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 13th: 5008750.
15-day: http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/5229/15day20100913.png
7-day: http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/6070/7day20100913.png
2010 Minimum = 4952813, Sept 10 (To Date)
2009 Minimum = 5249844, Sept 13
2008 Minimum = 4718594, Sept 17
2007 Minimum = 4267656, Sept 16
2006 Minimum = 5781719, Sept 14
2005 Minimum = 5315156, Sept 22
2004 Minimum = 5808750, Sept 19
2003 Minimum = 6032031, Sept 18
2002 Minimum = 5646875, Sept 09 (No Data 12-21).
RGates and others may not understand what I am trying to say. Presenting information on extent, area, or trends, as if that alone explains it, is data rich but information poor. Daily weather charts, which I read, along with satellite observations of forecast accuracy, are very informative. Over time, weekly, monthly, and seasonal trends can be fairly explained, using data rich and information rich posts, as in the following example:
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2010/august
But to simply state what the data “did”, as RGates does in a previous comment:
“Easy. Summer sea ice extent and area continues in the lower range set in the record year of 2007. This year saw the highest or second highest total amount of ice melt (from the March high to the September low), running very close on the heals of 2008. We had to suffer weeks on end of listening to certain folks prattle on about PIPS 2.0 data showing thick MY Ice that just wasn’t goint to melt this year…yet it did melt.
Look for more record low sea ice extent and area in the Arctic between 2011 and 2015. But the most important thing to look in the next few months is CryoSat 2 data forever changing our perspectives on sea ice thickness and therefore volume.”
…is information poor, in my opinion. Saying that, for example, 2009 is greater than 2010, does not provide the why. Daily Arctic weather systems analysis does and is provided by several websites. So AndyW, If you want this information, read it for yourself. I’m not your mother.
Here is another very good forecasting web site. Some of the links are broken, but you can still get wave and wind charts, which can be used to estimate where the ice will be going.
http://www.aari.nw.ru/index_en.html
Alexej Buergin says:
September 14, 2010 at 3:23 am
” R. Gates says:
September 13, 2010 at 4:07 pm
I never forecast 2.5 million sq. km for 2011. Please stop this nonsense.”
“R. Gates says:
February 9, 2010 at 11:28 am
Prediction: Summer sea ice minimum of Sept. 2010 will be lower than 2009 or 2008, but not as low as 2007. However, 2011 summer arctic sea ice minimum will be at a record low of somewhere around 2.5 million sq. km.”
You write too many comments, much too many, and many are too long. If you would limit yourself to what is essential, it would unclog this blog and help your memory.
______
I do stand corrected. I did make that comment last February, and was so certain I didn’t because it is not my belief. I didn’t elaborate completely what I intended at the time, and since that time I’ve made many more comments stating that between 2011 and 2015 I expect to see the minimum drop to the 2.5 million sq. km. range. It could happen next year, but I think the probability of it happening between 2011-2015 gets progressively higher as we approach Solar Max in 2013. In terms of actual numbers of posts here on WUWT, I would guess that you exceed me by a fair amount, but I always appreciate your perspectives, and I’ll make sure to keep my posts shorter.
While a year by year recovery since the low of 2007 is not following a nice neat path, I would have to say that the death spiral appears to have stalled. One of the reasons I think this might be the case is the amount of wind driven compaction that has occurred both in 2007 and in most years following. The ice built up between Alaska and Russia quite heavily and was slow to melt compared to other years. The waters there have also been anomalously cold, adding to the slowed melt in the beginning. I also think because of the dipole, ice was not spread out as much as in other years due to the more northerly wind direction keeping the slide shoot out Fram Strait fairly slow but also pushing the edge further north than usual. However, the retention of ice has also been hampered by that same dipole which tends to bring warmer temps into the Arctic. And finally, incoming currents from the Atlantic have been warm, melting the edge along the ice that was wind driven towards the pole.
AJB says:
September 14, 2010 at 7:37 am
2010 Minimum = 4952813, Sept 10 (To Date)
2009 Minimum = 5249844, Sept 13
2008 Minimum = 4718594, Sept 17
2007 Minimum = 4267656, Sept 16
2006 Minimum = 5781719, Sept 14
2005 Minimum = 5315156, Sept 22
2004 Minimum = 5808750, Sept 19
2003 Minimum = 6032031, Sept 18
2002 Minimum = 5646875, Sept 09 (No Data 12-21).
I’m just curious what the perception of the “trend” would have been if the 2009 minimum had come in at, say, 4,850,000 or some other number between the 2008 minimum and what is more and more looking like the 4,952K minimum this year.
