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
Pamela Gray says:
July 7, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Gates, of course it’s a contest. Ever read biographies on scientists?
Then there is the competition that went on to be the first to photograph stars during an eclipse of the sun to find proof of Einstein’s General Relativity. It was nail biting for those involved. Sleepless nights staring at the photos. And there was dread of being the one wrong.
Steven G
I like Holland.
Julienne said:
“The NCAR CCSM3 climate model performs best overall relative to the observational record, and this model shows evidence of rapid transitions towards a seasonally ice-free Arctic state under increased levels of atmospheric GHGs. ”
_____________________________________________
Climate models must work both directions; past and future. According to the following hindcast graph, arctic sea ice volume increased from approximately 38 km2 in 1955 to 48 km2 in 1967. This sea ice thickening was associated with a strong negative NAO index.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/IDAO/retro.html#Satellite_ice
Natural forcing clearly overwhelmed co2 forcing. The last thirty years of sea ice decline have been associated with a strong positive NAO anomaly. This anomaly is not natural? What about the extremely long lived positive NAO anomaly from 1910 to 1930. was this natural or co2 forced. Do you think it is possible that the arctic sea ice volume then could have been less than today?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Winter-NAO-Index.svg
stevengoddard says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Most of the loss of multi-year ice in 2007 occurred during the winter, not the summer.
_____________________________________________________________
And that’s exactly why your purported PIPS 2.0 analysis can’t be relied upon for much of anything at all.
“Oh look at my analysis, it shows thickness decreasing in the WINTER!”
“Therefore Arctic sea ice volume, particularly excluding first year ice, particularly excluding 2nd year ice, shows multi-year ice (three or more years old) dramatically shrinking in thickness.”
“Or not. How would I know. All I have is something in the units of pixel-metres. You’ll have to figure out what my pixels are, as even I don’t know.”
“But I can’t tell you the actual change in Arctic sea ice volume in engineering units (KM^3), the best I can do is not tell you explicitly what my self apppointed ROI is, not tell you what a SG self defined pixel is in relationship to a PIPS 2.0 pixel.”
“You’ll just have to believe me. What’s that you say about transparency?”
EFS_Junior
When doing relative year over year comparisons (essentially ratios) the units make no difference.
Ratios are dimensionless, like your comments.
Amino Acids in Meteorites
Holland plays a similar style to Germany, and Germany didn’t get a clean shot off the entire game today.
Smokey says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:20 pm
David W,
“You are over reacting: “…it does not alter the fact the 2007 result left the Artic Ice pack in a far more vulnerable and unstable condition than it had been previously.”
‘Vulnerable’ and ‘unstable’ are subjective opinions without any empirical validation. First, show us that the current conditions are anything out of the ordinary over the past ten millennia of the Holocene. Extrapolating your assumptions based on a 1979 – 2010 time frame is not science, because it does not follow the scientific method; it is not testable. It is simply alarmism that we can do without.
Show us that what is occurring is anything but natural regional variation, and I for one will sit up straight and pay attention”
Sorry but I think you misunderstood my post. It was certainly in no way intended to be alarmist. My assertion is that in any given year multi-year ice iwll be less vulnerable than 1st year ice. Would you disagree with this as a general principle?
My belief, is that their is an equilibrium that Artic Ice will return to in the shorter term and that 2007 took us well below this equilibrium. If alarmist predictions are to be believed this should have accelerated the downwards trend which it failed to do.
stevengoddard says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:39 pm
David W
“Most of the loss of multi-year ice in 2007 occurred during the winter, not the summer. It had nothing to do with warm air temperatures.”
Whilst I have agreed with much of what you posted I’m not sure I agree with this. 2007. The end result in 2007 was to some extent pre-determined by the years that preceded it. Would we have had the extent of ice loss that we saw in 2007, if those same localised conditions occurred 20 years earlier. I tend to believe not.
Coming into 2007, we had already lost a lot of multi-year ice in previous seasons. Unless your saying that multi-year ice reacts/behaves the same way as first year ice then I can’t agree with you.
Bottom line is I am not alarmist. I think this years Artic Sea ice minimum will to some extent be influenced by the results of recent years. It is unlikely to get over 6 million sq km due to the 2007 loss but the trend is showing some improvement so it is likely to be better than 2009 and possibly even 2006.
BTW the data is now out for 7th July 2010 at 45,000 sq km with July 6th re-adjusted to 33,750 sq km. The average for the previous week is now 63,995 sq km. Looks very much like a slow down of ice loss to me.
