAS very much lately, I find that humerous as well, because you used to mention it in every other comment you made!!!
Steve, I have to admit I made a mistake in 2008. I wasn’t aware that the ice age data I was working with uses a 30% ice concentration threshold instead of a 15% threshold. I had incorrectly assumed that a 15% cutoff was used as it’s a standard used by many of us in the sea ice community. But the ice tracking algorithm apparently needs to use a higher threshold to keep track of the sea ice. Thus, my prediction in 2008 was for ice extent using a 30% cutoff, which is quite a bit less than an extent using a 15% cutoff.
A little help here; somebody check my math;
Working Just from eyeballing graphs; looks like ice volume on or about June 1 would have been roughly 10 million km^2 (Ice Area) x 2.55 m(ave thickness) to get 25.5 million km^3 of ice. (10,000,000 km ^2 = 10,000,000,000,000 m^2, times 2.55 m = 25,500,000,000,000 cubic meters = 25.5 million cubic km, I think that’s right, anyway back to our story)
Looking at the PIOMAS website for the average;
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/images/PIOMAS_daily_mean.png
It seems the average for 79-09 was about 25 million km^3 of ice. Where is there an anomoly?
Further; at current levels, we’re at 18.6 (7.75M km^2 x 2.4), vs an average (again this is just from eyeballing their graph) of 19.
There doesn’t appear to be an anomaly at all, unless I’m doing my math wrong.
Can anybody either tell me what’s wrong with my math or what they’re using for data and why it’s so different than what PIPS and AMSR-E appear to show.
(Maybe they’re working from extent instead of area?)
stevengoddard says:
July 7, 2010 at 1:53 pm
wayne
The NCEP map animation is a temperature anomaly forecast.
OK, I see the ‘ANOM’, rather blurred, went right by without my reading glasses.
But same question. If the anomaly is minus around the edges, compared to the center at the pole, will the tributaries tend to re-freeze first, whenever, as the minimum approaches? I could see that since deep currents would affect them less (but, the latitude is also less).
I haven’t been following this sea ice for multiple years so I have nothing upstairs on that matter. Thought you might remember from years past.
Gates, of course it’s a contest. Ever read biographies on scientists? Candace Pert has an excellent one out called “Molecules of Emotion”. Its pages are filled with the heady experience of competition among scientific circles. It reads like a “whodunit”. And while this is just my hobby, I take it seriously. Funny thing though, history is filled with the discoveries, wise council, and spot on understanding of our world attributed to hobbyists.
“long term down trend”
Imagine IF we had 250 years of satellite data. Would we see cycles? :o)
anecdotal suggests so.
I have confirmed that a Steven Goddard “pixel” is NOT a PIPS 2.0 pixel per these thickness images (pixel-metres SG quotes are NOT PIPS 2.0 pixel-metres);
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/ithi.html
I have confirmed that Steven Goddard is NOT cross-integrating the PIPS 2.0 thickness images with the PIPS 2.0 concentration images per these concentration images;
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/icon.html
I have confirmed that Steven Goddard’s ROI (Region Of Interest) has never been defined or explained anywhere on WUWT to date.
I have confirmed that PIPS 2.0 is meant to be used for navigation purposes only, and should not be used to make quantitative measurements of ice volume, as these will lead to extremely high biased volume estimates, given the conservative nature of thickness values, who’s sole purpose is to provide for safe transiting of submarines under said ice.
If we’re crowing about past predictions, about 2-3 weeks ago (cant remember the post, there have been so many ice ones) I said something like:
When school finishes in July, so will the Arctic melt
I based this on the observation that 2010 was taking a similar shape to 2006. (Joe Bastardi posted on that thread.)
We’ve now reached to point in the season where the trends start to diverge. Up to this point guessing where the extent will wind up based on the trends up to this time of year is exactly that, a guess.
You’ve gone too far this time with claims that melt water ponds are freezing over with just one image to back it up. You’re starting to sound like the mainstream media. Original poster said
“Meltwater ponds at the North Pole are starting to freeze over.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/webphotos/noaa1.jpg”
Really?
Or was it just snow filling it up? Here’s photo’s from the day before, that day when it snowed on the cherry picked 6th and the day after that, all from the other camera.
Sunny 5th
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2010/images/noaa2-2010-0705-074322.jpg
Snowy 6th
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2010/images/noaa2-2010-0706-073228.jpg
sunny 7th
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/npole/2010/images/noaa2-2010-0707-013805.jpg
Meltwater ponds do not start to freeze up in July, they get filled with snow that is all which quickly melts and then gets filled again till later in the year when they do refreeze over.
If you want to pack some punch with the big things, then don’t look silly with the little things.
Andy
EFS_Junior;
I can confirm that PIPS 2 has been underestimating ice concentration in its forecasts.
