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
stevengoddard says:
July 8, 2010 at 8:30 am
geo
The shape and behavior is tracking 2006, but 2010 has less ice than 2006. i.e. it is offset downwards.
++++
Yes. I’ll still be interested to see the shape of the 2010 July/August “sag”, as one of the points I’m interested in, and I think this multi-year 2007-201x period should be illustrative of, is “when is it reasonable to call multi-year ice effect on July/August sag ‘mature’?” 3rd year ice? 4th? What? Clearly 2009 was not quite there yet on that point, tho much better than 2008. Will 2010 complete that, or still show a little more sag than 2006, but not so much as 2009?
EFS_Junior says:
July 8, 2010 at 4:16 pm
[…]
“I have reverse engineered the PIPS 2.0 map projection and know that a PIPS 2.0 pixel is ~1130 km^2.”[…]
——————————–
But pixels closer to the pole will represent a larger area than those further south on that map projection. Do you talk about your security clearance in the past tense because it was revoked due to you wasting everybody’s time?
Actually, Aug/Sep “sag” would be more accurate for what I’m pointing at, looking at JAXA.
The reason I’ve been pointing at July 1-15 since about the middle of April was a different point –as a pretty reliable indicator of whether another 2007 was potentially in the cards this year, as some were predicting. So far the answer seems a pretty credible ‘no’.
FergalR
Good point. The maps are probably intended to be something close to equal area projections, but there are other reasons not to convert to standard units of volume.
1. PIPS consistently reports greater thickness than other sources
2. My images are magnified and represent smaller area than the original PIPS maps
Trying to determine absolute volume numbers would give wrong results, and serves no purpose- since I am only using PIPS for relative comparisons between one year and the next.
Sitting in my chair, I am travelling hundreds of thousands of miles an hour – but it makes no difference to me because I am only concerned with my relative velocity to the objects around me.
FergalR says:
July 8, 2010 at 4:56 pm
EFS_Junior says:
July 8, 2010 at 4:16 pm
[…]
“I have reverse engineered the PIPS 2.0 map projection and know that a PIPS 2.0 pixel is ~1130 km^2.”[…]
——————————–
But pixels closer to the pole will represent a larger area than those further south on that map projection. Do you talk about your security clearance in the past tense because it was revoked due to you wasting everybody’s time?
___________________________________________________________
1) Yes it’s not an equal area projection. However, it’s an easy projection to figure out, on my first try even, the difference between N70 and N90 is only a few percent (+/- 3%) if one assumes equal area vs actual transformation, certainly good enough for engineering purposes, and definitely good enough for SG.
2) I’m retired, I’ve done about four years of consultion with the USACE since retirement, but none of that required my past security clearance, which went away once I retired.
Yes you would get wrong results.
As other commentators have pointed out PIPS have published ice volume data for several years. You could validate your calculations. Your refusal to do so speaks volumes.
Well the, 15 day moving average for daily ice loss continues “dropping like a rock” (as Anu would put it. The average daily ice loss for the past 15 days now stands at 75,906 sq km per day. Here are the averages for the past 8 years for the period 24th June to 9th July (past 15 days).
2003 ~ 63,770
2004 ~ 51,812
2005 ~ 77,458
2006 ~ 89,166
2007 ~ 109,937
2008 ~ 76,864
2009 ~ 86,152
2010 ~ 75,906
You have to go back to 2003 and 2004 to find a lower rate of ice loss for the corresponding period. Comparisons to 2003 and 2004 should also take into account that both those years saw much lower levels of ice loss early in the season. So any assumption that we might see higher ice loss later in the season as we did in 2003 and 2004 do not necessarily hold.
Given the early season loss this year I remain confident that the rate of ice loss this season has already peaked and we are headed for a minimum extent similar or greater in extent than 2006.
R. Gates says:
July 8, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Pamela Gray says:
July 8, 2010 at 3:29 pm
Two things. Gates, you bring up an interesting point that really needs some gold standard research to back up your point. Describe how an increase in CO2 has led to a more frequent DA, and please site references.
