I’ve been remiss at posting regular entries of this feature, and there hasn’t been much happening on the way to peak Arctic Ice this year. The action seems mostly down south, and there’s a lot of news from NSIDC that you haven’t heard about.
Per the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), the Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent Anomaly for November was a record high for their data set:
Source: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu//DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Nov/S_11_plot.png
November’s record high Antarctic Sea Ice Area of 16.90 Million Sq Km, exceeded the prior record of 16.76 Million Sq Km (Set in November 2005), by 140,000 Square Kilometers. See here:
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Nov/S_11_area.txt
Oddly, they have a plot for extent, and a data file for area, but no plot for area or data for extent. I meant to say: Oddly, they have a plot for extent, and a data file for area, but no plot for area or data file for extent. They do have both data included in the file named “area.txt”. Seems backwards, doesn’t it?
The NSIDC plot certainly shows a lot of growth in November around the periphery of the sea ice pack in November:
Source: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Nov/S_11_trnd.png
I find it interesting that the (NSIDC) National Snow & Ice Data Center doesn’t find it newsworthy to mention this record high Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent Anomaly in their December 6th press release:
They certainly could have included this information, since their FTP folder had NH data posted three days prior to the December 6th press release:
And the SH data also, with the same time stamp:
But this comes as no surprise considering that they glossed over the other record highs that occurred this year in,
June:
Source: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu//DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Jun/S_06_plot.png
Data: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu//DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Jun/S_06_area.txt
July:
Source: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu//DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Jul/S_07_plot.png
Data: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu//DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Jul/S_07_area.txt
August:
Source: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu//DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Aug/S_08_plot.png
Data: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu//DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/Aug/S_08_area.txt
It is apparent that Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is currently maintaining above average;
But, with such good news, I wonder why NSIDC and others aren’t providing more information to the public on this interesting phenomenon. I know these new record highs aren’t as interesting or as likely to generate news stories as “death spiral watch”, but perhaps in their next press NSIDC release they will at least recognize the Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice for the simple fact that it has hit record highs?
We are constantly told that NSIDC is all about the science, and we are just “breathtakingly ignorant” (to quote NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze), so I’m sure this press release reporting on only one half of the planet’s icecap’s is just an oversight on their part. I’m sure NSIDC will want to show that their mission truly is “global” and talk about the gains in Antarctica when they write up their year end review which will be seen by hundreds of journalists.
They seem to have interest in the minuscule (compared to the whole continent) Antarctic Peninsula ice loss, but not so much the main continent gains.
Antarctica is by far the largest mass of ice on Earth, containing approximately 90% of the world’s supply. By contrast, the Arctic and glaciers make up the remainder, yet they get all the facetime.
The fact that Sea Ice Extent around Antarctica is trending up and has been regularly hitting record highs in 2010 should give any rational person a moment’s pause. It might even provide the basis for some healthy skepticism of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Narrative.
Oh, and for the few worrywarts who frequent here, who will howl mercilessly that I didn’t show the Arctic Sea Ice trend, here’s your North and South trends together:
Cryosphere Today – extent 15% or greater – click to enlarge
Cryosphere Today – Antarctic Sea Ice anomaly – click to enlarge
Of course all the graphs and imagery that I didn’t cover here is available 24/7/365 on the WUWT sea ice page, which I recommend you visit.
h/t to WUWT reader “Just the facts” for pointing out the ftp data which has remained buried and out of view of NSIDC’s main public relations page.
November's record high Sea Ice Extent of 16.90 Million Sq Km, exceeded the prior record of 16.76 Million Sq Km (Set in November 2005), by 140,000 Square Kilometers:
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Re: Owen says December 21, 2010 at 9:10 am
“Plus, we have the net melting of land ice in antartica which is far greater than any gains in sea ice. ”
There is no real data for this supposed loss. It is billed as being based on satellite images but that is only half the story. It is calculated by some rather crude and uncalibrated computer simulations of mantle rebound, ie. speculation not data, not science.
I refuse to give any credence to such speculation. Model output is NOT DATA.