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/archive/retrievepic.html?filetype=Concentration&year=2010&month=7&day=6
Julienne says:
July 7, 2010 at 2:08 pm
Steve, I have to admit I made a mistake in 2008. I wasn’t aware that the ice age data I was working with uses a 30% ice concentration threshold instead of a 15% threshold. I had incorrectly assumed that a 15% cutoff was used as it’s a standard used by many of us in the sea ice community. But the ice tracking algorithm apparently needs to use a higher threshold to keep track of the sea ice. Thus, my prediction in 2008 was for ice extent using a 30% cutoff, which is quite a bit less than an extent using a 15% cutoff.
Sorry to jump in, that’s exactly why I kept harping on the “cutoff percentage” in past posts Julienne. This creates a rather ‘black hole’ in the maps and logic being applied by various data entities in this area of science. Especially when you bring in the aspects of wind reversals, as you have mentioned, this could end up being sizable. As long as the wind is pressing the ice against the edges, basically no affect occurs, however, when reversed, fragmented ice is blown out of the “cutoff” iso-lines. The ice is still there, it’s just suddenly no longer counted. In some aspects this could be seen as correct with caveats, on other aspects, this is incorrect and deems the data unusable.
Why is it so hard to just get the real ‘total’ sea ice data on a per cell basis? Who ever then used the data could form their own ‘cutoff’ point if it was deemed necessary. I can find no current data available, only historic up to 2008.
Some like me like to do the science, to understand and try to stay out of the way unless there should occur something that seems to add to the understanding, I just wish the data was more available in this area.
PS cookie for the spotter 😉
That’s quite a claim. I’ll believe it only when I hear from Lewis Pugh, the kayaker… I wonder if he’s set off yet?
R. Gates says:
July 7, 2010 at 1:01 pm
You are wrong to clump all skeptics together in thinking we wish for Snowball Earth to prove AGW wrong.
Nobody is prepared for that, as most govt’s have been listening to the steady drip, drip, drip of Catastrophic Meltdown Doom.
If the Earth is to cool a lot, I hope that it does so slow enough that mankind can adapt, and have enough time to throw off the oppressive yoke of the Anthropogenic Warming Guilt Trip.
We’ve much better things to be doing.
wayne says:
July 7, 2010 at 3:02 pm
“Why is it so hard to just get the real ‘total’ sea ice data on a per cell basis? Who ever then used the data could form their own ‘cutoff’ point if it was deemed necessary.”
Wayne, the 15% threshold as applied to passive microwave-derived ice extents came from comparison studies of the ice edge from passive microwave at 25km spatial resolution with higher resolution data from higher resolution visible data (i.e. AVHRR) and also radar (SAR) data.
If you want the real sea ice data on a per cell basis, all you have to do is go to NSIDC’s website and register for the data. After that they give you a link to the ftp site that contains the gridded data (which is not thresholded). To read the data, you read it as a binary formatted array of 304×448 (which is the polar stereo (PS) grid for the NH). If you want to convert to extents, you will also need to download the area per pixel file since the PS grid is not an equal area grid. You can get started here for the near-real time data access: http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0081.html (and you can then link to earlier data as well)
So it is not “Dropping. Like.A.Rock” anymore?
hmmmmm. Interesting.
Of course trending a straigh line down and saying “The End is Nigh” is not science.
We know there are cycles.
So the question is ; Have we reach the bottom of this cycle?
Bastardi is indicating the next winther will be very hard on the CAGW crowd;
http://www.accuweather.com/video/103968440001/major-cooling-on-the-way-worldwide.asp?channel=vbbastaj
And, unfortunately, also hard for those who has a hard time with the electricity bill already.
But who cares about them? Not the CAGW crowd, thats for sure.
AndyW says:
July 7, 2010 at 2:58 pm
Regarding refreezing melt ponds;
———————–
The pictures you show are from the other webcam. The instruments near the one Goddard was talking about show it below freezing and very cloudy for 15 straight hours. Why wouldn’t the ponds freeze?
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/PAWS_atmos_recent.html (newest at the top)
Still too soon to congratulate Steve G, but maybe I should put the champagne on “ice” and start the “ice”ing for the cake…
Pamela Gray says:
July 7, 2010 at 1:52 pm
“…Other measures, for example El Nino measures, use a much better analysis of data to suggest pending conditions and that purposely shy away from linear statistics, as these have proven to be poor predictors of possible pending changes in oscillating systems. And would you agree that the cryosphere is an oscillating system?”
_____________________________________________________________
Thank you Pamela, I think that is the “skeptic” point of view in a nut shell. Climate is an oscillating system with known cycles. – one with a period of about 88 years and the second with a period of about 200 years. not to mention all the long term Milankovitch cycles. Also identified are other 50-70 years fluctuations.
Nature just does not move in straight lines very often.
