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.
” mikelorrey says:
September 13, 2010 at 5:47 am
Gneiss,
The sine wave model is fine, the issues you complain about that prevent perfect fit…”
This is quite similar to a simple pendulum, which produces almost a sine-oscillation for small amplitudes. For bigger amplitudes one has to do corrections to the sine. That used to be a very common method before the age of the computer (and still is).
I made the 1.0 million Square km Prediction.
On the basis of “freak” Weather, making wildy more difference than the trends.
– – 1.0 – – was Conditional on the Clouds staying away, like 2007, and _No one_ could tell me whether the Clouds would chase away the Sun & slow th e Melt – – or Not. They did. But with 2010 = the 4th Hottest El Nino in 61 years – – I had to Warn everyone.
The NEXT El Nino could be: (most will be #1)
1) An unimportant small ice-loss. And 2007-2037 will have 2 La Nina per El Nino.
2) 2007-repeat = Ice-death.
3) Volcano + EL Nino = super Ice Gain.
In short: I see it as a race between two “freak” year types..
Being in the “cold half” of the 60-year PDO cycle with an underlieing bias towards more La Nina – – means a single BIG GAIN year will ENSURE High Ice volumes for 50+ years.
So I see it as a Low-ice time, lingering, because Low Ice = more Sun … is balancing with La Ninas = more Ice.
The early 1950s had this too: 1947 was the turnover but 1954 the Low year.near the bottom: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/IDAO/index.html. The PIOMAS 340/year “trend” just gets overwhelmed by the 4000 km3 drop of 2007 – – or similar gains from an El Nino + Volcano year (La Ninas have too little moisture to be a “freak”).
– – 2013/14 – – could go either way.,
No ice – – or 50 years until another Low Ice Era.
Or, like this year “wait till next time”
Weather, not Climate.
wayne says:
September 12, 2010 at 9:53 pm
Wayne, do you think a body of water that size undergoing a massive seasonal energy exchange with geographically restricted external influence doesn’t produce its own weather to some extent? Entropy is a wonderful thing in both senses of the term.
So far it looks like a shortest melt season in the JAXA record.
– – Notice the LACK of Updates ?
Pips is 2 days behind on their Drift “forecast” & the whole Nansen/Norse/Topex complex is stuck on the 9th.Hamburg is still on August 31.
But Bremen is their usual day ahead (If you can reach them). Spt 13 is another Gain day.
Do you think the unsettled conditions have them “hiding” ?
PS the “slush” appearance is likely from the passing Gale breaking up Very Thin ice.
JAXA Dailies + my mini-Ice-Drift forecast based on http://www.wetterzentrale.de/topkarten/tkecmnh.html
Daily: ___________2007___ to___ 2010__&__(2009__2008
Spt_10-11______ – 25,650_____ +33,593___(-19,219__-_
Spt_11-12______ – 15,569_____ +14,000p__(-_9,531_-_
Spt_12-13______ -_4,219 ___(Anti-Dipole)_(09 past Minimum
Spt_13-14______ – 32,500_____ – weird __
Spt_14-15______ – 23,437_____ – ?__? _(07=469 over Min
Spt_15-16______ -__157 _____ = High over Pole (clear?)
Confirmed JAXA 15% extent for Sept 12th: 5005000. Updated charts …
15-day: http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/8172/15day20100912.png
7-day: http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/4153/7day20100912.png
And here’s a better view of where we are perhaps …
http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/1469/15day20100912feboct.png
Phil. says:
September 12, 2010 at 7:38 pm
I have 2007’s minimum area at 2.9194391 million km^2…is my spreadsheet in error? That would put us more than 5.23% above the record minimum.
-Scott
Confirmed JAXA extent is a bit higher than the preliminary: 5.005e6 km^2, for a gain of 18594 km^2.
I’m still not convinced that we’ve reached the extent minimum. Reasons include (a) we’re almost sure to see a least a few more days of loss, (b) CT’s area went down yesterday, placing us only 5289 km^2 above this year’s minimum area on Sept 9 (though CT’s extent did increase ~12900 km^2 in one day), (c) I’m worried the recent stability/gains in the area are due to refreezes in areas already well above 15% extent and the regions of low extent are not refreezing and may actually be melting significantly, and (d) compaction is still a major possibility.