My guess is that it would be perceived as decent evidence of a possible reversal of the long term downtrend, whereas the strong year last year and the failure to top it this year is viewed less so. That is, we had a quite strong recovery in 2009, but don’t top it this year so the argument for a trend reversal is diminished somehow. Not sure this makes sense, but that seems to have been the result.
(Like R. Gates, I tend toward long posts so stop reading here if they annoy you.)
My personal experience with weather/climate correlates quite well with the readings in the Arctic, by the way. Here in SW Wisconsin, I’ve shoveled snow off a pretty large driveway each winter for about 15 years now and I spend a fair amount of time cutting wood during the winter as well. Up until the winter of 2007/08, winters were getting progressively milder, to the point that I began to fear we’d start experiencing an in-migration of population if it improved much further. Winters had become quite mild with snowfalls few and far between. Sap would run several times in box elder trees during the winter months when cutting them down.
That changed dramatically in 2007 when winter brought snow early that stayed late and the number of snowfalls increased. I hoped it was “weather” and would return to trend in 2008, but alas, we’ve now had three winters in a row that I would view as the “old-time Wisconsin winters.” Another four or five years of this and I’ll start figuring that we’re going through a climate change around here, at least in the wintertime. The deer population has suffered too, as the solid snow covering has had an icy crust under it each year that persisted during the entire winter making it difficult for the herd to forage. Wisconsin hunting statistics are now reflecting the drop.
Those two ships attempting to circumnavigate the Arctic had better pick up speed.
Ah poor Grant Foster over at Closed Mind cannot post critical comments, what a CSP. All I said was (on his “Death Spiral” post) “Wow, a linear trend prediction on July26th! Tamino, put out your prediction for 2011 and if you are within 5% we all can be impressed.” That is why blogs like this flourish and ones like his remain boring and unpopular, echo chambers are like that.
AJB says:
September 14, 2010 at 7:37 am
A few corrections for you AJB:
2008 min was 4707813 on Sept 9
2007 min was 4254531 on Sept 24
2004 min was 5784688 on Sept 11
If you’re using a Excel, I suggest using the “min” function to pop out the minimum value. This won’t give you the day, so I suggest going into the data (hopefully organized in some way) and bolding/changing the color of the text of the minimum value so you can easily distinguish it and know what day it happened. Some other programs (such as LabView) can give you the corresponding day along with the minimum value simultaneously (does anyone know how to make Excel do that?…it’d save me time in the future at my job).
By the way, with confirmed JAXA number is indeed a bit higher than yesterday’s, but I’ll leave my confidence of having reached the minimum at 70% (what’s the deal with the downtick in DMI’s 30% extent?).
-Scott
NORSEX must have figured out that their 15% extent measurement was 1,000,000 km2 above everyone else and decided to rectify the situation the easy way. Just put it there. (Just kidding, but does anyone have an explanation for the graph below?)
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_ext.png
Rod
Richard Sharpe says:
September 13, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Hmmm, did the extent increase again today?
Yes you’re quite right, it did (current level 13 Sept, 5.009 M km2).
I think the NANSEN arctic-roos site:
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic
is demonstrating a failure of some sorts in the
Daily Updated Time series of Arctic sea ice area and extent derived from SSMI data provided by NERSC.
Pamela Gray says:
September 14, 2010 at 9:33 am
Those two ships attempting to circumnavigate the Arctic had better pick up speed.
Icebreaker escort, I hope, or at least rescue at the ready, standing by in case of mishap.
With all these hyped reports of an ice-free Arctic piece of cake sailing, the door is wide open to disaster.
Where are they currently?
rbateman says:
September 14, 2010 at 10:17 am
I think the NANSEN arctic-roos site:
and
Rod Everson says:
September 14, 2010 at 9:48 am
We’ve finally hit it…the tipping point. Ice is just falling off a cliff because it was so thin. It’ll all be gone in just a few days! It was indeed worse than we thought!
Seriously though, I think it is just noise in the “unfiltered” results and will be corrected within a day or two…
-Scott
The continuing trend of losing sea ice is consistent with a thawing planet. The sudden expansion of ice 11,500 years ago was an anomaly, and followed a very warm period. Regardless of the increase or decrease in solar activity, regardless of the increase or decrease in CO2, the planet will continue to thaw until it reaches the thermal equilibrium seen as recently as 65 million years ago.
The ice may suddenly advance again if the Atlantic temperatures become too hot, thus causing an Arctic hurricane, as it apparently did 11,500 years ago. Right now, we have nothing to worry about in terms of a sudden advance of ice (glaciers covering all of Eastern Canada and Northern Europe).
