UPDATE: 8AM PST 9/13/10 JAXA has updated with their final Sept 12th data, up for the second straight day there’s been a gain:
The latest value : The latest value : 5,005,000 km2 (September 12, 2010 final data)
While the vagaries of wind and weather can still produce an about-face, indications are that the 2010 Arctic sea ice melt season may have turned the corner, earlier than last year.
In the JAXA data, there was a gain of 33,593 km2 in a single day on 9/11/10 and another gain of 18, 594 km2 on 09/12/10 (final data):
09,08,2010,4989375 09,09,2010,4972656 09,10,2010,4952813 09,11,2010,4986406 09,12,2010,5005000
Last year, when I correctly called the turn, it was September 14th:
Arctic sea ice melt appears to have turned the corner for 2009
I wrote:
That is a gain of almost 26,719 km2 from the Sept 13th value of 5, 249, 844 km2 which may very well turn out to be the minimum extent for 2009.
And it is not just the JAXA plot that indicates a turn the corner bump for 2010. The DMI 30% extent graph is showing a very sharp uptick.
Here is the relevant area zoomed and annotated:
ADDENDUM: Last year’s DMI graph about this time had similarly abrupt uptick:
Temperatures at 80°N and above are now dropping quickly, after some delay:
The annotations are mine, the current temperature is approximately -5.5° C. I say approximately, as DMI doesn’t make the data available here, only the graphical output, so I’ve had to draw a line and estimate based on the coarse scale they provide. Seawater freezes at a temperature of -1.9° C (source here) but varies with salinity. Call it -2° C, but clearly now air temperatures are cold enough above 80°N to expect some refreezing.
The NSIDC Arctic extent plot shows the beginning of a flattening, but since their smoothing algorithm adds a reporting delay, we won’t see the turn (if it holds) until about two days from now.
NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice Extent – 15% or greater – click to enlarge
If it is indeed the turn, then Arctic Sea Ice minimum for 2010 will end up at 4,952,813 km2
I may make a follow up post and have a look at all the forecast players mid to late week if the turn is confirmed. Of course my forecast has been proven incorrect already, but then, so have others.
Polar weather forecasts suggest colder weather ahead, and historically, the timing is right for a turn.
One such indicator is the Arctic Oscillation, shown below:
Source, NOAA Climate Prediction Center:
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao.sprd2.gif
The forecast shows a deepening AO in the next few days, which traditionally means colder temperatures and a refreeze.
So, we’ll watch and wait, and I’ll update if the turn is confirmed.
Confirmed JAXA 15% extent for Sept 11th: 4986406. Updated charts …
15-day: http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/4927/15day20100911.png
7-day: http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/8793/7day20100911.png
A flash in the pan?
REPLY: [snip] Junior, that’s really, really immature bringing Joe Bastardi’s mother into the discussion. Take a timeout – Anthony
NeilT says:
September 12, 2010 at 10:39 am
Just goes to show you that the planet can surprise us every time. The only difference between my point of view and the POV on this site is that everyone here is waiting for it all to return to normal, whilst I’m just waiting for things to build up to the point where a blind beggar on the streets of Naples will know that it’s AGw that’s causing the Arctic Ice to vanish.
NeilT,
Define “normal”. Normal for the last million plus years has been the ice age regime. interglacials such as the Holocene are the exception. You imply that skeptics will never accept CAGW no matter what the evidence. I turn your implication around and ask what evidence would dissuade you from your convictions about CAGW. We skeptics keep seeing the warmists moving the goal posts as the tipping point keeps receding into the future.
I also took an even simpler minded guess back on the 23rd of Aug for a slow down after the 6th & a min on the 12th but I’m thinking that we will post another gain for the 12th & if it drops down the road it won’t get down to the 10th’s min..So the 10th it is!!?..I think that would be good news for a good recovery.
Well … Steve …
Regardless of what the alarmists may say .. I’ve found your exercise fun and enjoying. You were not wrong .. you were not right. Nobody can be wrong or right in a chaotic system … all they can hope for is that the “dice” end up on their number.
Aside from it all .. .there is NOTHING GLOBAL about the arctic. The Alarmists will for sure toot their little party makers claiming that the ice caps will be gone by next week …but the fact of the matter is …. ice extent etc is more dependent on the “weather” than on the “climate”. .. so tell the alarmists to stick that one into their weather isn’t climate category.
We in the South had the unfortunate luck of having a massive high pressure park itself on top of us for most of the summer. When someone shows me how CO2 effects High Pressure systems, that might peak my interests. But to be sure, our triple digit summer had nothing to do with CO2 .. it was totally weather.