We are now only 115,156 sq km over the 2007 result but more importantly only 211,093 sq km under the 2006 extent at 6th July. The 2006 minimum was 5,718,719 sq km. Are we headed for a repeat of 2006 or 2007. My money would be on 2006 due to the level of ice loss earlier in the season. 2007 didnt lose ice til much later in the season and as Stephen pointed out it was due to specific reasons not aligned with temps.
Incidentally. When one begins looking for “recovery” of Arctic Ice extent, in the end its going to come down to an increase in the level of multi-year ice. This will logically first be seen in the Arctic Basin later in the season and so for the time being early season ice loss which is predominantly first year ice is going to be of less significant.
It is what will occur in the Arctic basin beyond mid-July that is more likely to point towards a long term trend.
FergalR said
July 7, 2010 at 3:20 pm
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)
It’s below 0C but it’s not below the freezing point of sea water which is -1.8C from memory so that’s nto relevant. The ponds are still there by the way
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/latest/noaa2.jpg
It was an erronous claim in my opinion, not only that but it was spun to indicate a trend. Like I said silly little thing to post.
Andy
I am very firmly in the steven goddard cheering section, but I would be sad to see R.Gates, Julienne, villabolo or Junior run off this blog through ungracious sniping.
David W
NSIDC maps showed much less multi-year ice in Spring, 2008 than they did in Autumn, 2007.
Wayne, it sounds like you downloaded the Had1SST data set? You should probably be aware that prior to about 1953, most of the sea ice data is based on climatologies since there is very little observational data spanning the entire Arctic. Of course data from 1979 onwards is the most reliable since the same type of sensor/method (multichannel passive microwave of similar frequencies) is used. Data from 1953-1978 relies on ship observations, aircraft observations and some earlier satellite missions, including ESMR which was a 1-channel microwave sensor.
The Had1SST data is on a climate model grid (lat/lon grid) at a different spatial resolution (and grid) than the data I directed you to. I’ve only actually looked at the derived ice extent from the Had1SST product so I’m not familiar with the data format, but I’m a bit surprised it would be in ASCII format. You will want to keep in mind that the Had1SST data are at a coarser spatial resolution than the data I pointed you to when doing your analysis.
The near-real-time data currently contains data from 2008 onwards. Near-real-time (NRT) data is kept until the better calibrated/geolocated data from RSS comes in and then the “final” product is produced. You can link to NRT, final, and preliminary data products via the ftp site. They are all in the same grid (and hopefully the same format, but the final products should have a 300 byte header which I don’t think is the case for the NRT data).
If you have any questions on how to read/work with the data, contact user services at NSIDC. They tend to be very helpful.
To R.Gates
As long as this years minimum ice extent again exceeds the prior year (2009) people can rightly claim that the minimum arctic ice extent is recovering.
The low point for minimum ice extent was in 2007 and it has been in recovery in 2008 and 2009.
Obviously the long term trend is still down and we will need to see a number of years of 6 million sq km + before you could say that the long term trend has changed with statistical confidence, but each season that exhibits year on year growth in ice extent is defineitely a recovery in ice extent from the years prior.
stevengoddard said:
July 7, 2010 at 3:40 pm
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.
___________________
Apologies if you find it abrasive Steve, meant more as advice. Also, some of your comments to posters are not always the most gentlemanly are they?
Anyhow, as I mentioned above, the temps don’t seem low enough to cause freezing as I assume they are formed in ice formed from seawater so to freeze they must get down to about -2C or so, and the temps linked above by another poster showed -0.3C. What happened is that, like they did a few days ago, they got full of snow or sleet or a mixture of both and that has now melted.
As R Gates said, it’s just a weather related short term thing and didn’t belong in this otherwise excellent article. Also, the comment written “Meltwater ponds at the North Pole are starting to freeze over.” is trying to suggest something that it shouldn’t because it is not happening.
Andy
AndyW
The top layers of the ice are freshwater, from snow and natural desalinization of sea ice over time.
stevengoddard says:
July 7, 2010 at 9:50 pm
EFS_Junior
When doing relative year over year comparisons (essentially ratios) the units make no difference.
Ratios are dimensionless, like your comments.
_____________________________________________________________
Yet you still made the following patently absurd comment, with absolutely no foundation to speak of or quantative measurements (in engineering units, of course, not quess the Steve Goddard’s units) to back up this specious claim;
“Most of the loss of multi-year ice in 2007 occurred during the WINTER, not the summer.”