I’ll raise my confidence to having reached the extent minimum to 55% though. 🙂
-Scott
Whew ! so we didn’t fall off the edge of the pizza after all. Well scrub the kayak trip again. I think I’ll go get a beer and drink a Toast to JAXA, and DMI.
And for you chaps that may have nailed it; Skol !
Gneiss said:
Really Gneiss, 10-15 years back? Really? No evidence? Really? Most have abandoned the hypothesis? Really?
http://www.agu.org/journals/ABS/2009/2009GL038777.shtml
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122261152/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
http://www.springerlink.com/content/8415720180780275/
You may wish to rethink this…
I’m wondering, but have never checked, if the melt season is increasing in length. Wouldn’t this be a necessary progression for the Arctic ice “death spiral”?
Gneiss says:
September 13, 2010 at 5:03 am
Alexander Feht writes,
“So, Gneiss, close your eyes and repeat after me:
‘The world is pink. The world is pink. The world is pink…’”
Doesn’t work for me. Does it work for you? Is Arctic ice on a pink upward trend?
Yes, as a matter of 367 band visual, it is doing just that.
What do you suppose that ‘pink’ represents on those satellite images?
Using extent, area, or volume day to day wriggle averaging and saying that the smoothed trend is now related to recovery or a death spiral, or to poor parenting, is statistically untenable. Each wriggle up or down is, at that moment, related to weather and oceanic conditions entirely explainable without considering human CO2 emissions for the larger Arctic area and especially so for the specific Arctic.
To say that what has happened every day since what, 1998, and say that this particular string of Sun/weather/water affects on Arctic ice is significantly different than at any other time reveals the myopic vision we have of Earth. These days, Earth is commonly viewed in a space smaller than an 8 by 11 inch page, and talked about in terms of its changes within the life span of a single human. We are subconsciously led to believe one human footprint can cover the entire Arctic surface. However, if one were to place this data in a data base that includes the moment the Arctic area settled into its northern exposure to the Sun, a reasonable person would have to harbor doubts that these days are significant, statistically speaking, even without knowing the day to day wriggles of the past.
Not even my children in their doting years will have enough satellite data to say anything at all about trends other than it is the smoothed average of day to day wriggles. That is not to say that I am oblivious to Arctic conditions. I love the topic. But only because of the teleconnection between Sun/weather/oceanic conditions at the time of observation, and the reaction of the ice to those drivers at the time of observation.
I therefore prefer wriggles to smoothed data. Smoothed data hides the major drivers and inappropriately focuses our attention on pure speculation.
George E. Smith says:
September 13, 2010 at 8:44 am
It wasn’t me that nailed it.
I missed high by 1 million, and that’s what I get for following trends.
It’s all RGates fault, he made me do it (NOT).
It was fun, and I’m on for the Global Sea Ice Maximum > 21.5 M km^2.
Alexej Buergin says:
September 13, 2010 at 5:21 am
(And we were and still are talking about JAXA here, with some DMI and some ArcticROOS thrown in. US numbers are not trustworthy, UAH excepted.)
Uh, because of the conspiracy, right? And I guess the Germans are in it too…
DROPPING. LIKE. A. Oh. … ummm … well .. like a YOYO!!
I was right! 12% of us guessed a level between 2008 and 2009. But I can also correctly pick a coin flip every so often.
Guesses for next year?
Sometimes when working with complex systems it is better to ask what are the range of possibilities rather than making definitive predictions that may or may not turn out to be right due to any number of factors.
So the question on the table is will the arctic be ice free in 2013, some say yes and many here say no but what I would like to know first is: is it possible?
And here is how to answer that question:
1) (total mass of sea ice at summer minimum in gigatons) * (average temp of ice below 0 C) *(joules to raise a gigaton of sea ice 1 degree C) = additional joules required to melt the remaining sea ice
2)the amount of energy in joules that is not radiated back into space due to the addition of co2.
