by Steve Goddard
In April, I pointed out that PIOMAS forecasts for the summer didn’t make much sense.
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.
It is now early August. Let us see how they did. They expected most of the ice to be gone in the Beaufort Sea by now, and much of the remaining ice to be very thin.
The most recent NSIDC newsletter included this map, showing that the thick multi-year ice is still present in the Beaufort Sea. This is in stark contrast to the PIOMAS prediction of thin ice in that region.
The image below shows in red where PIOMAS mispredicted the ice edge vs. NSIDC August 6 map. Green indicates areas where they overestimated the amount of ice.
This discrepancy will get worse through the remainder of the month. PIOMAS extent/thickness predictions are way off the mark, and their volume calculations are much too low.
As I forecast last week, DMI now shows 2010 ice extent highest since 2006.
Ice thickness remains between 2009 and 2006, just as PIPS data indicated it should back in May.
JAXA shows that divergence from 2007 continues steadily, and is now in excess of 700,000 km².
The JAXA area graph show that ice melt has dropped off dramatically.
NSIDC maps show little ice loss so far this month. There has been nearly as much gain (green) as loss (red.)
NCEP forecasts generally below normal temperatures for the next two weeks in the Arctic.
DMI shows that summer is just about done north of 80N, and has been the coldest on record (for that dataset starting in 1958). Average temperatures have fallen below freezing there.
Conclusion : There will probably be minimal ice loss during August. The minimum is likely to be the highest since 2006, and possibly higher than 2005. So far, my forecast of 5.5 million km² is looking very conservative. Ice extent is higher than I predicted for early August.
Meanwhile, down south. Antarctica continues gaining ice at a record pace. NSIDC showed it the highest on record for July.
Bremen shows it likely headed for a new record.
In Greenland, we are bombarded with stories about “losing Manhattan sized chunks of ice.” The BBC made it one of their lead stories yesterday. Yet the ice isn’t lost and the Greenland ice sheet has been having an exceptionally cold summer, as seen in the NOAA anomaly animation below.
Perhaps “some scientists” might want to actually check the Greenland temperature data before talking to the press? Under any circumstances, how would “abnormally warm” temperatures cause a 700 foot thick block of ice to fracture? The concept doesn’t make much sense from from an engineering point of view. A few months of (imagined) warm temperatures might cause a little surface melt, but the thermal conductivity of ice is much too low to alter the temperature and material strength of ice more than a few feet below the surface. I had this same discussion with Ted Scambos at NSIDC a few years ago about Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves.
The whole story is a complete ruse.
We are bombarded with misinformation about the state of polar ice. People’s brains have been programmed to believe that the last few ppm of CO2 have made a huge difference in the behaviour of the ice, and that belief makes their thought process irrational. People will find what they expect to find. It is human nature.
Robert said
“Another thing to consider that many times ice losses in polar regions are not so well correlated with air temperature but rather with sea temperature. ”
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Arctic ocean heat content has been falling rapidly since 2007. From Bob Tisdale:
http://i49.tinypic.com/5ebpua.jpg
“We are bombarded with misinformation about the state of polar ice. People’s brains have been programmed to believe that the last few ppm of CO2 have made a huge difference in the behaviour of the ice, and that belief makes their thought process irrational.”
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Repeated here for effect.
Hear, hear, Stephen!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Smokey says:
August 8, 2010 at 7:49 am
[Maybe that should be: “75% irrational.”☺]
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Roger that! LOL
Here is a nice peer reviewed paper that says it all. Not even Mann can make these warm periods disapear!?
http://www.giub.unibe.ch/klimet/docs/climdyn_2007_grosjean_et_al.pdf
Regards from the colder than “normal” Swiss mountains, Freddie
Hang on, I read that correctly, DMI 80 plus temperature has gone minus.
Bugger, it’s worse than we thought! CO2 has changed the latent temperature ice melts!
Oh noes! It’s that pesky weather thing, on a slight tangent, well a lot more than slight.
When the temperatures start to plummet around Moscow in a week or so’s time will the MSM report it? I suspect there will be rather more people dying from cold in and around Moscow from cold this winter than the 2000 or so drowning drunks.
There you go that’s my prediction, ( not projection or any other weasel word BS. prediction ), I think it is also fair to make another prediction in my home country, UK there will be absolute carnage amongst the elderly this winter. If I was a betting man I’d put the death toll at around 40,000, at least half of them because our environmentalist scum have put the price of fuel up.
