Our one stop shopping Sea Ice Page has quickly become a world wide favorite, and Joe Bastardi of AccuWeather uses some of the graphics offered there.
To watch the AccuWeather broadcast go to:
http://www.accuweather.com/video.asp?channel=vbbastaj
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Steve Goddard writes that so far, “steady as a rock” and offers some interesting analysis:
At the beginning of June, I observed that the PIPS ice distribution in 2010 was very similar to 2006. The distributions were nearly identical, with 2010 average thickness a little lower than 2006.
Can we find another year with similar ice distribution as 2010? I can see Russian ice in my Windows. Note in the graph below that 2010 is very similar to 2006. 2006 had the highest minimum (and smallest maximum) in the DMI record. Like 2010, the ice was compressed and thick in 2006. Conclusion : Should we expect a nice recovery this summer due to the thicker ice? You bet ya.
Since then we have read seemingly endless hysterics by Joe Romm and government sources about record melt rates, and how clueless and ignorant my analysis has been. So let’s look at what has actually happened since June 1. The graph below shows JAXA extent since June 1 for 2006 and 2010.
Basically, they are two parallel lines. 2010 has tracked 2006 quite closely – just as PIPS said they should. There have been no major diversions from the pattern this summer. Summer 2010 has been almost a straight line. Apparently some bloggers “can’t see the forest for the trees.”
In the DMI record, 2010 has passed every year except 2005 and 2006. The only real question now is – will 2010 end up in the #2 or #3 spot?
Closeup below:
At the end of May, Mark Serreze and Joe Romm had a different take for 2010:
“Could we break another record this year? I think it’s quite possible,” said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
We are in the fourth quarter of the 2010 game. The score right now is :
Breathtakingly Ignorant* WUWT – 1
Experts – 0
Will the peer reviewed experts score at the last minute? What do you think?
* A term coined by Dr. Mark Serrezze
Icarus says:
August 9, 2010 at 11:50 am
Where is there any evidence of a ‘recovery’?
Lay off the kool aid. You’ll see it.
When I put in a Sea Ice Outlook, what was amazing to me was how little this strong El Nino/La Nina year impacted the other Outlooks.
Joe Bastardi: you should put in an Outlook.. As should Wayne Davidson. In September 2009 he stated, based on 25 years’ Arctic Experience: “If El-Nino persists till the spring, and La-Nina follows, ships at the Pole will wander unobstructed in August 2010”. http://www.eh2r.com/
El Nino = Hot = Me
La Nina = cold = Joe
Fast Nino/Nina Transition = Sunny skies = Wayne Davidson.
As this was an El Nino “Modoki” it faded more slowly than Normal, confounding Wayne, & the Indexes (CTI, ONI, etc) implied 6-to-9 weeks between the Clouds after June 26th & High Pressure = Clear Skies. The 6-week lagged High Pressure is here – – but so are the Clouds ! – – and the 10-day forecast suggests a return of the Low (but so STRONG it, oddly, ought to lose a lot of Ice through Fram Strait – – but the Cascade Melt I expected from the Sun heating the “Deep Blue Sea” – – a (9 week) delay till Aug 20 looks too late in the year to get Strong Sunlight.)
10-day forecast — click N. Hemis(phere) at http://www.wetterzentrale.de/topkarten/fsecmeur.html.
Daily JAXA:_______2007________ 2010_________(2009)__
Aug 7-8________- 75,625 _____ – 50,313 _______(-43,281)
Aug 8-9________- 83,750 _____ – 76,094prelim.__(-35,000)
Aug 9-10_______ -37,500 _____ – ?___ ? _______(-45,819)
As Steve predicted 2010 would “roll back” 2009, 2009 must make up 195,309 km2 real fast.
That looks as likely as my 1 million km2 Forecast.
OCEAN CURRENT STOP ? : RISK : net -3.5% = 6.5 % … and under 1% if the clouds hold 3 more weeks*.
* minus 0.1% if under 150K ice loss, .2 under 100K, 0.4% if under 50K//Add if Over 150K/day.
