by Steven Goddard,
We have been watching temperatures and webcam images closely at the NOAA North Pole drifting weather station this year. Except for a few days in early July, they have looked like the series of images below – snow, ice and clouds. No open leads and little or no surface meltwater.
June 15 (NOAA 2) more images follow…
June 22 (NOAA 2)
July 6 (NOAA 1) Small ponds covered with ice
July 24 (NOAA 2) Small ponds covered with ice
August 2 (NOAA 2) Small ponds covered with ice
This correlates closely with the record cold temperatures this summer north of 80N
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
It hasn’t always been like this. John Daly did an excellent writeup on this topic a few years back. During May of 1987, Navy subs arrived at the North Pole and found lots of open water.
In 1959, the USS Skate surfaced at the North Pole, and reported this :
“the Skate found open water both in the summer and following winter. We surfaced near the North Pole in the winter through thin ice less than 2 feet thick.”
By contrast, the New York Times published this misinformation in 2000 :
The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday. At least for the time being, an ice-free patch of ocean about a mile wide has opened at the very top of the world, something that has presumably never before been seen by humans and is more evidence that global warming may be real and already affecting climate. The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water was more than 50 million years ago.
This is in sharp contrast to the NYT prediction of an imminent ice free Arctic in 1969
Expert Says Arctic Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea”
Almost 200 years ago, the President of the Royal Society wrote this to the admiralty :
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated.
(This) affords ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened and give us leave to hope that the Arctic Seas may at this time be more accessible than they have been for centuries past, and that discoveries may now be made in them not only interesting to the advancement of science but also to the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations.”
The image below from September 1, 1996 shows what summer ice typically looks like in the Arctic. Lots of open water between the ice. That is why places like NSIDC report extent as regions which have more than 15% ice concentration. The location below would be considered ice covered by NSIDC.
Sadly, UIUC seems to have “lost” their archive of ice concentration maps. It has been offline for two weeks now, so we can’t use that valuable resource for the time being. I wonder what’s up with that?
Oops! This link appears to be broken.
Two years ago, this news was famously reported :
(CNN) — The North Pole may be briefly ice-free by September as global warming melts away Arctic sea ice, according to scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. “We kind of have an informal betting pool going around in our center and that betting pool is ‘does the North Pole melt out this summer?’ and it may well,” said the center’s senior research scientist, Mark Serreze. It’s a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen in autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said. The ice retreated to a record level in September when the Northwest Passage, the sea route through the Arctic Ocean, opened briefly for the first time in recorded history. “What we’ve seen through the past few decades is the Arctic sea ice cover is becoming thinner and thinner as the system warms up,” Serreze said….Serreze said it’s “just another indicator of the disappearing Arctic sea ice cover” but that it is happening so soon is “just astounding to me.”
Later in the summer, Mark Serreze reported on WUWT
The north pole issue: Back in June, there was some coverage about the possibility of the North Pole being ice free by the end of this summer. This was based on recognition that the area around the north pole was covered by firstyear ice that tends to be rather thin. Thin ice is the most vulnerable to melting our in summer. I gave it a 50/50 chance. Looks like I’ll lose my own bet and Santa Claus will be safe for another year. There was indeed some coverage a some years back of an open north pole (and I was interviewed). This opening, however, was pretty clearly causes by unusual winds breaking up this ice, and not from melting out.
And yet, in 1959 the US Navy reported ice less than two feet thick at the North Pole. North Pole ice is probably 2-3 times as thick now as it was a half century ago. The Navy knows ice and ice thickness – that is why I trust Navy PIPS over academic models like PIOMAS.
Our global warming friends seem to believe that the Arctic data set began with satellites in 1978, and they appear to have difficulty interpreting even that time period in an objective fashion. Satellites (unfortunately) came on line right at the start a period of warming, after 30 years of cooling temperatures and dire forecasts of an impending ice age.
Video of rising temperatures during the satellite era.
Regarding the comment by :
“EthicallyCivil says:
August 3, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Looking at the current sea ice maps one can see deep penetrations of partially open (non 100%) coverage… if has been fascinating to watch these intrude. The comparative picture with former years is stuck on 7/22, before these tendrils intrude so it is difficult to compare.”
It is difficult to compare because they have apparently changed the color key, which indicates the concentration of ice. Compare the key of the 7/22 maps with today’s maps.
The old key had 100% as deep purple; 90% as slightly lighter purple; 85% even lighter purple; and 82% as even more light purple.
