While not hugely significant by itself, it is interesting to note that the DMI 30% Arctic extent has reached its highest number for this date, exceeding 2006. The refreeze has been very fast:
Here’s the zoom:
The JAXA 15% plot show it equal with 2006, and a steepening slope:
JAXA AMSR-E Sea Ice Extent -15% or greater – click to enlarge
Correction to my previous postof October 13, 2010 at 1:54 am:
“It has been static since mid-September.” should have read “It has been static since mid-August”
My apologies.
Just a fun bit of trivia, but the revised JAXA 15% extent for Oct 12 has been posted and we are exactly tied with 2008 at 6664375 km^2. 2008 had marched up to this year quickly when this year’s growth slowed, and it even passed 2010 for a day (Oct 9). Now they seem to be running pretty evenly, but I’m guessing 2008 pulls ahead today or tomorrow and will stay ahead for at least several days. It also appears at first glance that we’re about to pass 2006 (we’ve already passed 2009 and 2005), but in the next 4 days 2006 has several large gains, so we won’t be passing it for another week or more presumably.
In terms of area, CT showed some funky behavior Oct 7-9th (showing almost no growth…even though their images didn’t indicate that kind of slowdown). I swear they skipped a day or something and added it back in later…I had to do some copying/pasting in my spreadsheet yesterday. Maybe I just missed a day in there myself and finally caught it yesterday. Anyway, 2010 is still ahead of 2008 in area, but I expect 2010 to be passed tomorrow.
-Scott
Günther Kirschbaum says:
October 12, 2010 at 3:35 pm
You are starting all over again in making yourself ridiculous. And people will fall for it again. It’s an easy job, but someone’s got to do it.
—…—
(Robt is confused. Who is the “you” that you believe is supposedly making “who” appear ridiculous? Twice this year sea ice extents has reached all time highs.
Yes, it is an easy job showing the flaws in the CAGW theories of catastrophic Mann-caused global warming.
By the way, is there any reason why the 30% ice plots don’t show a 1979-2008 mean? Is it because that data set doesn’t exist, or just because people don’t want to plot it?
doug,
I like the coinage “offsense”. But I’m having difficulty decoding the phrase, “offsense to moral thought”. (Or an “offense to moral thought”, for that matter.)
Scott says:
October 13, 2010 at 8:53 am
Just a fun bit of trivia, but the revised JAXA 15% extent for Oct 12 has been posted and we are exactly tied with 2008 at 6664375 km^2. 2008 had marched up to this year quickly when this year’s growth slowed, and it even passed 2010 for a day (Oct 9). Now they seem to be running pretty evenly, but I’m guessing 2008 pulls ahead today or tomorrow and will stay ahead for at least several days. It also appears at first glance that we’re about to pass 2006 (we’ve already passed 2009 and 2005), but in the next 4 days 2006 has several large gains, so we won’t be passing it for another week or more presumably.
In terms of area, CT showed some funky behavior Oct 7-9th (showing almost no growth…even though their images didn’t indicate that kind of slowdown). I swear they skipped a day or something and added it back in later…I had to do some copying/pasting in my spreadsheet yesterday. Maybe I just missed a day in there myself and finally caught it yesterday. Anyway, 2010 is still ahead of 2008 in area, but I expect 2010 to be passed tomorrow.
-Scott
_____________________________________________________________
UIUC did have an error in their area dataset a few days ago.
I and someone else emailed them of this error, here is their response;
“Everett,
Thanks so much for writing. Someone else noticed the missing data from a couple
days ago and alerted us about an hour ago.
We are working on rerunning the last few days and the corrected timeseries data
should be available in an hour, or so.
Thanks again.
Sincerely,
Bill Chapman”
Thank you, John F.Hultquist, for the info! I’ll look into that and if I can find the link again to the 1,000 year winter, I’ll post it. As a weather nut, I love to read up on precipitation events. I love snow and cold weather, so a cold winter is fine by me! As for global warming, a report of all Arctic ice being gone by 2030 scared the scat out of me, with the sea level rise stories, but then I wondered what if this is just a temporary melting of some ice (the 4x the size section breaking off of Greenland) and the ice is growing again below the surface. We math-incompetent (unfortunately, math and science didn’t agree with me) still love to learn, as long as it doesn’t involve us doing the calculations and computations! Scott (#63) and Z (#83) I love your bear logic! =)
Oops! John, the link you gave me comes up as not available. There are a variety of topics at http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov, so I’ll see what I can get from there in the general terminology. and I’ll look up the topics you gave me.
oldseadog says:
October 12, 2010 at 8:51 am
“A bit OT, but I have a friend who has visited Polar Bear country a few times, and he says that you have to carry a tobacco tin with two pebbles in it. When a bear attacks, he says, you shake the tin and the rattling frightens the bear.
Anyone tried this?”
If what I’ve heard is true, anyone who has tried it has only tried it once. Perhaps a better question would have been, “Does it work?” ;o)
EFS_Junior says:
October 13, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Thanks for the info EFS…I thought I was going crazy! I still don’t know if the numbers from those days make sense looking at the CT images (to me it looks like there should have been a slow, steady gain rather than a loss, some small gains, and then some bigger gains), but I figure with the uncertainty in area processing that could happen, and even if something is wrong, it’s just a day or two of slightly off data.