~ ~ ~ ~
Pamela Gray says:
July 7, 2010 at 1:52 pm
You know, Gates, regarding hollow compliments, eventually you might have to stop praising Steve for his short-term analysis being spot on, especially after a couple years of that. And I mean to say that you might have to change your oft repeated second half of your post regarding long term trends. If you pile up enough short term accurate assessments of continued ice health, it becomes a long term trend of continued ice health.
And surely you jest about ice being able to suddenly bounce back to some predetermined (by whom?) level of ice indicating rebound. Are you saying that it must do that in order to show rebound or are you willing to consider a slower return to previous levels?
Other measures, for example El Nino measures, use a much better analysis of data to suggest pending conditions and that purposely shy away from linear statistics, as these have proven to be poor predictors of possible pending changes in oscillating systems. And would you agree that the cryosphere is an oscillating system?
_______________
Pamela,
My praise of Steve is not hollow. I’ve called him brilliant on many occasions, and meant it, but I also think he uses that brilliance to carefully pick his cherries to prove his skeptical case against AGW. I’ve only been on WUWT for far less than a year, so if Steve’s forecasts continue to prove accurate in the long term, then he shall gain more and more of my appreciation for his skill. When he et. al were crowing about the March-April “bump up”, and I cautioned that what goes up that fast in Arctic ice late in the season, would also come down just as fast, and when it did come crashing back I don’t recall him giving me any credit, but instead, he shifted over to his PIPS 2.0 thickness data, and lord knows, we all got pretty PIP’d out over that.
The level of rebound in Arctic to necessary to consider it a true recovery is something I’ve brought up many times. Arctic sea ice is in a long term decline, and has been for decades. Julienne’s excellent graph, referenced in my last post displays that quite well. 2007 was a shocker for everyone. No GCM’ predicted it, nor could they as it was the result of anomalous meridonal winds (aka the Arctic Dipole Anomaly). This anomaly, which has been growing in frequency and intensity for a decade or more first started appearing with more regularity about the time that the actual Arctic Sea ice extent started diverging from the GCM’s. This shift in the rate of melt in the Arctic is exactly what would be predicted by a chaotic system that has reached some sort of tipping point and is suddenly found a new attractor. Chaotic, unpredictable, and completely deterministic.
So back to the point of what a “recovery” would mean. If you look at the long term summer minimum, (from Julienne’s chart) you’ll see that a true long term recovery back to a point that we are not seeing a long term decline would put us somewhere around 7 or 8 million sq. km. for the summer minimum. We could certainly build back up to that, maybe going to it over a period of a few years, and I would think that would be what AGW skeptics are looking for…and being a 25% skeptic, it would be what I would be looking for. On the other side of the coin, I’ve said since March that the minimum would be somewhere between 2008’s low and 2007’s low, which put’s it about 4.5 million sq. km. this year. My long term forecast shows the DA intensifying it’s grip on the Arctic, as it goes from an anomaly to a regular feature (it’s getting very close now).
And yes, the Arctic is an oscillating system, with short, long, and medium term variations, (these are really oscillating chaotic attractors) but I happen to think that the 30% increase in CO2 added since the industrial revolution is significant enough to disrupt these natural variations, and the Dipole anomaly is one example of a new oscillating chaotic attractor being added to disrupt the other patterns. Such is the nature of a chaotic system. And as CO2 continues to increase, there is bound to be other chaotic attractors besides the DA that will arise, with some final new equilibrium point (which can be a final set of oscillating chaotic attractors) not to be found until the growth in CO2 ceases.
AndyW says:
July 7, 2010 at 2:58 pm
Andy, why is it “going to far” indicating that some pond on the pole is frozen?
So when air temp is below zero it freeze, and above, it melts?
So another day its melted? up-down-up-down….soon it will be down,down down.
Is it that important to you? Why?
AndyW,
Your communication style is remarkably abrasive.
When temperatures get below freezing, water freezes. You can see a layer of thin ice on the surface of the melt ponds.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/webphotos/noaa1.jpg
Also, frost often forms on the ground even when the air temperature above is several degrees above freezing.
Enneagram says:
July 7, 2010 at 1:59 pm
BTW:
according to a recent press release from the the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), the thermosphere has experienced a tenfold decline in temperature since 2002.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/00current.htm
__________________________________________________
That jives with the height of the atmosphere contracting.
“…A 12-year low in solar “irradiance”: Careful measurements by several NASA spacecraft show that the sun’s brightness has dropped by 0.02% at visible wavelengths and 6% at extreme UV wavelengths since the solar minimum of 1996. The changes so far are not enough to reverse the course of global warming, but there are some other significant side-effects: Earth’s upper atmosphere is heated less by the sun and it is therefore less “puffed up.” Satellites in low Earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag, extending their operational lifetimes….” http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/01apr_deepsolarminimum/
stevengoddard says:
July 7, 2010 at 3:40 pm
AndyW,
Your communication style is remarkably abrasive.
————–
People get that way when you poke holes in their religion