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.
stevengoddard says:
August 8, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Amino
Professors bludgeoning the art of computer programming from their office using a 40 year old antiquated language (Fortran) know much more about the ocean than the US Navy does.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran
“Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, computational chemistry, and electricity supply systems state estimation. It is one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing and is the language used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Fortran_2008
“Since Fortran has been in use for more than fifty years, there is a vast body of Fortran in daily use throughout the scientific and engineering communities. It is the primary language for some of the most intensive supercomputing tasks, such as weather and climate modeling, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, computational economics, plant breeding and computational physics. Even today, half a century later, many of the floating-point benchmarks to gauge the performance of new computer processors are still written in Fortran (e.g., CFP2006, the floating-point component of the SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks).”
The Navy codes in what language now? FORTRAN!
Those old farts, they should have been coding in C, which BTW, was a retarded programming language before the release of C99, no double precision floating point instruction set before than, now that’s retarded!
And all the while FORTRAN has stayed ahead of the pack for one simple reason, it’s the most computationally efficient compiler out there, and it will stay that way, despite obvious biases of certain people who no nothing of which they speak.
FORTRAN is dead, long live FORTRAN!
2008 is a lousy model to predict 2010
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/081108.html
Again, “melt” isn’t the best word to use because there is a lot involved besides just melt. I use the word ablation because it includes all sorts of different things that help to break up and disperse ice pack, especially storms, surf, and wind currents.
How what remains of the ice pack behaves has less to do with temperatures than it has to do with weather. Major storms can break up and disperse a lot of ice while a storm-free period with exactly the same temperature of air and water will result in a completely different ablation profile.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
August 8, 2010 at 6:13 pm
wsbriggs says:
August 8, 2010 at 5:43 pm
inside every C/C++ program, is a Fortran program trying to get out.
I remember sitting in front of a computer screen in college back when FORTRAN was the hot language to learn for getting a computer job and trying to find what period I had either omitted or put in the wrong place that was causing my assignment to have a bug. Those days of staring at the green lettering on the screen (there was not multi-color then) for hours—gosh I don’t miss them.
At least you got to skip the punch cards, the green screen was a step up. Trying not to shuffle the cards, or figure out on what card the typo was on. Re-typing the whole program when you couldn’t figure out if it was a typo or a card out of order.
From: Amino Acids in Meteorites on August 8, 2010 at 6:13 pm
You got to start on a terminal? Lucky! Back in high school I learned punch cards first. No terminals but later we used these workstation-like IBM things, the monitor was built into the top at an angle, the program was transferred to 8-inch floppies which were then stuck into the mainframe. And to change tasks, you pulled out a drawer and loaded in a different stack of large magnetic disks. They looked so nice under their Plexiglas covers.
Dang, I miss line printers. Code just doesn’t look right if not on a long continuous strip of green-barred tractor feed printer paper, easy to scan through, with notes written right on the sheets. Plus they can be very environmentally-friendly. Back in college, the backs of those once-used wide sheets were THE paper for assignments for both the math and physics departments. Now that was practical recycling.
stevengoddard says:
August 8, 2010 at 8:27 pm
2008 is a lousy model to predict 2010
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/081108.html
August 11, 2008
The pace of sea ice loss sharply quickened in the past ten days, triggered by a series of strong storms that broke up thin ice in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
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Once more, I disagree of course. I think 2010 has much more in common with 2008 then any other year, especially as both were very close in where they were on April 1, and both saw very large drops in sea ice from April through July. Divergence can do much the same as “strong storms” in breaking up the ice so it can melt more readily.
And so now we are really coming down to the wire, so it is getting a bit “fun” I suppose.
I suppose where we differ is looking at CO2 as being a “minor” GH gas. Certainly water vapor plays a bigger role, but it hasn’t increased 40% since the mid 1700′s.
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You can’t be serious that you would actually write this….LOL?
Oh….I see that you are…and that you did.