I’m just glad that I’m not scratching my head anymore trying to figure out what happened. 🙂 I’m still pretty swamped with work and some things at home, so I don’t have the time to dig into stuff like I’d like…following the numbers with my existing spreadsheets is the only time I have for this hobby right now.
-Scott
Well the ice behavior is certainly interesting; and I am sure we will know more as it gets into the main winter conditions.
The sea water would seem to need to drop to about -2.5 or so, to start freezing at normal salinity. I have in the past argued that once the surface water starts to freeze, the segregation coefficient for the salt species, causes massive amounts of salts to be expelled into the water at the growing interface; and this would have the effect of further lowering the freezing Temperature of salt water; so especially if calm water conditions prevailed, the start of ice growth would seem to hesitate; and further temperature drop would be necesaary to account for the higher interface salinity; so the atmospheric and water temperatures would have to continue to drop. Eventually, the temperature drop would be such as to nullify the smaller effect of lowering freezing point, and then freezing would be able to proceed apace; now with a much bigger temperature gradient between the sink (atmosphere) and the source (water) so the rate of conductive heat loss to the air cwould now be greater, so once the real freeze got going it would take off at a very fast clip; relative to what happens at the onset.
I imagine that if conditions were a bit stormier, so that the growth interface was cosntantly getting washed by water motion, that the salinity would not increase so much so growth would continue earlier but at a lesseer growth rate because of the smaller gradient. Well I haven’t worded that quite properly; but I think I have conveyed the concept.
So all of that dicking around, when this freeze started a while back may have assisted in theis somewhat wild regrowth rate.
It’s an interesting dynamical situation. And of course, I understand that thickness growth is slowed down by poor thermal conductivity of ice; but as far as ice extent, or area, I can see how it would take off so fast..
And I would still like to know more about the rejection of CO2 from the growing ice; which also ought to be rejected by the water per Henry’s law, and hence result in an increase in Atmospheric CO2 during the refreeze cycle.
I have asked Dr Steven Piper at San Diego; that oceanographic place there; aka Woods Hole west, who is a real CO2 expert about that; and he doesn’t like my conjecture; and says I need reprogramming; but he’s a very nice chap, who has been very helpful with atomic powered CO2 information.
Perhaps Ferdinand Englebeen could jump in with his thoughts; he seems to be very ice savvy to me.
Joanaroo,
That is odd about the link. I’ve been using Google Chrome. The site you show can be used to get to the one I show. On the left under Climate-Weather, click on El Niño/La Niña. Then in the list of links, click on Outlooks. Then under Expert Discussions/Assessments, click on the first link, which is the PDF suggested earlier. However, you might just try again or use a different browser.
For topics you can try the search box at the upper right on WUWT. Note under that is Ric Werme’s guide to WUWT (white letters on a blue background). That’s helpful. Also, near the bottom of Ric’s guide there are some formatting things of use to you if you want to post comments and have them show better.
Strange number for the 13th as it shows a drop of some 20,000+ (pre adjustment).
Grown rate plot updated to the 13th Oct 2010: http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/2447/13day20101013.png
The ice extent gain seems to have hit the buffers recently, perhaps the warm SST’s are putting a temporary brake on it?
Andy
AndyW says:
October 14, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Yep, the ice growth the last couple of days has been pretty pathetic. Yesterday’s growth was the third lowest in the JAXA record, the day before was the lowest ever, and three days ago also showed the third lowest ever for that day. In that 3-day span, only 2007 performed worse.
Unfortunately, CT’s area numbers haven’t updated the past couple days. Looking at their images, growth on most fronts seems to have severely slowed. Only the area on the far right north of Russia (sorry, I don’t know my polar geography to give a better description) has showed significant gains. The area on the left in the NW passage has frozen up quickly and solidly, but this has had little effect on extent because of the small areas involved (and most of those areas already had >15% coverage anyway). Don’t know when we’ll see a return to even average growth, but at this point 2008 has surpassed 2010 considerably, and 2005 passed 2010 back after 2010 was ahead of it for all of 4 days. Just 4 days ago 2010 was nipping at the heals of 2006, but now it’s nearly 1/2 a millions km^2 behind.
That’s what happens when you slow down in a time where the slopes on every year are steep.
-Scott
Good sumary Scott.
SST’s currently
ttp://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
Starting to cool off so so perhaps more gain soon
Andy
AndyW says:
October 15, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Thanks for the compliment. 🙂
And nice map…do you know where I can find something equivalent to that for every day in say, the last 5 years or more? Anomalies are very useful, but when the anomalies are based on older data and I’m comparing ice to the last several years, I’d like to know what the anomalies were in those other years too.
Also, anyone know why the CT numbers haven’t been updating in the last few days?