_____________
I shall do this gladly, but am off to an evening event, and shall post this later.
—…—…—
When you return: Please show, by calculations of heat transfer and delta T through the calender year, exactly how a global change of less than 1/2 of one degree is directly responsible for the steady loss of ice between 1979 and July 2010. Further, you must show that that ice loss occurred only during the supposed winter heat rise – because Arctic summer temperatures have remained steady at +3.0 degrees since 1958.
Ice extent loss is, after all, the ONLY proof of global warming we (you actually) have left – after 15 years of steady temperature since 1995 – and so you must be able to show exactly how the loss of ice area has happened based on the specific temperature rise you claim to have measured.
Do not extrapolate temperatures before 1960 or after 2010. You are claiming a steady ice loss because of a supposed global temperature change. Global temperatures did rise during that period. I am claiming your calculations cannot produce that result based on the net 4/10 of one degree change actually measured.
George E. Smith says:
July 8, 2010 at 4:26 pm
CAGW =Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming
it fits. 🙂
Steven Goddard,
It may be, as you are contemplating, that you’ll have to change your prediction higher than 5.5. There’s a divergence happening from your video prediction—a good divergence. 🙂
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
In regards to the Dipole Anomaly, I find it most convenient to look at it from the perspective of being oscillating chaotic attractor, though it is not inaccurate to see it as simply polar amplfication of general AGW– the effects and dynamics are precisely the same, and it is only the perspective that differs. Though on a global basis we may have only seen .6 C or so of warming in the past century, the Arctic has seen far greater increases, just as predicted by AGW models. I’ll give a few references for this, of a broad nature, but these are just general background:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/impacts/arctic-climate-impact.html
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/294036
But such broad studies, combined with on the ground reports of melting permafrost:
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/breakingnews/melting-permafrost-prompts-arctic-community-housing-developments-to-skip-town-96755194.html
Ought to be enough to convince some skeptics at least that there are some significant changes (i.e. warming) going on in the Arctic. True enough, this could be natural variation, cycles, etc., but none are known to exist that could have such a dramatic effect on the Arctic. Is it just a coincidence that AGW models have long stated that we’d see the first effects in the Arctic, and now we are? Still, there could be some other explanation, but if the warming is not from CO2 increases (30% in the past three hundred years or so) then what is the source?
So enter the Arctic DA. A nice broad background can be found here:
http://www.climatehq.com/2009/12/arctic-dipole.html
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI3619.1
Chaos theory when applied to climate would posit that we would expect to see unpredictable yet deterministic effects when threasholds were reached when adding the smallest changes to a system over time…exactly as is the case with the addition of a few parts per million of CO2 every year. The DA corresponds precisely with the general expectations for the arrival of new oscillating chaotic attractors, that would cause a sudden and unpredicted shift in the weather patterns (see this chart, to see the divergence of Arctic recent sea ice minimums from GCM’s):
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/2009/stroeve.png
We’ve seen the frequency and strength of the DA increase, in a self-reinforcing manner, exactly as is the nature of chaotic attractors:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/atmosphere.html
If the Arctic Dipole Anomaly is a new oscillating chaotic attractor caused by CO2 induced Arctic warming, then here are some general expectations:
1) It will continue to strenghten, occurring even more frequently and become more intense, such that it will become the norm for the Arctic. All chaotic attractors appear virtually instantly and then grow rapidly. In the climate system, the DA’s arrival from a climatological perspective has been instantly.
2) GCM’s will have to be modified to account for the increasingly significant effects of the DA (indeed, they already are)
3) Other chaotic attractors are “out there” waiting for new tipping points to be crossed. We’ve seen this throughout the history of the climate, and in a period that we are going through with geologically speaking rapid increases in CO2, we must expect other chaotic attractors are close by.
I only know the basics of chaos theory, and I welcome the feedback from readers on WUWT who know it better than I do to give their thoughts, especially in the area of oscillating chaotic attractors and their growth and evolution.