The new key has 100% as deep purple; 90% as a garrish crimson; 85% as a vivid mustard yellow; and 82% as a sickening pus-hued yellow green.
I have yet to see any explaination for this dramatic change, right in the middle of a melt season.
Surely an adept computor geek can translate the new maps back to the old color scheme, so we can compare as we did before.
Steve writes:
The image below from September 1, 1996 shows what summer ice typically looks like in the Arctic. Lots of open water between the ice. That is why places like NSIDC report extent as regions which have more than 15% ice concentration. The location below would be considered ice covered by NSIDC.
Steve, not sure what you are trying to say by the above paragraph. Of course at 25 sq-km spatial resolution a region such as you show would be considered ice, but not 100% ice, since the open water areas would reduce the ice fraction in that 25 sq-km pixel. Also, the reason why NSIDC reports regions with more than 15% ice concentration is because comparisons between passive microwave derived ice concentration with visible imagery indicates that a 15% threshold matches well with the visible data for location of the ice edge.
On a different note, MODIS imagery indicates quite a bit of open water area between the ice floes at the moment. The ice extent continues to drop quite rapidly over the last few days:
20100729 = 7.1605200
20100730 = 7.0599500
20100731 = 6.8812300
20100801 = 6.7729500
20100802 = 6.5567500
What do you attribute these reductions to?
Julienne, seems Steve’s talk of cold temperatures is not helping the ice to grow. Perhaps he’ll say that you made the data up and in reality the ice is not shrinking. After all he did say that the ice loss is supposed to have slowed down by now, and if you can lose 500K in less than a week, that would make his 5.5 estimate look quite foolish…
Caleb says:
August 3, 2010 at 6:54 pm
Regarding the comment by :
“EthicallyCivil says:
August 3, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Looking at the current sea ice maps one can see deep penetrations of partially open (non 100%) coverage… if has been fascinating to watch these intrude. The comparative picture with former years is stuck on 7/22, before these tendrils intrude so it is difficult to compare.”
It is difficult to compare because they have apparently changed the color key, which indicates the concentration of ice. Compare the key of the 7/22 maps with today’s maps.
The old key had 100% as deep purple; 90% as slightly lighter purple; 85% even lighter purple; and 82% as even more light purple.
The new key has 100% as deep purple; 90% as a garrish crimson; 85% as a vivid mustard yellow; and 82% as a sickening pus-hued yellow green.
I have yet to see any explaination for this dramatic change, right in the middle of a melt season.
There’s been no change!
Sea ice melting … sea ice freezing. Same old story happening all the time. Nothing to get excited about. Now if we were to start hearing about snowfall rates measured by the many meters up in Baffin Island and other parts of Nunavut, then that’s something to get excited about.
R. Gates writes:
“If I was a doctor reading the EKG of a patient and suddenly the last few years came across the monitor, I’d certainly have reason to take a big notice.”
The difference between the doctor with his EKG and you with your ice measurements is that the doctor has the very best reasons for believing that the EKG is the key or one of the key indicators of the underlying condition. Those reasons are decades of surgical practice and highly confirmed hypotheses about heart disease and its symptoms. At this time in the history of climate science, all you can do is assume that the condition of the ice is a key indicator of the “health” of global climate. Time, decades, might very well prove that it is, but now there is not one reasonably confirmed physical hypothesis that ties global climate to the condition of that ice.
RoyFOMR writes:
“I’m no scientist but surely we could resolve the question of what the state of Arctic ice was historically by examining polar tree-rings? Contrarian pedants may snarkily point to the absence of arboreal lifeforms in such a region as problematic.This is, of course, a total strawman. The robust symbiosis between temperature and tree-growth is unarguable. In layman terms, as proxies they are as two peas in a pod.”
Au Contraire, clearly, you are a brilliant scienpol or policitist. No one said the trees had to grow in the region. They just have to be from the region.
Julienne
Over the last couple of weeks a pretty substantial spread has opened up between NSIDC graphs and other data sources. Both JAXA and DMI have 2010 more than 500,000 km2 ahead of 2007, and NSIDC has it at about half that. DMI is actually nearly 1,000,000 km2 ahead of 2007.
Do you have any ideas why the spread vs 2007 is decreasing in NSIDC, and increasing in JAXA and DMI?