Hope you don’t give up on your PIPS scheme, or the rest of your efforts. It’s been worth the read. …. a hell of lot more than thinking my SUV is killing the earth .. and that some Polar Bear is going to come and give me hug if I buy an electric car that likely wouldn’t even make it up the grade of my driveway, let alone pull my boat.
fishnski says:
September 12, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Definitely no certainty that the minimum was the 10th. As for a recovery, I think it’s pretty much a draw this year. Glass half full/half empty kinda thing.
-Scott
This has been my first season closely following the Arctic Ice Area and Extent numbers.
What this season has shown me is that localised wind and ocean currents play a huge role in determining the final result.
In the end though, warmer/cooler temps play their part. Irrespective of whether or not you trust global temp measurements, it was a very warm year and ENSO conditions did contribute towards significant warm SST anomalies in the Arctic. Under these conditions it was probably unrealistic to expect this years extent to beat 2009. It was significant that it did not go below 2008 though.
Looking at the transition into the last el-nina in 2007/8 I see similarities going into 2011 except at this stage we are going into a stronger la-nina cycle. The last la-nina lead to some quite cool SST anomalies in the Bering Sea going into the 2008 melt season. If we see something similar or more pronounced into 2011 then we will see very cool SST’s at least on the pacific side of the Arctic and from this presumably a higher extent.
I will be watching SST’s in the Bering Sea quite closely going into next spring and these will probably paly a major role in my predictions for 2011. If they are as cool as models are predicting or cooler, I will be predicting an extent over 6 million.
This year though ENSO conditions prevailed.
EFS_Junior says:
September 12, 2010 at 11:13 am
No, I am not Superman, and neither are you.
You didn’t bother observing what the 367 band has to say about present conditions.
If the temps don’t reverse real soon, the inevitable freezeup will occur and minimum will have passed.
Amazing what data can reveal if one simply takes the time to observe.
Do you have anything to discuss about that 367 data?
This years ice extent isn’t much different to what it was last year at this time, I don’t see any decline, there is more ice further from the pole than last year. I don’t know if the ice will continue to increase from here or not, or how fast it will grow when it does get past the minimum extent, I will take these things as they come.
With ice extent and area already at their third-lowest point in the satellite era, very low volume, and most of the multiyear ice gone, Arctic ice cover is not “recovering” by any recognized metric.
This year’s pattern has been consistent with a steep downward trend towards a seasonally ice-free or low-ice state, many decades sooner than the IPCC’s apparently too-optimistic prediction.
What has this got to do with man-made co2? Not one mention of co2, greenhouse or carbon dioxide on the NSIDC news page.
and in February
Now, I will be curious to see how R. Gates paints this year’s melt season As for 2011, 2012, & 2013 we have you on the record. There’s nothing wrong with predictions as long as you own up when you are wrong. You could still be correct though though. Let’s wait and see.
By the way where on earth [pun intended] did you get this “record amounts of CO2 and methane” from?????? Was it a typo?????
EFS_Junior says:
September 12, 2010 at 2:27 pm
REPLY: [snip] Junior, that’s really, really immature bringing Joe Bastardi’s mother into the discussion. Take a timeout – Anthony
___________________________________________________________
Yeah, I know it was w-a-a-a-a-a-y over the top.
But what was posted made absolutely no sense, the links had nothing to do with the current discussion.
Thus my “low brow” question and answer.
I’m still ROTFLMFAO!
REPLY: Still doesn’t excuse it, it was vulgar beyond anything I’ve ever seen here. An apology would have been appropriate. 24 hour timeout – All further posts until then snipped. – Anthony
Gneiss says:
September 12, 2010 at 3:50 pm
There is plenty of ice left up there, and it’s still the uninhabitable place it has always been.
4,900,000 square kilometers of frostbite.
Think of the endless vistas of frozen and the Cruiseline possibilities.
Oops, someone already tried that. Crunch. They got lucky, and were rescued.
If the stories of ice-free keep up, though, there will be the unlucky ones who will not live to tell about it.
Mere facts will never sway a true believer. I just watched a program on television where a comedian sailed the Northwest passage. He was prevented from doing so, but mentioned that the passage was successfully navigated by Amundsen over a century ago. It would never occur to a true believer that a repetition of a weather event from 1906 indicates a repetitive cycle of these things. The lack of heating in the oceans, or the atmosphere, is of no moment to a true believer. Do not expect a robust level of ice in the arctic to sway any of them either. If there has been no warming since 2004 then the globe is no longer warming. That is a mere inconvenient truth to the true believer. And I have been called evil for pointing it out.
Gneiss says:
September 12, 2010 at 3:50 pm
With ice extent and area already at their third-lowest point in the satellite era, very low volume, and most of the multiyear ice gone, Arctic ice cover is not “recovering” by any recognized metric.