You just don’t know how to keep quiet for your own good at all, do you, R?
Right. I forgot.
To quote you from earlier in this thread: “Either way, I win.”
This post on a site by someone named Neven dedicated to Arctic Sea Ice speaks volumes for supporters of AGW. I’ve put the link to the site underneath. I’ll let the quote speak for itself.
“Extent melt rates have plummeted again after yet another extension of the adverse weather that is keeping the ice pack from converging towards the Pole. The month started out well with a small century break and some decent daily melts, due to an intensification of winds that were still blowing in the wrong direction but had an effect on the very mobile ice pack nonetheless. But this has reverted back to the state we have witnessed the past 6 weeks: Arctic skies dominated by low-pressure areas that increase cloudiness, decrease air temperatures and stall the Beaufort Gyre. The exact opposite of the conditions in 2007 that resulted in a record minimum extent.”
That someone can be happy to see increased melt and disappointed when conditions become adverse to ice tells you quite a lot about where their headspace is at.
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2010/08/sea-ice-extent-update-23-last-chance-for-change.html
Ooops. I meant to say adverse to ice loss in the last paragraph there.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 8, 2010 at 8:59 pm
punch cards…..IBM things,…8-inch floppies…magnetic disks. ..
They are prettier and much easier to use now. But I still think it’s funny that some people actually believe computers will “attain consciousness” some day. They aren’t any different than they were at the beginning they just have longer sets of instructions to follow that they do faster, with smaller parts doing the instructions.
Computers coming to life and co2 controlling climate; two things we should see on Myth Busters.
Re: David W says:
August 8, 2010 at 9:24 pm
Well, I dunno David, I’m one AGW sceptic who believes warmth and NW passage navigability would be great. Warmth is good, cold bad. I don’t know where you live, but you may come around to this thinking when you’re freezing it off this winter.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) said:-
August 8, 2010 at 4:45 pm
“After several months of reading the articles here and staring at the data ’til I got a feel for it, my gut gave me a number, 5.7.
As the season has progressed, I have seen confirmation of it in the trends. Now I want to be more hopeful, but I’ve learned throughout my life the problems from being too hopeful, but also what happens from not being hopeful enough.
So put me down for a 5.7 +/- 0.1 million km^2 minimum by the IARC-JAXA sea ice extent numbers. That’s my prediction.”
With about a month to go that’s not really very impressive, if you had made that 6 months ago then it would have been. Given your late start why not wait till September 1st :p
Andy
crosspatch said:-
August 8, 2010 at 8:39 pm
“Again, “melt” isn’t the best word to use because there is a lot involved besides just melt. I use the word ablation because it includes all sorts of different things that help to break up and disperse ice pack, especially storms, surf, and wind currents.”
What’s your terminology for after the minimum and extent increases again? Reverse ablation? Or do you revert to freeze?
Andy
I am a passer-by today and I find it interesting to seperate air temperature and sea surface temperature ( SST ) as two completely different thing while the reality is that they are correlated but in a longer sense.
My secondary education tells me that given an isolated environment, the water temperature and air temperature will get to an equalibrium eventually.
Given the air temperature is slightly above 0 for 2-3 weeks already, roughly 1-2 degrees lower than “normal”, the SST should start to fall or at least flattened the warming trend. I suppose this is the way why air temperature is important. Of course I always admit that sea current and sunshine are also important in shaping the SST, but I need to remind those who claim that SST is the “real” factor for melting about this fact.
The other thing that I find interesting is for those who claim a specticular drop in the next one and a half month to secure a very low NH sea ice extent, I would remind you those very low years are always accompanied with a large drop in early-mid August when the overall temperature is still comparatively high, this is a matter of specific heat capicity of air/sea transforming to latent heat capicity of ice melting. The reality is, given the air temperature is forecasted to be sub-zero near Arctic for at least another week, a realistic conclusion is that in at least another week, the ice melting mechanism is very much halted. Even the temperature is going to return to normal in say two weeks time, it will take time to restart the whole mechanism and with a lower overall temperature than it could be in early August. So reasonably it is realistic to say that the remaining part of the 2010 ice melting season is going to be at a slower pace than 2007,2008,2009.