Richard M said:
August 9, 2010 at 6:20 pm
A lot of very patronising sounding comments unfairly aimed at Icarus. In there however there was a mention of the following
“I do believe just about everyone here already understands that Arctic sea ice has declined in the last 30 years. If that was your point then you have provided nothing that wasn’t already known.”
You need to tell Steve Goddard that because he has said twice in this thread that there was unusually high ice in the 1980s, so ice cannot been in decline for 30 years if you believe him. However I think you are both wrong, if you look at this
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
it seems ice has been declining from before the 1980’s and the 1980’s doesn’t look too out of the ordinary.
Richard M also said:-
“In addition, just about everyone here also knows the biggest part of that drop was due to the winds in 2007.”
That’s because that claim keeps getting spouted here, it does not make it totally correct. True winds did play a part, but as they were warm southerly winds from Siberia ice loss was due to melt (or ablation if the word melt makes you feel you have become an AGW supporter) as well as compaction. Coinsidentally, 2007 was also a very sunny year in the Arctic, which helped also with even more mel…ablation 😉
Yikes! After reading all the above comments I put “ice free north pole” into Bing.
I got 53,200,000 hits! Surely we are doomed.
(ps. Gaurdian was best. First ice free north pole in 50 million years.)
AndyW says: August 9, 2010 at 10:48 pm
“it seems ice has been declining from before the 1980′s and the 1980′s doesn’t look too out of the ordinary.”
Actually the ice has been in decline for about 9000 years. Once it was over 1 km thick covering much of the northern hemisphere, most of it is gone, maybe all of it will go someday, but it will be back. So don’t worry.
A one km thick slab of ice covering all of Canada is just as normal and just as natural as fruit trees, grasses and furry woodland creatures on Elsmere Island.
It has all happened before and it will all happen again, it is normal, it is natural.
AndyW
It was Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC who said that ice was unusually high in the early 80s. Why did you try to change attribution of that remark to me?
The 2007 event was primarily due to wind. I have written several articles detailing that topic.
RE: Icarus says: (August 9, 2010 at 11:50 am ) “Arctic ice appears to be declining consistently, in every calendar month:”
My best-fit, 5-line segment approximation of my unofficial calculated NSIDC anomaly plot still shows a strong recovery rate since 2007:
Segment-Dates Anomaly Seg-Slope Seg 1000 sq-km 1000 No. Start End Start End sq-km/yr 1 1978.875 1987.708 679.1 374.7 -34.5 2 1987.708 1990.466 374.7 189.8 -67.0 3 1990.466 2001.625 189.8 -117.1 -27.5 4 2001.625 2007.625 -117.1 -1029.2 -152.0 5 2007.625 2010.542 -1029.2 -593.4 149.4The internal break-point dates were automatically selected for best fit. All segments were required to have a minimum two-year duration.
I simplify my decimal dates for monthly data are as:
YearDate= [year] + ([month] – .5)/12
Steve,
What was the glitch last week in NSIDC’s ice measurements? I must have missed that one.
“Does anyone know whether a climate scientist (pro AGW) has stated on the record giving an outline of what would falsify AGW theory?”
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2008/05/falsifiability-question.html
A good start would be to build a physics based climate model that does a better job at explaining not only the current warming but also climate changes in the past, with a very low climate sensitivity. Good luck!
Icarus says:
August 9, 2010 at 11:50 am
You just provided it in your link. I suggest you look at the slopes of how lines starting at 2007 would look. Only a few years, but how long does it take before it’s considered a recovery? Many would agree 1 year is not enough data. 2 years is more in between. But year 3 now?…I would definitely argue it’s (the start of) a recovery if we bottom out above 2009 this year (not convinced we will yet).
For a graphical illustration, I suggest plotting x^2 from -10 to, say, 4, or plot sin(x)+1 from pi/2 to 2*pi. Would you argue with those recoveries?
-Scott
Hi Icarus
Thanks for reading my 17 links. Firstly I said about the IPCC that;
“…generally they view actual observations as ‘anecdotal.’