Really?
The WINTER?
REALLY?
ROTFLMFAO!
@ur momisugly Julienne — July 7, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Just a final thanks for your help. I’ve already have the Had1SST (now I know what to call that dataset) running, and yes, its ~gig of glorious ascii, any mean month from 1870 to Oct. 2008 and at least six times the size required 🙂 And, I noticed all of the caveats on that data. Don’t think I will have any problem with the rest, this is very similar to my specialty in programming over the decades.
If I’m going to take the time to program and analyze this data for the coming years I want to do it right. Thanks again, you got me off high center.
Anthony, whilst I get the same view on the DMI ice extent site, is there a reason the JAXA one you’re showing dated 6/7/10 looks like 🙁http://climateinsiders.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/amsre_sea_ice_area.png) and yet a day later 7/7/10 the right turn on the 2010 line and the bump on the 2007 line have both vanished? Seen here:http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent_L.png
The Arctic Roos version is also showing a right turn like you showed (but less dramatic) (http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_area.png) . Yet NSIDC isn’t (http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png) Any thoughts?
stevengoddard says:
July 7, 2010 at 7:44 pm
Completely OT.
Spain won Wimbledon, today’s leg of the Tour, and is about to win the World Cup
Alessandro Pettachi is Italian!
From: stevengoddard on July 7, 2010 at 7:44 pm
The Spanish World Cup win against Germany was expected as it was predicted by Paul the German psychic octopus. One certainly can’t deny the sound scientific reasoning behind his successful prediction rate:
Of course this octopus is not psychic, it must merely have extraordinary abilities to process vast amounts of data related to the playing of previous games and those involved in such to arrive at a forecast. With nine brains available it clearly has the processing power to “run” a model in its own… well, head or whatever is housing all those brains. I hope it’s not too focused on soccer (football), it would be interesting to show it lots of Arctic sea ice graphs and charts and have it make an extent minimum prediction. Ah heck, if we can provide it a better way of communicating with us, maybe a Stephen Hawking-type keypad, it could contribute to the next IPCC assesment report.
Of course with a string of successful predictions comes the detractors:
People want to eat that octopus? After it has been demonstratively shown octopuses are likely more intelligent than humans? It is obvious that the WWF must immediately take action to protect these noble beings, since it is their sworn mission to protect all creatures from the unending ravages of evil mankind (except of course mankind itself since they are the violent aggressors). While they have decided their primary battle is against global climate change, since global climate change is a clear and present danger to octopuses worldwide they are already fighting for them thus this would be a mere extension of those ongoing efforts to save all life on Mother Earth (except humans).
I expect the protests outside sushi bars worldwide to commence shortly.
“Temperatures in the high Arctic have been below normal this summer, and in a few days will start their decline towards winter. ”
So they have.
The melt is from below.
This year will likely be the first year when all the 3-yr old and older ice is gone.
Here in Australia we are having a great many climate change stories all seeking to ensure we accept the man made version. Some “facts” reported in the Land newspaper.
NASA says the last 12 months were the warmest on record globally.
NOAA says the combined global land and ocean surface temp was the warmest on record for May, March-May and January-May.
In Australia the period June 2009-May 2010 has been the warmest on record (BoM)
The total volume of Artic ice is currently at it’s lowest point for at least the last few thousand years. ( Didn’t we see photos of a US submarine surfaced at the North Pole in 1958 in clear water?)
Artic sea ice is currently at its lowest recorded extent for June (USNSICDC).
Some of these claims seem specious and I would appreciate any help to answer them in a letter to the editor. I appreciate there are some specialists here who know far more than I. Thanks.
I can guarantee that BoM will get the answer it wants if the station adjustments we’ve seen so far are a guide.
EFS_Junior
You might want to learn a little bit about the Arctic before posting. NSIDC explained in their April 7, 2008 sea ice news why there was so little multi-year ice at the end of the winter. Your last post made it quite clear that you really have no idea what you are talking about.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/040708.html
Why is the AMSR-E sea ice extent graphic in the post different from the one you see at WUWT website? Both 2007 and 2010 curves are markedly different.
Lawrie Ayres
The claim of record low ice volume is from PIOMAS, which appears to be nonsense.
The real story with global temperatures is that they have risen much slower than IPCC and Hansen forecasts.