Even if the Sun is entering a new deep minimum, and temperatures drop worldwide causing the temporary expansion of ice at the poles, the ice advance will not cause the glaciers that covered much of the Northern Hemisphere in the past. Within 150 years, the Sun will return to the activity seen during the second half of the 1900s, and global thawing will continue to melt the poles, which is natural for the Earth (as evidenced by the extensive peat bogs in the permafrost).
Global thawing is not global warming in the sense of the planet being cooked. It is simply the gradual return of heat to the polar regions; a process which has been in progress for nearly 65 million years because of the meteor associated with the Chicxulub crater.
(Fishnski quote yesterday)
..I’m thinking that there will be a very small increase when we get the new #’s & i’m also looking for a good increase in snowcover in the next couple of weeks to fuel the cold factory..think positive (gains)..!
The Rocket Sturgeon strikes again!…Thought I was wrong till the update..didn’t ya?!!
Boost your confidence level to 100% Scott..its over Johnny…
R. Gates said:
“I do stand corrected.”
This behaviour is the correct path forward.
An understanding of the basic dynamic of the AGW situation, in that the proponents thereof are never in a position to be forced to provide this response to almost any contention they make is the very heart of the problem with AGW.
Skepticism rules.
It looks like Nansen just keyed in all the 2007 data for today’s date … dropped all the graphs straight down in area and extent to the 2007 levels in 12 hours flat.
That’s a heck of a good trick … Better than Mike’s trick even …
WUWT?
fishnski says:
September 14, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Do you really want snow on the ice to insulate it from the cold air above? Won’t that additional layer of insulation retard the growth of the ice below?
Nope, not yet. The behavior of the ice in 2005 late in September is still looming large. Can’t be overly confident.
-Scott
This is the graph that I’m inclined to think has the greatest bearing on the state of the sea ice the following summer. Since 2000, and particularly since 2005, the period from September through January has been much warmer than the 1958-2002 average. So far, that’s true this year as well, though only modestly.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Until the re-freeze season starts to experience colder than normal temps, or at least average ones, it seems to me that it will be unlikely that we will see minimum ice extents as high as were typical in the 80’s and 90’s. (Note that this says nothing about man causing it, however. It just seems logical to me that significantly warmer than normal temps will lead to less ice volume at the peak and therefore make lower minimums more likely, regardless of all the other factors in play.)
I meant the landmass snow cover Scott..The albedo effect I think you all call it. The faster we can get the ground to turn white especially over in Siberia where the “Real” cold is generated the sooner we can seal the deal (Ice cap).
I’m just hoping for another great snow season especially up in the WV Alpps..this is the only reason why I watch the Ice. I mean..if you don’t love snow & cold, who’s afraid of a little Global warming?..I would say BRING IT ON!!!
Scott says:
September 14, 2010 at 9:47 am
You are correct. Sorry everyone, did it in too much hurry.
Preliminary for the 14th = 4982969. 4952813 on Sept 10 still holding.
AJB says:
September 14, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Yep, a preliminary loss of 25781 km^2. Not too bad…I’m still placing a 70% confidence on already having hit the minimum. This time of year seems to have revised extents be higher than preliminary extents, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the final number is above 4990000 km^2.
I’ll be interested to see the area numbers after yesterday’s gain of nearly 50000 km^2, I’m guessing extent losses will be almost entirely due to compaction instead of melt, meaning it won’t matter much in terms of long-term condition of the ice.
-Scott
Pamela Gray said:
September 14, 2010 at 8:47 am
While a year by year recovery since the low of 2007 is not following a nice neat path, I would have to say that the death spiral appears to have stalled. One of the reasons I think this might be the case is the amount of wind driven compaction that has occurred both in 2007 and in most years following. The ice built up between Alaska and Russia quite heavily and was slow to melt compared to other years. The waters there have also been anomalously cold, adding to the slowed melt in the beginning. I also think because of the dipole, ice was not spread out as much as in other years due to the more northerly wind direction keeping the slide shoot out Fram Strait fairly slow but also pushing the edge further north than usual. However, the retention of ice has also been hampered by that same dipole which tends to bring warmer temps into the Arctic. And finally, incoming currents from the Atlantic have been warm, melting the edge along the ice that was wind driven towards the pole.
_____________________________________________________
A northerly wind would push the ice edge more southerly than normal not more northerly and assist ice movement out of the Fram Straight once the melt had reached that far. Given the northerly and north Easterly wind in the Bering sea at the start of the spring season I would expect it to reduce ice extent loss then as it would be cold air of course and also in a direction resisting the extent reduction.
At least you have finally come out with something though, even though incorrect! Last time I asked you you said your laptop had problems so you could get any data. You still didn’t hazard a guess on daily extent for today though.
Andy