Can someone clear this up for me? The Antarctica extent (from the graph) has been running a full 2 SD’s above the average for some time now, but the reported anomaly is always very, very close to zero. I thought the anomaly was the daily deviation from the daily average. Why isn’t it a lot larger? Two significantly different data sets? Different extent measures (15 vs 30?) Extent on one, area on the other? What’s going on?
The current cryosphere anomaly is only .072 mm km2, whereas the graph looks like extent is running over 1mm above the long term average day after day.
Dan Kirk-Davidoff says:
>>
You can see this in Fig. 6 of the IPCC AR4 summary for policy makers. There’s no such analogous upwelling in the Arctic, so temperatures there are predicted to warm rapidly. This is borne out in the observations: temperature have increased substantially over the Arctic
>>
Where do you see this data Dan?
Met office, Hadley take care not to show Arctic temperatures … because there aren’t any. GISS “interpolate” (ie extrapolate) from lower lattitudes where the temperatures are already fictive SST generated largely from averaging LAND temperatures out over the sea and calling it SST.
with that kind of methodology you can paint the Arctic any colour you like.
If you are aware of a source of real data , please post a link.
Allan Millar, I stand corrected. I did try to find IPCC statements about sea ice but could only find this page, http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg2/index.php?idp=599, which only hints to the increase of snow, talks about its importance in creating sea ice and not much else. I’m glad that this prediction is being falsified, it is good news.
REPLY: Good on you to admit your error, Luis. – Anthony
P. Solar,
Perhaps you missed this part of the post “Of course all the graphs and imagery that I didn’t cover here is available 24/7/365 on the WUWT sea ice page, which I recommend you visit.”
Are you looking silly?
Luis Dias says:
December 21, 2010 at 5:06 am
I see – so the increased precipitation fails as snow on the warmer water then turns into ice.
Phil :
>>
“…hasn’t been much happening on the way to peak Arctic Ice this year”.
I believe you, but the charts say there has been a reversal in the Arctic over the last couple days. I don’t believe there really is melting at these temps, but that’s what the charts say. I’m assuming data glitch, can someone in the know confirm?
>>
Don’t forget this is not actual ice , it’s the area with >15% ice cover. Some wind compacting or extending the ice flows can make the same amount of ice bigger or smaller.
The 2007 minimum that freacked a lot of people was largely due wind.
If wind compacts ice the ice extent can be smaller . If it speads areas that are already close to 15% they drop below the cutoff and the total gets smaller.
Don’t waste time looking at day to day changes.
Why is Cryosphere Today showing a negative anomaly for Antarctic ice when NSIDC is showing a clearly positive anomaly?
Either someone has their wires crossed or I am missing something.
Mods, you appear to have lost my post on this thread.
REPLY: Phil. You know full well the spam filter is automatic, and certain word or phrase combinations trigger on it. Certain links or excessive links do also. So don’t blame people for a program doing what it was designed to do. Your post is in the Spam filter, not the trashbin, which would require a manual effort. Almost everyone who comments on this blog, no matter what side they are on, gets one or more there eventually. Now if you ask nicely about it, I can retrieve it for you. Naw on second thought, you’ll just complain about that, so I’ve retrieved it.
– Anthony
MTC:
>>
Not wishing to troll, but isn’t the typical response that sea (water) temperatures are still getting warmer around the antarctic, which tells a tale of incipient iceocalypse. What’s the data on that?
>>
That’s no troll, it’s a fair question and it probably is the “typical response” in some quarters.
Which sea temperatures are you refering to? Please bear in mind, as I posted above, GISS SST is not “sea” but air temps and is not measured anywhere near where they indicate the temperature to be occuring.
evanmjones says:
December 21, 2010 at 10:27 am
Why is Cryosphere Today showing a negative anomaly for Antarctic ice when NSIDC is showing a clearly positive anomaly?
Either someone has their wires crossed or I am missing something.
Different imager, different statistic (area vs extent) and different baseline.
For what it’s worth CT (area) and Uni Bremen (extent) both show the data following their respective averages rather closely.