The main point being made was that we have this tendancy to believe that everything post satellite is entirely factual and anything before that always needs to be treated with great circumspection. Computer models and linear projections are a poor substitute for actual observations
I think you have summed up the situation in your inital paragraphs;
“Arctic ice, like everything else in the climate system, will inevitably experience natural fluctuations. No-one’s disputing that. The fact that ice has increased and declined due to natural causes in the past doesn’t in itself mean that the current decline is natural. Agreed?”
The fact-which you don’t appear to dispute- is that arctic ice comes and goes with astonishing regularity, sometimes melting for decades-as with the period from 1820 and 1920- and sometimes for much longer, as with the Vikings and Ipiatuk.
The fact-which again I don’t think you dispute-is that during the 1970’s there was a especially cold period as noted by Hubert Lamb of CRU, the Russians and the CIA. Whether the high point of ice coincided exactly with the advent of satellites in 1979 or preceded it by a few years is by the by. Ice has been mostly declining from this high point ever since.
Bearing in mind that arctic ice has this tendency to wax and wane, it makes the current situation the ‘norm’ rather than unprecedented. Why then do you believe this modern episode is out of the ordinary and caused by man rather than by the natural causes that have been the case many times in the past?
Whilst our records are less extensive for the Antarctic, Hubet Lamb believed-as I have come to as well- that ice levels in one hemisphere will increase as the other decreases. We sem to have been seeing this in recent times. I do not pretend to know the cause, just that it means total global ice is kept in rough equilibrium.
By the way I do believe the earth has been warming, instrumental records show this rise dates back to 1698 rather than 1880. James Hansen merely plugged Giss figures into the latter stages of this long rise, which has had numerous setbacks and advances along the way, but has clearly been occurring for many hundreds of years.
tonyb
Spector: I’m skeptical of your claim of a ‘recovery’ of Arctic sea ice extent. I have aggregated all twelve of the monthly Arctic sea ice extent graphs here:
https://sites.google.com/site/europa62/climatechange/arctic-sea-ice-extent
Surely if there was a detectable recovery from the long term decline in progress, we would expect to see substantially more than half of the monthly values above the long-term declining trendline, for at least the last few years… but we don’t see that at all. Taking the last data point for each graph, for example, we actually have only 3 points above the trendlines and 9 on or below the trendlines. How many years of consistently above-trendline values would we have to see, in order to have some confidence that there was a change from the long-term declining trend? I don’t know how to calculate this but intuitively I would think at least 10 years. What do you think?
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
August 9, 2010 at 10:17 pm
You have to take into account El Nino.
El Nino has been occuring for thousands of years, why would it now start increasing global temperatures? also La Nina have been still occuring, countering the warming effect.
Steve,
You claim “PIPS factors concentration into their thickness maps.”
There are three good reasons to doubt your bald assertion:
1. There is absolutely nothing on the PIPS website to indicate this. There are separate thickness maps and concentration maps, but no map claims to be a combination of the two that can be used to derive volumes. But maybe you have an email from the PIPS team to support your assertion.
2. Only by using both concentration and thickness can you get good agreement with the data on ice volume published by Posey from the PIPS team.
3. It you were right, then to derive a true thickness you would need to divide the presented “thickness” maps by concentration. But that gives ice thicknesses off the PIPS scale, way thicker than 5 metres.
4. Deriving volumes using both the thickness and concentration maps gives the relatively smoothly varying plots I presented. This is to be expected. While area is strongly affected by wind and currents, volume is not.
You certainly are very reluctant to combine thickness and concentration to derive ice volumes. I’m unsure whether this stems from an inability to do image processing on more than one image at a time with your proprietary software, or a dislike of what a proper calculation indicates.
Scott: The ‘recovery’ you suggest from 2007 is a recovery from an even more precipitous decline back to the merely steady long-term decline since 1979. It’s not even a recovery back to a stable state, let alone a recovery back to increasing ice extent. Look at the 12 monthly graphs of Arctic sea ice extent and tell me honestly if you see any significant number of points *above* the declining trendline in recent years, rather than below. You can’t. If anything, there are more below the trendline in recent years than above, indicating that the decline may be accelerating. Agreed?
Tom P,
If you look at the PIPS maps, regions of low concentration ice are clearly shown as thin ice. Compare the PIPS map vs. satellite images. Particularly, note the region near the North Pole.
