Antarctic sea ice today from the University of Bremen, on track for a new record high this year:
From Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry:
“Our finding raises some interesting possibilities about what we might see in the future. We may see, on a time scale of decades, a switch in the Antarctic, where the sea ice extent begins to decrease…”
Resolving the paradox of the Antarctic sea ice
While Arctic sea ice has been diminishing in recent decades, the Antarctic sea ice extent has been increasing slightly. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology provide an explanation for the seeming paradox of increasing Antarctic sea ice in a warming climate. The paper appears in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science the week of August 16, 2010.
“We wanted to understand this apparent paradox so that we can better understand what might happen to the Antarctic sea ice in the coming century with increased greenhouse warming,” said Jiping Liu, a research scientist in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
For the last half of the 20th Century, as the atmosphere warmed, the hydrological cycle accelerated and there was more precipitation in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. This increased precipitation, mostly in the form of snow, stabilized the upper ocean and insulated it from the ocean heat below. This insulating effect reduced the amount of melting occurring below the sea ice. In addition, snow has a tendency to reflect atmospheric heat away from the sea ice, which reduced melting from above.
However, the climate models predict an accelerated warming exceeding natural variability with increased loading of greenhouse gases in the 21st century. This will likely result in the sea ice melting at a faster rate from both above and below. Here’s how it works. Increased warming of the atmosphere is expected to heat the upper ocean, which will increase the melting of the sea ice from below. In addition, increased warming will also result in a reduced level of snowfall, but more rain. Because rain doesn’t reflect heat back the way snow does, this will enhance the melting of the Antarctic sea ice from above.
“Our finding raises some interesting possibilities about what we might see in the future. We may see, on a time scale of decades, a switch in the Antarctic, where the sea ice extent begins to decrease,” said Judith A. Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Volcanic activity up in Arctic, down in Antarctica?
Yin, yang. I could be wrong, but it is apparent to me, the earth seeks a balance. Polar ice isn’t the only instance.
Consolidating several of my posts from Sea Ice News #18:
The Antarctic Oscillation (AAO) appears to be a significant contributor to the current record high Antarctic Sea Ice Extent:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot_hires.png
In July 2010 the Antarctic Oscillation (AAO) had its 2nd largest positive anomaly in the historical record, following only May 1989:
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/aao/monthly.aao.index.b79.current.ascii.table
Note that when viewing the top 15 largest positive anomalies in chronological order:
1979 June 1.70
1979 July 2.41
1985 July 1.91
1989 May 2.69
1989 June 1.99
1993 July 1.96
1994 August 1.91
1998 April 1.93
1999 May 1.64
1999 Oct 1.65
1999 Dec 1.78
2006 May 1.70
2007 Dec 1.93
2010 July 2.42
2010 June 2.07
2 occurred in 1979, 2 in 1989, 3 in 1999 and 2 thus far in 2010, indicating that there is a decadal aspect to the Antarctic Oscillation (AAO).
From a visual perspective:
Here is a animation of the Southern Polar Vortex and AAO over the last month;
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/z500_sh_anim.shtml
Here’s an animation of a global view;
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/z200anim.shtml
and here is an animation of the Northern Polar Vortex and Arctic Oscillation (AO) over the last month:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/z500_nh_anim.shtml
Here is some background on the relationships between several of the Global Atmospheric Oscillations;
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SyNZdbGlSxAJ:scichina.com:8080/kxtbe/EN/article/downloadArticleFile.do%3FattachType%3DPDF%26id%3D418397+correlation+aao+decadal&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a
I am trying to make sense of the atmospheric temperature anomalies reported by the NCEP Climate Data Assimilation System (CDAS) over Antarctica:
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/temp10anim.shtml
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/temp30anim.shtml
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/temp50anim.shtml
Is the large positive anomaly over Antarctica indicative of what occurs when the Antarctic polar vortex breaks down;
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/z500_sh_anim.shtml
and non-polar air penetrates? Is a portion of the anomaly associated with latent heat being released due to rapid and expansive sea ice formation? Is there another atmospheric temperature data set that these anomalies can be compared to in order to assess their accuracy?
As Eric Says:
This increased precipitation, mostly in the form of snow, stabilized the upper ocean and insulated it from the ocean heat below.
How come snow on the top insulates the ice from the heat below? Wow!!