Over in Europe they are doing their version of the DDT ban, environmentalists Tch! they hate people with a passion, if it really is that bad why don’t they lead by example and off themselves.
Sorry for the rant, just come back from explaining economics to the “entitled”, *sigh*
Buy long underwear now . . . we are all going to need it over the next 30+years.
And make sure your car’s antifreeze is up to snuff.
Generally ice sheets and glaciers break off when they are too big, as the stress exceeds the strength of the structure. Glaciers do not extend to the ocean and calve because they are suffering extended melting – it’s because they are moving forward and exceeding their limits. Of course, there are some cases where melting may exacerbate calving, but the case would usually be that the ice would not be melting at the sea’s edge, if the glacier were not at the sea’s edge. Melting glaciers generally recede, not advance.
Robert says:
August 8, 2010 at 9:07 am …….
I am somewhat confused by your post – are you suggesting that it was melt ponds that caused the ice to break off, and that the melt ponds were caused not by high air temperature but by warm oceans? I’d be fascinated to know how that works.
Steve, I’ll just just right to your conclusion to save time:
“Conclusion : There will probably be minimal ice loss during August. The minimum is likely to be the highest since 2006, and possibly higher than 2005. So far, my forecast of 5.5 million km² is looking very conservative. Ice extent is higher than I predicted for early August.”
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I’m not sure what you mean by “minimum”, but already for the first 8 days of August we’ve lost about 400,000+ sq. km in extent. In the past few days we’ve seen some divergence in the ice, as it has spread out more, reducing the APPARENT RATE of ice loss (if you are measuring ice loss solely by extent, and not volume). But this does not mean the ice has ceased to melt during this time. Divergence is a tricky thing if you’re measuring rates of melting only based on extent. Suppose for example, that I have a pile of melting ice cubes on a warm table in a room near freezing in air temperature and am measuring the total amount of ice only looking at the shrinking area that ice cubes occupy on the table as the cubes melt, disregarding the actual volume. Then suppose I “diverge” the ice cubes, scattering a few around the edges of the pile, then I might say the ice APPEARS to be melting more slowly, as the extent of the ice on the table has grown. The point to understand here is that the melting is occuring from the table (i.e. water) not from air, so that the rate of melt really didn’t change, only the area or extent diverged. I posit that this is exactly what is happening right now, and I based this on the warmer than average SST’s in the Arctic. (http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/sst/ophi/color_anomaly_NPS_ophi0.png) The primary melting right now is from the water, and we’ve seen divergence in the ice, so we have in effect, spread the ice cubes out over a larger area of the table, and if anything, the actual melt rate (if we could measure volume) is higher. (where is CryoSat 2 data when you need it!)
As a side note, “rotten” comes about when this diverged ice doesn’t completely melt, and a new layer of ice forms between and on top of the diverged ice, giving the appearance of a more continuous expanse. But I know David Barber and his “rotten ice” are not very well received by some here on WUWT, but I thought I just point that out for those who care.
In terms of my own prediction of 4.5 million sq. km. extent, I’m standing by it, though it may not come until around the 20th to 25th of September. This will be a similar later low such as 2007 that saw a low on Sept. 24, or 2005 that saw a low on Sept. 22, as contrasted to years of earlier Sept. lows such as in 2008 when we hit it on Sept. 9. I base this later low, again, on the warmer water temps.
I think right now it is a matter of how fast this diverged ice actually melts enough to show up in a lowering of the extent. The period of divergence should come to an end fairly soon, but that is based mainly on weather of course.
Congressman Ed Markey doubles down on stupidity. All AGW “deniers” should be condemned to live out their last days on Manhattan size ice “island”. And…
“So far, 2010 has been the hottest year on record, and scientists agree arctic ice is a canary in a coal mine that provides clear warnings on climate…He said it was “unclear how many giant blocks of ice it will take to break the block of Republican climate deniers in the US Senate who continue hold this critical clean energy and climate legislation hostage.”
Somebody please inform this dullard that all the taxes in the world won’t prevent an ice shelf from calving off from momma glacier when the conditions are right.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/08/ed-markey-wants-icy-concentration-camp.html
I looked late last night at the JAXA area directly from their site, not the sea ice wuwt page, and it showed a tiny uptick to the area. This morning, gone. Anyone else notice that blip (or am I seeing things 🙂 )?