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/pips2/ithi.html
Matt
On August 4 (the date of their last newsletter) NSIDC showed a downwards glitch in the ice which has since been corrected. Unfortunately that glitch is immortalized in their newsletter, and gives the wrong impression about the state of the ice.
The video below shows the changes since the newsletter came out.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg0EJ6z3qcA]
“Teacher! Leave them kids alone…”
Stevengoddard, I used to sing that song to my students in the eighties.
George E Smith: “So I had to map out my own drainage ditches…have stepped in a few myself, but seldom the same one.” Classic case of Karl Popper’s Searchlight Theory of Learning. No question it’s been effective in your case. Must say I’ve gleaned a bit from your musings these last couple of years.
Steve you wrote :-
“unusually high ice conditions of the early 1980s.”
so I thought you agreed with him? ie the downward trend we see on NSIDC’s graphs is not due to a deathspiral but actually just return from very high values in the 1980’s. But I guess you don’t agree with that like I don’t.
Andy
From: Tom P on August 10, 2010 at 5:34 am
Reality check.
Your “summary” graph:
http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/2114/volumes.png
It shows volume increases during the melt season. If you have properly accounted for concentration etc as you have claimed, then there must be some reason why the Arctic gained sea ice during the melt season. Please supply additional info as to how such volume increases occurred.
Steve,
You claim “If you look at the PIPS maps, regions of low concentration ice are clearly shown as thin ice.”
Areas of thin ice are to be expected to be more prone to breakup in open conditions, and hence tend to have low concentration. But look at NW of Baffin Island which has concentrations above 80% of the thinnest ice in a nearly landlocked sea.
This all hardly implies that PIPS ice-thickness maps somehow incorporate concentration while for some reason not mentioning this anywhere.
The video below shows the changes since the newsletter came out.</i?
Must be that new fade cream.
AndyW says:
August 10, 2010 at 6:55 am
Steve you wrote :-
“unusually high ice conditions of the early 1980s.”
so I thought you agreed with him? ie the downward trend we see on NSIDC’s graphs is not due to a deathspiral but actually just return from very high values in the 1980′s. But I guess you don’t agree with that like I don’t.
Andy
———————————————————————————————
I certainly won’t try to speak for Steven Goddard.
But I’ll say that to say “unusually high ice conditions” isn’t right. It wasn’t unusually high. The earth had cooled from ~1945 to ~1976 and that created a larger ice mass at the Arctic that lasted into the 80’s. It wasn’t unusual because the earth always warms and cools and the mass of Arctic ice always increase and decreases. So the early 80’s weren’t unusual. It was usual.
There is a problem though, something that really is unusual, with comparing Arctic ice today after a natural warming time from ~1976 to ~1999 that caused Arctic ice mass to decrease to a time when it had increased and then concluding the difference is from ‘global warming’.
Icarus says: (August 10, 2010 at 3:55 am) “Spector: I’m skeptical of your claim of a ‘recovery’ of Arctic sea ice extent. I have aggregated all twelve of the monthly Arctic sea ice extent graphs here:”
Recovery, per se, is yet to occur. My curve indicates that a line with a relatively high positive slope or recovery *rate* best fits my reduced data since 2007.625 and that a break-point at that date provides the best fit of recent data.
I have taken the NSIDC monthly arctic sea-ice data and re-ordered it to create a simple sequential time record. My unofficial anomalies are calculated by subtracting a calculated Fourier series approximation of the annual melt-freeze cycle automatically averaged over the largest available central integer year period.
kadaka (KD Knoebel)
The underlying data input into PIPS 2.0 is from microwave satellite observations of the Arctic. These are bound to have day-to-day variations irrespective of any changes in the ice due to weather conditions that interfere with the measurements. Hence some jitter is always to be expected. On top of that, there are variations in the ice extent itself which depend on winds and current as well as melt. JAXA average over five days to reduce these effects. The ice volume calculations show much less variation, although they will still be prone to noise in the measurements.
Therefore it’s hardly surprising that the volume plots don’t decrease each and every day, but it is notable that they are much smoother than the corresponding plots of ice area.