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Theo Goodwin said:
“At this time in the history of climate science, all you can do is assume that the condition of the ice is a key indicator of the “health” of global climate. Time, decades, might very well prove that it is, but now there is not one reasonably confirmed physical hypothesis that ties global climate to the condition of that ice.”
_____
Actually, I was NOT trying to indicate that the condition of the Arctic sea ice, as reflected in this long term graph:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/sea.ice.anomaly.timeseries.jpg
Was a good indicator for status of the global climate, but merely that it was a good indicator for the health of the Arctic sea ice. Now there are some who might say that as the Arctic goes, so goes the planet, but I’m not quite there yet. I simply choose to watch the heartbeat of the canary for now, seeing if the coal dust is indeed causing irregular heart beats.
Julienne,
There appears to be a discrepancy in the NSIDC numbers. Your numbers (and graphs) show a loss of over 8% ice since July 29 – but your maps show a loss of less than 3%. And your graphs do not correlate well with other data sources.
20100729 = 7.1605200
20100730 = 7.0599500
20100731 = 6.8812300
20100801 = 6.7729500
20100802 = 6.5567500
Caleb says:
August 3, 2010 at 6:54 pm
This is all part of the loss of the comparison images. Personally, I think the color map on those images was easier for a quick comparison, especially by people not used to dealing with more garish false-color images.
The comparison images use the purple theme. Since they aren’t available, I’m downloading the images from the home page, using the “high” color scheme. “Medium” just looks wrong to me, and “low” just looks misleading with dark areas really being quite ice covered. The only thing that has changed in this melt season is the loss of the comparison images.
Sure, but this one doesn’t have time. Also, I’d have to start my own archive from the daily images as they go by each day. And write my own comparison tool. And find a better place to store all the images instead of a Comcast “personal pages” server.
Feel free to contact Cryosphere and tell them you miss the comparison stuff.
Julienne said:
“On a different note, MODIS imagery indicates quite a bit of open water area between the ice floes at the moment. The ice extent continues to drop quite rapidly over the last few days:
20100729 = 7.1605200
20100730 = 7.0599500
20100731 = 6.8812300
20100801 = 6.7729500
20100802 = 6.5567500
What do you attribute these reductions to?
_____________
I’d be actually very curious to hear both of your answers to this question. I have my own ideas, but your thoughts would be quite illuminating. Current trajectory of melt with a good solid 4-5 weeks left will put 2010 right below 2008 and above 2007. Of course anything can happen, but we’ve got lots of warmer than normal SST’s in the Arctic right now, and all that lower concentration ice is now surrounded by warmer than normal water, and I would think the majority of the melt now is being driven almost entirely by water temps. created partially by the rapid melt earlier in the season.
The “ice area” loss has also considerably slowed on Arctic ROOS and JAXA, suggesting that a lot of the recent extent loss is made up of the few remaining “vulnerable” areas and that the remaining regions have a healthier ice concentration (this is also supported by the DMI 30% extent over the other 15% thresholds)
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Area.png
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi_ice_area.png
I forgot something good.
I copied the entire UIUC map collection over to my local disk a few weeks ago. I have everything from 1978 through July 4, 2010.
The only problem is that they aren’t generating any new maps, so I can’t do current comparisons.
R. Gates says:
August 3, 2010 at 9:34 pm
The SST anomalies are not the temperatures. That is an entirely different picture.
And besides that, the warmer anomalies have been in the same places most of the summer.
stevengoddard said:
August 3, 2010 at 1:49 pm
“AndyW, Exactly. 2007 was a wind compaction event – much more than the melt event it was advertised to be”
Well at least you got what I was inferring Steve, unlike Billy Liar.
2007 was a wind event mainly on this blog. Anthony has previously posted that it was wind blowing it out of the Framm straight etc whilst you opt for wind compaction from the Siberian side. So even you both disagree with each other. Assuming you are correct, that the southerly Siberian winds were the main cause then you still haven’t got any figures to show how much compaction occurred compared to how much melt happened from these warm winds. So saying it was mainly wind is just your opinion, because it suits your agenda. I suspect most of the loss was from melting in situe and compaction had a lesser role.
Getting back to 2010, JAXA seems to be diverging from your predicted trend line at the moment.
Andy
R. Gates says:
____________
I’d be actually very curious to hear both of your answers to this question. I have my own ideas, but your thoughts would be quite illuminating. Current trajectory of melt with a good solid 4-5 weeks left will put 2010 right below 2008 and above 2007. Of course anything can happen, but we’ve got lots of warmer than normal SST’s in the Arctic right now, and all that lower concentration ice is now surrounded by warmer than normal water, and I would think the majority of the melt now is being driven almost entirely by water temps. created partially by the rapid melt earlier in the season.”