Tim McHenry says:
August 8, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Well, I dunno David, I’m one AGW sceptic who believes warmth and NW passage navigability would be great. Warmth is good, cold bad. I don’t know where you live, but you may come around to this thinking when you’re freezing it off this winter.”
I hear where your coming from Tim but I’m not so sure Neven’s delight when he sees higher rates of Artic ice loss is due to him being a fan of warmth and an ice free NW passage.
….and possibly higher than 2005.
I think it will. I’ll put up 2 guesses, the latter one in September has the better chance to be right….I think.
DMi without my guesses, so my black circles don’t cover any parts
http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/6084/icecover201088.png
DMi with my guesses, the black circles
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/3491/icecover20108.png
It could hit the slightly aggressive downturn 2005 (the red line) took just before the middle of August. But if not that, then I’m thinking it’s likely to pass through the downturn 2005 took in the middle of September just before it hit minimum. So 2010 would be higher than 2005, which would be pretty interesting. 🙂
190 comments here today. Maybe Arctic updates should be everyday till minimum. 😉
I am glad I can read about the arctic here at WUWT.
Imagine a situation were one could get info about it in MSM only ….which relys on press releases from Hansen et.al. …… good grief !
From: AndyW on August 8, 2010 at 10:26 pm
True, I should have trusted my gut and posted this prediction well over a month ago. But this is my first time doing something like this, thus I was hesitant. Next year I should be earlier, but meanwhile I need to severely update my programming skills and learn statistics so I can analyze things better.
Although more than seven months before the minimum would be quite a stretch for a prediction. Just looking at the SEARCH outlooks you can see how even the professionals will adjust their predictions as the minimum draws closer.
BTW, what’s your prediction?
The satellite pictures of this iceberg (?) shows that it is stuck in the fiord with sea ice across the mouth of it. Looks to me as if it will stay there for some time whilst winter approaches and it will freeze in situ. Ice shelfs fracture due to storm surges not temperature. Ice becomes more brittle the colder it gets and the Arctic has has some cold da
This ice shard looks locked in the fiord and will be frozen in situ over winter. Ice becomes brittler the colder it gets and the Arctic has been cold this summer. Ice shelves fracture due to storm surges and this could have broken off due to just this funneling up the fiord and the ice breaking at an old crevasse. No problem.
David W,
You need to read more at Neven’s place, specifically the post on the alarmist’s dilemma. Basically, it is all about the difficult position that we alarmists are in. On the one hand, we think that – for example – the melting of the Arctic is a bad thing and the longer it takes the better; on the other hand, there is the thought that the only things that is going to prompt action to prevent bad things are things with significant symbology – such as the melting of the Arctic ice.
So we are trapped. If the Arctic ice melts slowly, that may be worse for the planet than Arctic melting rapidly. But the truth is that we do not know what will trigger action and what will trigger bad things. Hence, the dilemma for us.
To be fair Steve, its pretty tough to judge the accuracy of ice thickness without a more refined regional chart. They did get the direction of the currents and most of the ice area correct.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/animate.arctic.color.0.html
Sorry, the link from my comment to the 30 day animation from the UIUC front page is broken; here’s the home page: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
Regarding the live-shot from the north pole camera:
A lead formed between the near buoy and the far buoy early in the summer. You’ve been able to watch the far buoy drift first to the left of the near buoy, and then to the right. I thought it might be interesting if this lead opened up, and we saw an expanse of water large enough for a sub to surface in.
Instead the opposite seems to have occurred. The lead has slammed shut with enough force to cause the ice to buckle in one place.
Maybe we will get lucky, and be able to watch the formation of a pressure ridge.