How can someone refute such solid science? We’ve lost the debate…
For anyone that cares… using the numeric keypad [ALT] 248 yields ° as in 30°C and [ALT] 247 yields ≈ as in ≈0.3°C.
This public service announcement was brought to you by Water™.
Err, isn’t this part of the Earth’s ‘wobble’?
That is, the earth wbooles on its axis, so that sometimes the artic is relatively closer to the sun and melts slightly, while the Antarctic is relatively further away and freezes more water. The other end of the cycle has the reverse occurring.
I thought that was Polar ice 101?
GeneZeien says: August 16, 2010 at 8:27 pm
“Air heating water… challenging. Fellow ought to try warming his bath water with a hair dryer (take care not to drop it). Then try the reverse, fill a tub with warm water to heat the bathroom. Which do you suppose will change the temperature of the other 1 C first?”
Exactly so. Well said.
I would be interested in Prof. Curry’s assessment of McShane and Wyner 2010 and its potential impact on the GCMs upon which this paper relies. Would the moderators care to solicit her comments?
Tks,
RayG
cba says:
August 16, 2010 at 8:43 pm
…..more downward radiation……what can it do but evaporate more water, causing more convection and creating more cloud cover?
I’ve always liked this video, a lot, of Reginald Newell saying what you’ve covered. Reginald Newell worked for years at MIT as a professor ‘on the physics of the upper atmosphere, on past and present climate, and on global air pollution’, and at NASA as a meteorologist. He also ‘served as president of the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics (IAMAP) International Commission on Climate from 1977 to 1983 and was a member of the IAMAP Commissions on Meteorology of the Upper Atmosphere and Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Pollution from 1971 to 1983.’
What’s the difference in bare ice vs. snow covered ice between yesteryears and recent years? Also, is it really a strange notion to have snow in Antarctica?
If the Southern Hemisphere was a mirror image of the Northern Hemisphere and Earth’s orbit about the Sun was a circle and (insert any other condition not allowed to vary), and then the ice in the south did not track the ice in the north – an explanation would be in order. As the mentioned things are not true, why does anyone think there is an issue here? It is a WAL to invoke GHGs in such a different and complex situation about which we know almost nothing.
However, the climate models predict an accelerated warming exceeding natural variability with increased loading of greenhouse gases in the 21st century.
And this is where science and empirical data get off.
Until the climate models link up with the real world, they are just models, no different than any unproved theory.
One could just as easily have a model that predicts an accelerated cooling exceeding natural variability with decreased loading of greenhouse gases in the 21st century.
Well, where is the testing of the opposing theory?
You are brave to put this out there, Dr. Curry.
Dig us up some opposing theory/models and let’s get this PNS behind us.
“For the last half of the 20th Century, as the atmosphere warmed, the hydrological cycle accelerated and there was more precipitation in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. This increased precipitation, mostly in the form of snow, stabilized the upper ocean and insulated it from the ocean heat below.”
Really Dr. Curry worries me with this kind of sentences: she starts from an assumed connection that is in fact refuted by the meteorological facts. If indeed more precipitation has reached Antarctica it is because of the renewed strength of mobile anticyclones coming out of the continent and the increase of those. Correlatively, depressions have been deeper (the frequency of those deeper than 980hPa on western Antarctica is rising). That’s what brought an increase in precipitation as a result of energy gradient between colder polar air masses reaching further toward the equator and bringing lost of moist warmer air to the pole through advection channelized along the Andes. In fact there was a study few years ago confirmed this and showed that along the coast of Chile, temperatures steadily declined while along the mountain ranges temperatures were climbing. Paleoclimatology indicates that this circumstance is incompatible with a warming scenario as it shows an increase of contrast between the pole and the rest. In fact regional dynamic warming of the western Antarctica and its record snowfall are explained as well as the melting of some but not all Andean glaciers. And this stuff gets published in PNAS? Dr. Curry may be well inspired reading Leroux “dynamic analysis of weather and climate” Springer 2010 2ed. before putting the cart before the horses!
Eric Anderson says:
August 16, 2010 at 9:29 pm
There is a possibility that there is no continuance to warming, or even a plunge to cooling.
Note the lopsided nature of the Sea Ice that forms around Antarctica.
Keep that imbalance growing and you could make an argument for the wobble of the Earth to increase, nudging the axial tilt of Earth to what climactic end I dare not say.
Just another theory to toss on the barbie.
stevengoddard says: August 16, 2010 at 9:15 pm
“Temperatures in Australia have been running well below normal.”