I’d be more interested in the water temps very close to ice edge within the basin rather than the 4-5C anomalies being presented in areas outside the basin. How can you accurately measure an anomaly properly when for a signficant number of years the area in question was covered with ice at that time of year.
If an area of ocean outside of 80N is ice free fairly early on due to ocean currents, it certainly wouldnt surprise me to see a high anomaly in that area. But I dont think that necessarily points to warmer temps within the basin.
One thing that I think lends credence to this idea is that once you get outside the area of normal maximum ice extent, you see much lower anomalies. This suggests to me that the presence or non-presence of ice in a particular area from season to season can distort the anomaly readings.
Arctic ice isn’t rotted. There is no alarming thinning. Global warming climate models are wrong. Co2 does not control climate. Nothing unusual is happening in weather. What is happening now has happened before.
“Is this the end of the world? No, this is the world.”
~~Michael Crichton
1:35 video, ” Michael Crichton, No, this is the world”
We are a couple of degrees and a couple of months from dropping below the blue “zero line” on the chart up top. Per Milankovitch, when that happens and we have persistent ice growing at the north pole, the Interglacial is over and it’s back to the ice age for us.
This, BTW, is what the warmers are all atwitter over. That we are NOT having that event. I count it as a good thing that the next ice age is not begun. They panic over it. Go figure…
Steve, my numbers are the daily values (not smoothed over 5 dayas). As you know, NSIDC uses a 15% cutoff whereas the DMI for example uses a 30% cutoff. So that would be one source of difference. And of course we use different sea ice algorithms, with different sensitivities to atmospheric and snow/ice conditions. I notice the JAXA value is 6.65 million sq-km for August 3rd whereas NSIDC is 6.55. Since both NSIDC and JAXA use a 15% threshold, the differences between the two (100K) must be a result of using different sensors and different algorithm. JAXA uses the Bootstrap algorithm applied to AMSR-E data. The values I quote are from NASA Team applied to SSM/I data. In general, NASA Team tends to underestimate thin ice more than the Bootstrap algorithm so that could be one reason for the difference. But I don’t know what sort of filtering for clouds/land contamination is done in the JAXA data.
A comparison to visible or SAR data would be more insightful as to where the differences lie.
As long as you use a consistent algorithm and consistent data source, it shouldn’t matter too much in terms of looking at seasonal/interannual variations.
rbateman says:
August 3, 2010 at 10:00 pm
R. Gates says:
August 3, 2010 at 9:34 pm
The SST anomalies are not the temperatures. That is an entirely different picture.
And besides that, the warmer anomalies have been in the same places most of the summer.
_______________
I don’t disagree with anything you said, though I wonder why you need to state the obvious. Anomalies are a direct measurement of the relative heat (with a comparision to previous years, hence “anomaly”) available for melting (especially SST’s). One thing you forgot to mention, however, was that anomalies in one domain (i.e. temperatures) lead to anomalies in others (i.e. sea ice area and extent).
R. Gates…we’re starting to see the thick, old ice in the Beaufort melt out (lots of old ice broken up into smaller floes) and quite a bit of FYI on the other side of that is also melting out (as seen by the many open water areas in the MODIS and AMSR-E imagery and individual ice floes). Nothing too remarkable in terms of atmospheric circulation this past week that I can see, I think it’s more that the ice is starting to run out of thickness.
From: R. Gates on August 3, 2010 at 9:34 pm
http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/sst/ophi/color_sst_NPS_ophi0.png
Currently most of the Arctic basin is minus 1.5°C and colder, with most of what’s left running 0 to -1.5°C. Offhand I don’t see those temps driving much melt of that mostly freshwater sea ice.
Julienne,
Both NSIDC and DMI had 2007 and 2010 equal at the beginning of July. DMI is now nearly one million km2 ahead of 2007 and growing, and NSIDC has them separated by less than 300,000 km2 and shrinking.
There is a huge difference between the two. Regardless, I expect ice loss to drop off sharply after this weekend because of cooler conditions in the Chukchi and East Siberian Seas.
FWIW concerning the Cryosphere Today – it is run by one guy who has other responsibilities in addition to maintaining the website. This likely why responses to the e-mails sent to the listed addresses are slow, and why data has been down for some time.