Robert,
Looks like you need to catch up on your reading.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726433.500-natural-rifts-may-have-weakened-antarctic-ice-shelf.html
I understand Al Gore made sea ice (arctic only) a proxy for global temperature. It seems to me a very poor proxy. Clearly season (winter/summer) has the greatest short-term effect on arctic sea ice. But the next biggest factor is NOT global temperature but ocean currents. The 3rd biggest factor is likely prevailing winds — especially in the spring/summer.
An even worse proxy for global temperature is “ice thickness”. Ocean current flow is INTO the arctic from the N Pacific then a “bit of “wandering” and out into the N Atlantic … where any ice quickly melts whatever its thickness. By a “bit of wandering” I mean there are some circular currents within the arctic ocean which may delay the overall movement of water/ice to the SE. (The trip takes < 2Y for water not caught up in a circular flow).
In the diagram titled "Arctic Sea Ice: End of July 2010" there is clearly some multi-year ice along the east coast of Greenland. This ice is headed south and will melt over the next several months. There is also a lot of 1st year ice in the NE corner of the diagram. This ice is headed towards the pole and will NOT melt for over a year.
My recollection (from reading Surface at the Pole) is open sea (created when an ice flow cracks) will freeze about 4" in a day … another 3" the next day and about 1 foot in a week? The thicker the ice the more insulation it provides deeper water from very cold arctic air. Consequently, ice that is 2Y old is nearly at thick as ice that is 3Y old. Moreover an 11' thick ice flow is not going to last much longer than an ice flow 8' thick once it arrives in the N Atlantic in the summer?
My gut feeling is this whole thick-ice vs rotten-ice discussion is a straw-man used to confuse, rather than enlighten, the AGW debate.
How is this discussion possible. The respected Mr. Kallio says there is no sea ice!
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/entire-arctic-ocean-melted-as-early-as-august-8th-this-year/
R. Gates,
When September comes, are you going to just admit that I was correct?
Martin Brumby says:
I’m still hoping our old chum R. Gates will stop by and let us know whether the “3xManhattan” ice chunk is a good thing or a bad thing.
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Martin,
I try not to use the terms “good” and “bad” when talking about natural events. I’ve never for example, be an “alarmist” here on WUWT, as I try to approach AGW from an objective as possible perspective.
Regarding the large chunk of ice that has broken off in Greenland. We know that in general Greenland has been losing ice mass (thank you GRACE), but whether or not that fact, or this particular event is related to AGW is still an unknown. We know that temps (especially water temps) in an around Greenland have been much warmer than average for many months, and last winter, with the negative AO index, we saw warmer temps over Greenland while the cold air was pushed south (to Florida, of all places!).
In looking at the general trend of Greenland losing ice mass and the calving of this glacier– neither is not out of character with the effects predicted by AGW, but that is not proof.
Scott
Just back from a nice ride in the mountains.
I’ve noticed that it is a common occurrence for ice to take a downtick right around NSIDC newsletter time.
PIOMAS is based on hypothesis. That hypothesis is turning out to be wrong. It doesn’t work in Nature. So that current hypothesis must be discarded and the folks at PIOMAS have to figure out where things went wrong.
“If it disagrees with experiment it’s wrong” ~ Richard Feynman
NSIDC maps today show extent more than 13% higher than the same date in 2007.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFEpSvTib9o]
People will find what they expect to find. It is human nature.
“Believing is easier than calculus. And we find that it is so much easier for someone to grasp a belief system in an idea and then just block out anything that might contradict that belief.”
~ John Christy
Has anybody actually looked at the satellite images lately? http://exploreourpla.net/explorer/?map=Arc&sat=ter&lon=0&lat=89,9&lvl=4&yir=2010&dag=219
The ice looks like it’s thin enough to be getting blown apart across nearly the whole arctic basin. It’s really spreading out. Wish we had an archive of these images to compare prior years.
video accompanying my previous comment
By definition the sea ice extent counts up to 85% open water as ice. As long as the floes are spreaded nicely, the sceptics will lean back and continue two dimensional thinking.
But the radar images speak the truth: extent is as usual, concentration is low.
http://exploreourpla.net/2010-08-06/arctic/envisat-asar-image-2010-08-06/
Scambos in New Scientist – February 16, 2008
Does the twice-a-day bending up and down of a floating glacier tongue due to tides cause it to break off near where the ice is grounded?