Steven Goddard is not mentioning Barrow any longer. his forecasting skills did not work that well on sea ice break-up.
Steven has written a post, claiming that there was no change to land fast ice at barrow on the 26th of June. it turned out, that the ice was gone from Barrow the day BEFORE the post was written.
he also made strong claims about the break-up on NARL near Barrow. Steven talked about the latests break-up on record and was still saying I expect that the ice will last longer than July 8. in comments on the 5th of July, even though the ice broke on the 4th.
http://seaice.alaska.edu/gi/observatories/barrow_breakup
forecasts don t get more wrong than that.
REPLY: Except when you forecast that the “surge” won’t work in Seed of Doubt Iraq, aka SOD then delete the entire blog to hide your own mistakes…which you never talk about anymore. Right buddy? -A
my blog is still there Anthony, nothing hidden at all.
http://sod-iraq.blogspot.com/
i am pretty proud, as you seem to be my only reader. i am fine with any discussion about the success of the surge. shall i write a post on my blog?
REPLY: My mistake. I stand corrected. Last few times I checked it was AWOL. Not sure why, but it was. -A
Straight from the NSIDC website:
“Weather conditions, atmospheric patterns, and cloud cover over the next month will play a major role in determining whether the 2010 sea ice decline tracks at a level similar to 2007, or more like 2006. Although ice extent was greater in June 2007 than June 2006, in July 2007 the ice loss rate accelerated. That fast decline led up to the record low ice extent of September 2007.
However, it would not be surprising to see the rate of ice loss slow in coming weeks as the melt process starts to encounter thicker, second and third year ice in the central Arctic Ocean. Loss of ice has already slowed in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas due to the tongue of thicker, older ice in the region noted in our April update.”
Kind of mirrors to some extent what I’ve been saying. In 2006 when we lost a lot of ice early, the ice loss during the remainder of the year slowed significantly. This year mirrors 2006 to signficant degree except the early season loss was even earlier than the 2006 loss. As NSIDC have said then “Weather conditions, atmospheric patterns, and cloud cover over the next month will play a major role in determining whether the 2010 sea ice decline tracks at a level similar to 2007, or more like 2006”.
Given the similarities between this year and the ice loss of 2006, my money is ice loss for the remainder of the year being similar or possibly even lower than the 2006 result. If this is the case the September minimum may approach 6 million sq km.
Excerpt from: sod on July 8, 2010 at 10:44 pm
kadaka@wuwt:~$ reply -sod on
Misleading, wrong, potentially libelous; you certainly made sure to get all of that in there. My, aren’t you special?
First part:
From “Ice Dancing” posted June 25:
Animation runs June 18 to June 24. Later the observation is made:
Next article “Latest Barrow Ice Breakup On Record?” posted on June 26 started with:
By the Barrow Break-up site as found in the “Observations 2010” section, it was reported a break-out occurred at Barrow on June 25. Steve covered it in “Barrow Update” on July 3.
Summary:
On June 25, using satellite images going to June 24, Steve made his “landfast ice” statement, while asking readers “What do you see?” and giving that statement as one of his observations. On June 26 he made reference to the statement in his previous post. On the Barrow site, actual date the observation was posted unknown, the break-out on June 25 was noted, which Steve noted with a post.
You claim he made that statement on June 26. Thus you are wrong.
Second part:
As those of us watching the Barrow site knew, and as I had noted at the end of the “Barrow Update” comments, on July 5 they had actually increased the prediction from July 7 to July 8, then later on July 5 the prediction changed to July 5, the same day, and in “Observations 2010” the break-up or break-out on July 4 was noted.
Interestingly, I still can’t find on that site a confirmation that break-up has occurred. I would say I can’t see any change on the site since July 5, but the prediction graph was updated with July 7 being the last “actual measurement” with the 2010 line still not terminated.