Leaving aside positive and negative feedbacks, weather patterns and cyclical anomalies, how the number from 1 relates to 2 will give a decent indication as to what is possible.
For instance:
If 2 is only 5% of 1 then it would be clear that 2 would have little impact. On the other hand if 2 is 500% of 1 then there is the possibility for a strong impact. Of course it may fall anywhere in between.
Anybody got some numbers they want to throw in the equations?
savethesharks says:
September 12, 2010 at 9:10 pm
R. Gates says:
September 12, 2010 at 9:33 am
I will be curious to see how AGW skeptics paint this year’s melt season.
=================================
Thanks for finally confessing.
You are not a skeptic. Not 40% not 5 %. There is no such animal.
You are a chicken little, Co2-demonizing alarmist, through and through.
You have no intention whatsoever of being open-minded and standing down when your 3 million or 4 million ice forecasts come in woefully wrong.
If you ever had the ability to admit you were wrong, it is now.
?????
The silence is deafening.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
______
My forecast for Arctic Sea ice extent minimum this year was 4.5 milion sq. km. It appears the the low may have been set (though I not completely convinced just yet). PIOMAS (Dr. Zhang’s estimate) was around 4.7 to 4.9, so they obviously were closer. Steve Goddard had been at 5.5 all season. So either way, both PIOMAS and I were closer than Mr. Goddard. It appears that AGW skeptics are busy buying different kinds of thread and getting their spinning wheels oiled up to try and spin this years lower extent than 2009 into some kind of tale that would show that the Arctic is “recovering”.
The essential truth of this season is that the Arctic continues on a long term downward trend. During the “bump up” in March ice extent and then well into April and May there was talk (among the AGW skeptics) of a big follow-on to 2009, with the extent maybe bottoming out at 6.0+ million sq. km. etc. this year. At the same time, I put out my 4.5 million sq. km. estimate. One thing I was pretty certain of at the time, there would be no follow-on “recovery” to 2009. The low solar irradiance during the long and deep solar minimum of 2008-2009 created the illusion that there might be some halt to the slide in Arctic Sea ice. Expect to sea more record global warmth and new record low Arctic Sea in the period of 2011-2015.
My main point of skepticism of AGW relates to 2 main areas: solar effects not related to Total solar irradiance (such as magnetic field strength and length of the solar cycle), and longer term ocean cycles such as the PDO. There is some remote chance that either of these acting alone or in combintation with some other cycle, could be creating the illusion of the kinds of effects we’d expect to get from AGW. This is where my 25% skeptical side comes in, but being 75% “warmist” I obviously think that AGW is more likely, and nothing that happened this year with the Arctic Sea ice has changed that stance.
Jeff P says:
September 13, 2010 at 11:15 am
I’ve thought about this a bit before, but haven’t run numbers previously. Lets do some ballpark calcs. For this, I’ll use 1983 as the starting year and assume that the ice was roughly at steady state then (bad assumption, but this is a quick and dirty calc). I’ll assume that ALL of the extra energy in the northern hemisphere from the CO2 greenhouse effect was channeled to the Arctic sea ice (thus, no global warming, only Arctic melting).
1983 sea ice area minimum = 5.386929 e6 km^2.
Assume average thickness = 1.5 m
Resulting assumed volume = 8.08 e12 m^3
Assumed density = 916.7 kg/m^3
Resulting assumed mass = 7.41 e15 kg
Assumed heat of fusion = 333.55 kJ/kg
Resulting assumed energy needed to melt all Arctic ice = 2.47 e21 J
Now, onto the supposed amount of extra energy collected by CO2:
Assumed CO2 conc 1983 = 341 ppm
Assumed CO2 conc 2013 = 395 ppm
Calculated change in forcing factor = 0.7865 W/m^2
Assume average change half that (integration would be better) = 0.3932 W/m^2
Assume Earth’s radius = 6371 km
Calculated Northern Hemisphere surf area = 2.55 e14 m^2
Time (1983-2013) = 9.467 e8 seconds
Final calculated extra energy from addition of CO2 = 9.49 e22 J
Note that this is a whopping 38x what is needed to melt all the ice. Now, clearly there were a lot of assumptions in this calculation. The biggest is that the earth didn’t warm at all (in temperature). To correct for this, we could take the average NH temperature increase times the average “heat capacity” of the earth’s NH surface and atmosphere. This would give how much energy went into the heating up the NH and subtract that out from the above numbers.