Not in Melbourne – it’s been mostly mild. Here’s July nationally.
GeneZeien says:
August 16, 2010 at 8:27 pm
I’ve tried to make that point with all sorts of high-falutin’ terms like “Heat Capacity” and “Density”, only to get blank looks or derision. Your analogy is perfect – thanks!
ClimateWatcher says:
August 16, 2010 at 8:48 pm
There could be another explanation – the additional CO2 is cooling Antarctica.
Yes, cooling.
See:
http://acmg.seas.harvard.edu/people/faculty/djj/book/bookhwk7-1.gif
In the tropics and mid lat(top two plots), CO2 presents a ‘dip’ in the emissions.
CO2 emits to space from the stratosphere at a lower temp than the surface, thus reducing loss to space.
In the Antarctic ( bottom plot ), CO2 presents as a ‘bump’ up in emissions.
CO2 emits to space from the stratosphere at a higher temp than the cold Antarctic
surface, thus INCREASING the loss to space – cooling the Antarctic.
Incidentally, the same principal pertains to high clouds:
http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~folkins/Cloud-LWspectrum.jpg
Cooling from high clouds and the Antarctic may be what’s limiting heating elsewhere.
Marvellous – so CO2 causes both warming and cooling, is there any phenomenon actually ruled out by current CO2 theory?
Empirical scientists would like to know.
BTW: Not missing a tropospheric hot spot are you, or some Long Wave radiation as measured by the ERBE and CERES satellites, and how are those model projections holding up vs the actual temperature record? Hmmmm?
In all seriousness – how on earth do I distinguish your all warming all cooling CO2 theory as an actual falsifiable scientific theory and not quakery?
As I said – please rule some phenomena out – then we can measure it and see how your theory stacks up. – anything else is nonsense.
Given that there is both sea ice and blue ocean, neither phase has the upper hand. If there is some swing one way or the other in the volume of ice vs blue ocean, would that really surprise anyone? Makes me want to slap my forehead and say “duh”. So I will.
Why is normal not seen as normal for these people? Maybe we should try the old trick of shouting of “Hey! The climate is variable!” Might knock them off their roosts long enough to take a few reading for a few decades to discover the trends, long and short.
I can’t help but wonder how damaging it is to rational thought that the satellite record began only in 1979 and not 1650. I’m certain that there is an entire generation that believes that time frame defines “normal” for polar ice. Does anyone really know what the actual tonnage of polar ice should be for August, 2010? I think not.
The good news is, in 30 years people around then will look back and wonder why we thought we had any say in their world. For perspective, how much sway does Hirohito, Stalin, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, or De Gaul, have today? Zip, maybe? I think so, and yet they were running the world in their day. How dated. Hansen will fade to a bullet point in a high school paper soon enough.
Current GCM’s have blown seasonal forecasts left & right.
To now trust them as they predict continued warming would be to ignore failed testing.
Buggy software does not sell very well. Witness Windows ME and Vista.
Both were flops, people hated them, and they cost Microsoft.
I want to see the Linux versions of GCMs: Open source.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
August 16, 2010 at 10:32 pm
Your video caused me to search Newell, and I found this:
“Reginald E. Newell, Jane Hsiung, and Wu Zhongxiang of MIT,
along with colleagues from the “British Met,” as they call it,
have collected and analyzed these data. MIT Press intends to
publish them in the Global Ocean Surface Temperature Atlas. One
of the most striking results suggested by the data is that there
appears to have been little or no global warming over the past
century.”
(1989)
http://www.fortfreedom.org/s47.htm
Quite a difference from CRU
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
Phil must know more about temps 1900-1989 than the MIT guys did in 1989…or
Perhaps I have missed something here. I wounder if Ms Curry has found the missing heat that Dr. Pielke Sr. was talking about a few months ago? Maybe she forgot to tell us.
Sorry, but may I suggest a correction to your ANSI codes? My ANSI sheet says and yields the following. ALT+0176=° [degree symbol]; ALT+0248=ø; and ALT+0247=÷
This is one way to get aligned with what will likely happen, and still pretend to believe in warming for a few decades.
“increasing slightly” ………. let’s just say it’s in a “Life Spiral”
“We wanted to understand this apparent paradox so that we can better understand what might happen to the Antarctic sea ice in the coming century with increased greenhouse warming,”
…….. So they should explain why the same effect does not take place in the Artic.