So, you’re here harping about comments made on July 5 about ice that was actually lost on July 4 despite the loss not being reported until July 5 after Steve made his comments. And technically it appears that the break-up has yet to be confirmed.
Plus in you hideous comment above you are whining about Steve’s forecasting abilities when the experts of the Barrow site didn’t forecast the July 4th loss either. At the start of July 5 they were so confident the ice was going to stay around they even added a day to their prediction!
So basically, Steve was as good a forecaster as the experts.
So tell me, sod, did you actually read any of these articles and perhaps the comments here on WUWT, or did you just gulp down some obviously misleading and/or incorrect comments about them elsewhere then ran over here to regurgitate?
If you had a shred of honor you would retract your statements, especially that egregious claim about the “landfast ice” statement. As it stands, I certainly know better than to wait for you to do so.
kadaka@wuwt:~$ reply -sod off
sod said on July 8, 2010 at 11:39 pm:
Heh, some blog. Nothing posted in 2009 per the archive listing, then resurrected in 2010 for this:
Goes away for a year, then comes back to complain to all his many readers about something that happened on Lucia’s site, then goes away again. Truly something to be proud about.
Before we get too far into a discussion about some kind of new dipole pattern setting up, please read the following. It will serve to place things in perspective. As far as mother nature is concerned, there just aren’t too many things new under the sun.
http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~igor/research/pdf/50yr_web.pdf
Gates, so you know, my fall back argument will be based on real observations. Not models, and not chaos. But real hard in situ observations. The Arctic Dipole t’aint new and the Arctic melt off this past decade t’aint new. So the Arctic Dipole t’aint some kind of “new oscillating chaotic attractor caused by CO2”.
Try a’gin.
Let’s start by discussing how a natural occurring dipole is created. If we can all understand the underlying and fairly well known cause of such an atmospheric condition, we can go on to discuss how external factors might be able, or not, to affect it.
Today, July 9th, feels to me like a little microcosm of the frustration and fascination of trying to figure out Arctic ice trends. Look at JAXA –2006, 2007, and 2010 are basically right on top of each other today, more than three months into melt season.
stevengoddard said:
July 7, 2010 at 11:11 pm
AndyW
The top layers of the ice are freshwater, from snow and natural desalinization of sea ice over time.
____________________
I doubt they are perfect freshwater, they might be less saline than the bottom but that ice will still have some ice in it. I still think it is due to sleet snow falling into them rather than a refreeze starting as you tried to infer especically when the temps only got down to -0.3C
Hows it doing now?
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/latest/noaa2.jpg
Still snowing and sleet but still a a huge melt water pond.
So my point stands.
Andy
oops for ice put salt in at the end of the sentence ” they might be less saline than the bottom but that ice will still have some ice in it.”
Doh
The above author, Polyakov, regarding natural dipole variability, is well respected and has authored and co-authored many papers on global warming, some showing evidence, and some not. He seems willing to question consensus and is a staff member at IARC.
http://www.iarc.uaf.edu/people/indiv/iarc_all_staff.php?photo=ipolyakov
Pamela Gray says:
July 9, 2010 at 10:30 am
Many thanks for the link, reading and taking on board, I usually get there, I just never know when.
Thanks
Pamela Gray said
July 9, 2010 at 10:45 am
Let’s start by discussing how a natural occurring dipole is created. If we can all understand the underlying and fairly well known cause of such an atmospheric condition, we can go on to discuss how external factors might be able, or not, to affect it.
______
That would be interesting because I am sure a lot of readers, including myself, know little about it.
Can you start the ball rolling by explaining how an atmospheric dipole is created Pamela and then give a list of how external factors could effect it, then R Gates can respond?
Andy
Gates is the one that believes CO2 increases can affect the dipole. It will be up to him to explain how he thinks that happens. In the meantime, both the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Arctic Oscillation figure into the phenomenon called the Arctic Dipole. Read Polyakov’s article for starters. Then we can discuss what the dipole is, where it usually occurs, and how it contributes to melt when other oscillations are in sync with it.