-Scott
Scott says:
October 15, 2010 at 11:24 am
AndyW says:
October 14, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Yep, the ice growth the last couple of days has been pretty pathetic. Yesterday’s growth was the third lowest in the JAXA record, the day before was the lowest ever, and three days ago also showed the third lowest ever for that day. In that 3-day span, only 2007 performed worse.
Unfortunately, CT’s area numbers haven’t updated the past couple days. Looking at their images, growth on most fronts seems to have severely slowed. Only the area on the far right north of Russia (sorry, I don’t know my polar geography to give a better description) has showed significant gains. The area on the left in the NW passage has frozen up quickly and solidly, but this has had little effect on extent because of the small areas involved (and most of those areas already had >15% coverage anyway). Don’t know when we’ll see a return to even average growth, but at this point 2008 has surpassed 2010 considerably, and 2005 passed 2010 back after 2010 was ahead of it for all of 4 days. Just 4 days ago 2010 was nipping at the heals of 2006, but now it’s nearly 1/2 a millions km^2 behind.
That’s what happens when you slow down in a time where the slopes on every year are steep.
-Scott
_____________________________________________________________
UIUC’s area data is now two days behind their normal posting updates. I think they must get their raw data from NSIDC. I say that because NSIDE is also two days behind their normal posting schedule. The NSIDC site has also been down quite a lot the past three days.
Makes you wonder if their satellite data is all fragged up at the moment or what all is going on.
I’m going through Arctic sea ice data withdrawal!
Arghh. When will people quit connecting a few days data to the long-term trend? Anthony understands the distinction:
But commenters still post that the ‘death spiral’ is false, that sea ice has recovered etc, when these concepts are referring to obs and projections on trends.
For the umpteenth time, you cannot derive meaningful information about sea ice trends from a few days, a few weeks, a few months, or even several years of data!
For instance, this year’s September minimum was lower than last year’s. Of course many of the ‘skeptics’ that visit this board were NOT posting that Arctic sea ice had returned to reducing. No, it’s only when bits of data fulfill the narrative they want that such people start cheering as if the trend has reversed.
Anthony, why do you not correct commenters on this error? It seems that, by omission, you are content to foster this false impression.
REPLY: Well I can’t spend all day policing the thousands of comments I get. Generally if something is wrong, other point it out like you have. – Anthony
For instance, the second comment in this thread;
Chris B says:
October 12, 2010 at 7:59 am
and others:
James F. Evans says:
October 12, 2010 at 9:25 am
and just what I was talking about re seasons….
Bad Andrew says:
October 12, 2010 at 9:58 am
It would take no time, Anthony, to clarify in the top post, or in an inline response to an early comment, that short-term data tells us nothing about long-term trends, and that the interesting-to-note data is weather variation, not climate. So little work is needed to head off such woeful suppositions as quoted above – assuming the interest here is fostering better understanding.
(I posted the last before seeing your inline comment, Anthony)
EFS_Junior says:
October 15, 2010 at 3:30 pm
Hi Junior,
I should have some time this weekend to finally put together my combination NSIDC/UIUC/JAXA spreadsheet, and I should be able to discuss some of the analysis you mentioned wanting to talk about in the comments on the last sea ice news. Are there any specific topics you wanted to cover? Also, are there any other interested people still reading this thread?
-Scott
Scott says:
October 15, 2010 at 7:04 pm
EFS_Junior says:
October 15, 2010 at 3:30 pm
I’m going through Arctic sea ice data withdrawal!
Hi Junior,
I should have some time this weekend to finally put together my combination NSIDC/UIUC/JAXA spreadsheet, and I should be able to discuss some of the analysis you mentioned wanting to talk about in the comments on the last sea ice news. Are there any specific topics you wanted to cover? Also, are there any other interested people still reading this thread?
-Scott
_____________________________________________________________
Yes, I’m still here.
I’d still like to discuss things and put up a few plots via Picasa, JAXA vs NSIDC (monthly), area vs extent, and area vs rate of change of area. Plus let me go back to that last post to remind myself of what I said then. As usual there are more things, but it will take some time to push the numbers (UIUC vs JAXA is mostly done, NSIDC vs UIUC is ongoing/backlogged for now).
I’d like to cover “biases” between the various datasets, that includes Norsex and DMI (qualitatively as I have not extracted any data from either, mainly min.max values vs other datasets).
But first a little homework is needed on my part, to make sure I understand what sensor/satellite each dataset is derived from, I’ll chase that one down first thing in the morning.
Regards,
Junior
EFS_Junior says:
October 15, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Sounds good. Please let me know if you find some good sources of data. Also, do you know of a source with catalogued polar SST anomalies? I think a multiparameter regression with both sea ice area and SSTs would do excellent in predicting the sea ice. For a multiparameter regression, I’d guess we’d need to use the full CT data set b/c JAXA simply isn’t big enough. If we could combine it with thickness estimates (PIOMAS or PIPS, either is better than nothing), we might end up with something pretty robust.
Anyone else want to discuss this too? AJB? fishnski? Andy? I’ve seen you all post good stuff in the past, and I think we all have somewhat different views on the “state of the Arctic” as well as AGW, but you all seem like pretty reasonable guys/gals that can discuss the numbers pretty objectively.
-Scott