Any comments on this calculation?
-Scott
Scott says:
September 13, 2010 at 7:57 am
Phil. says:
September 12, 2010 at 7:38 pm
Amazingly accurate: lowest so far this year 3.0721295, 2007 2.9978635 about 2.5% above the record minimum.
I have 2007′s minimum area at 2.9194391 million km^2…is my spreadsheet in error? That would put us more than 5.23% above the record minimum.
No you’re right, there was a double minimum and in my haste I copied the wrong one. The point still stands that this year’s area finished very close to the 2007 record as did 2008, and any one saying “about 3 just above the 2007 record” in February has hit the nail on the head. Note that this year is also showing a double minimum and could yet go lower:
3.1467891
3.1098619
3.0876937
3.0721295
3.1011343
3.0906556
3.0774183
Alexej Buergin says:
September 13, 2010 at 5:21 am
” Phil. says:
September 13, 2010 at 4:37 am
Clearly he was not since “2010 summer sea ice mimimum will come in right around 3 million sq. km, but a tiny bit above 2007′s summer minimum” must refer to CT area since the JAXA minimum was 4267656!”
I thought the poor man was just mixing up the numbers 3 and 4.
Then you were wrong weren’t you! I’d like an apology for you insulting remark too, I’d get a 24 hr ban were I to say something like that about you.
So the worst forecast from February 2010 was yours, Phil. Nobody else stood so far beside their shoes.
No because my preferred metric is area and always has been.
(And we were and still are talking about JAXA here, with some DMI and some ArcticROOS thrown in. US numbers are not trustworthy, UAH excepted.)
Those are your biases which I don’t share, I prefer those that use the higher resolution more reliable platform, CT for area and JAXA and Bremen for extent.
Once again RGates, you resort to CO2 as the unmentioned cause but fail to explain how CO2 has become involved with the day to day and year end Arctic ice data. I visit Arctic weather, jet stream, and oceanic current conditions regularly from which I can make an educated guess as to what the sea ice will do that day under those conditions. Not once have I had to say, golly, CO2 must have been “wut dun it”. If day to day conditions are entirely related to natural processes, how can you say that this minimum or that minimum is related to anthropogenic conditions, much less make predictions? Each and every minimum has naturally occurring conditions over the melt and freeze up season that explains it.
If you believe that CO2 is the driver of the trend, kindly explain how, with equations and measurements of CO2 either causing incoming oceanic temps to rise and/or air temps to rise over the Arctic outside the average range to the extent that it is the overriding driver, and not natural variations.
If you ask me what I think happened or what the driver was this year, I will give you a synopsis of the natural conditions that occurred this summer and you will also easily see my point.
Pamela Gray says:
September 13, 2010 at 10:15 am
Each wriggle up or down is, at that moment, related to weather and oceanic conditions entirely explainable without considering human CO2 emissions for the larger Arctic area and especially so for the specific Arctic.
Great! What, then, are the conditions which explain this? I know I would love to have the answers. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seasonal.extent.1900-2007.jpg
Assumptions make for very poor models. Scott, your calculations can easily be substantiated as pure fiction. Why? Your model does not even come close to observations of air, land and SST in the Arctic. The reason? Your model does not take into account pressure systems, between cells as well as vertically. Pressure systems are the primary driver of air temperature circulation. Air coming into the Arctic will, if vertical pressure gradients allow it, will push the normally cold air out. Air going out of the Arctic will leave a pressure void, allowing air from somewhere else to fill the hole. As a side affect, the sea ice goes where the wind tells it to, and sometimes that is towards the Arctic where it compacts, or out of the Arctic where it melts. The former still has melt happening but not as much, and volume is either stable or building. The latter melts it like an ice cream cone in a toddler’s hand and volume is unstable or decreasing.