This year’s pattern has been consistent with a steep downward trend towards a seasonally ice-free or low-ice state, many decades sooner than the IPCC’s apparently too-optimistic prediction.
============
You could have just said: “It’s worse than we thought”.
Climatic cycles be damned!!
Jimbo writes (and many others express similar sentiments),
“This is of course hardly any sort of ‘death spiral’.”
But it is. The spiral is still on. Can you name some actual Arctic scientists who disagree that the Arctic seems headed for a seasonally ice-free state, decades ahead of the IPCC predictions?
If Serezze had meant a monotonic decline he would have said “free fall,” not “spiral,” which is a more wobbly image — exactly as we are seeing. Serezze, unlike most commenters here, knows Arctic ice very well. Year-to-year variations depend partly on weather, while climate change drives the average down.
This year’s weak extent and melting of multiyear ice are totally consistent with that decline. They are not at all consistent with any return towards the satellite-period mean.
Michael Gersh writes,
“Mere facts will never sway a true believer.”
Indeed, but you illustrate your own point. Amundsen’s 1903-1906 voyage through the Northwest passage took three years, with three winters trapped in the ice. That does not resemble present conditions at all, much less give evidence for “a repetitive cycle of these things.”
[snip. you knew it was inappropriate. ~ ctm]
Gneiss says:
September 12, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Amundsen chose his timing, and spent a good portion of that 3 years learing from the Inuit.
He didn’t have GPS and Icebreakers to bail him out if he erred.
Gneiss says:
September 12, 2010 at 5:07 pm
“Indeed, but you illustrate your own point. Amundsen’s 1903-1906 voyage through the Northwest passage took three years, with three winters trapped in the ice.”
He only got stuck in the ice, because his satellite pictures got lost, dang that 1st mate! Also, by choosing store brand batteries, his GPS device died. He should have heeded those Duracell commercials.
Remember more people traverse the Sierr Nevadas than ever before so that also proves Global Warming!
Anthony, and of course Steve, an early thanks for a fascinating summer, I sure absorbed a lot of good weather, arctic geography, and physics from all of these weekly posts.
Speaking of physics, while following this summer’s melt I’ve toyed with some different views of the JAXA extent data and this one is quite intriguing:
IARC-JAXA without seasonal sine imprint
( my first attempt to link, hope it does work! I not this http://tinypic.com/9thh6w.jpg directly)
This graph is rather simple, it has the sine imprint AND the small linear downward trend both removed. Now from what I have always read about scientific data, if you view a data series and there is a definite pattern present or imprinted or of certain characteristic you just may be seeing an underlying physical reason for that pattern or repetition, but only a possibility of course. It is only the physics of it all that moves and melts this ice.
Now I don’t know about anyone else, but that chart has some peculiar lineups across multiple years and to great precision. And, in order for it to be physics behind this, both the energy causing the melt AND the wind forces must be considered. Now isn’t that strange? (but, it is just a curiosity so far) That graph didn’t look at all as what I imaged before making it, I assumed totally random noisy data with no real unusual attributes. I knew there would by a divot for 2007, higher points for the following years but not this same-amount-every-year type of points.
That graph also led me off into the toolies for I used it to calculate by those trend equations my guess of 6,125,000 for the final extent. Boy was I ever off! My slip, of course that was calculation the trend crossing, I should have subtracted the offset. Well, maybe closer next year. That is why this series of posts was so educational for us all Anthony. Thanks all.
REPLY: The tinypic site reports the image moved. Try again? – Anthony
Gneiss says:
“If Serezze had meant a monotonic decline he would have said “free fall,” not “spiral,” which is a more wobbly image — exactly as we are seeing.”
————–
This is the problem! People see wobbles where there aren’t any.
There is nothing wobbly about a spiral. Its progress in the y axis is uniform, it just rotates as it descends.
I imagine the expression originated with aircraft shot down in the (probably) WW1.
Not an apt description, but plenty evocative.
wayne says:
September 12, 2010 at 5:28 pm
=======
After all your hard work, I can’t see the links??
Gneiss says:
September 12, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Jimbo writes (and many others express similar sentiments),
“This is of course hardly any sort of ‘death spiral’.”
But it is. The spiral is still on.
_______________________
So when the “plane” (Artic Sea Ice) started it’s “death spiral” and got down to 4,250 feet (2007) then pulled up to 4700ft (2008) and up again to 5,210ft (2009) and lost a little altitude in 2010 at 4952ft (although not a final number) and you call that a death spiral?
Now I am not arguing that the short-term trend (yes 30 years is a short-term trend) is not down, it is, but your definition of a death spiral is inaccurate.