Luis Dias says:
December 21, 2010 at 5:06 am
The expansion of sea ice on the southern hemisphere is consistent with AGW. Since there is a sea all around Antarctica, if these areas warm just a little, there will be more evaporation, thus more clouds, thus more rain. This rain will fall on Antarctica, and it won’t be in liquid shape. It will be snow, of course. This snow will pile up and extend itself towards the sea.
=========
Oh, please. What’s the best estimate of last century’s warming? As Lord Monckton might phrase it, “nought point seven degrees.” So, how much does an increase of nought point seven degrees in global AVERAGE atmospheric temperature increase the icy waters of the Antarctic?
Here’s a hint. Fill your bathtub with water. Then, turn on your hair dryer (you cannot point the hair dryer at the bath though, that would be cheating). See how much the water warms.
This assumes nought point seven is even remotely accurate, which itself is a dubious proposition (see surfacesations.org).
evanmjones says:
December 21, 2010 at 10:27 am
Why is Cryosphere Today showing a negative anomaly for Antarctic ice when NSIDC is showing a clearly positive anomaly?
Either someone has their wires crossed or I am missing something.
Area vs. Extent — see big holes: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/antarctic.seaice.color.000.png
slow to follow says:
December 21, 2010 at 9:29 am
Re: Owen says December 21, 2010 at 9:10 am
“Plus, we have the net melting of land ice in antartica which is far greater than any gains in sea ice. ” Please can you give us the numbers to support this statement? Thank you.
slow to follow: please see following NASA site: http://climate.nasa.gov/news/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=242
References to key papers on the melting of antarctic land ice are provided at this site. GRACE measurements indicate an accelerating net loss of land ice.
Just looke at Solarcyle24.com -Mr. Sun’s taking a nap-again…
“Solarcycle-“Dang it! Ah hates Trifocals….
Here are the trends in sea ice extent in % decade. (From least squares fits of the log of extent vs. time). The decline in the Arctic is substantially faster than the growth in the Antarctic and the uncertainties for the Arctic are equivalent to or smaller than uncertainties for the Antarctic. Since the change in the Arctic is so much faster and more certain, it deserves more attention. The changes in the Antarctic during its summer months (Dec-Mar) are not statistically significant at the 95% (2 standard deviation) level.
Arctic Antarctic
Jan -3.23+-0.33 Jul 0.94+-0.345
Feb -2.9+-0.34 Aug 0.59+-0.27
Mar -2.67+-0.34 Sep 0.76+-0.34
Apr -2.64+-0.38 Oct 0.84+-0.32
May -2.44+-0.45 Nov 0.64+-0.35
Jun -3.59+-0.35 Dec 1.1+-1.13
Jul -6.70+-0.74 Jan 1.92+-2.25
Aug -9.7043+-1.18 Feb 2.68+-2.12
Sep -13.10+-1.70 Mar 3.72+-2.08
Oct -6.65+-1.03 Apr 2.96+-1.48
Nov -4.86+-0.54 May 2.37+-0.95
Dec -3.39+-0.32 Jun 1.42+-0.60
A quick thought experiment. What will radiate out more energy from the earth…
a. An atmosphere where the heat is smoothed out across all latitudes.
b. An atmosphere where all the heat is concentrated in the equatorial regions, and the poles are much cooler
Any ideas?
.
@Evan Jones and Rod Everson,
Cryosphere Today shows ice area; NSIDC shows ice extent. Since they are different quantities, they don’t always agree precisely; but they show long-term similar trends.
Comparing the N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere graphs we see that the N. Hemisphere is showing a lot more decline than the S. Hemisphere is showing an incline, and even more telling is the fact that the N. Hemisphere has not had a positive anomaly since 2004, whereas the S. Hemisphere had a negative anomaly only in the past few months. The lack of any positive sea ice anomaly for the N. Hemisphere in six years is a signficant event, though of course AGW skeptics will easily dismiss it. But the time for dismissing events is soon coming to an end. In the next few years we will see whether the AGW skeptics are right, and some combination of solar/ocean/etc. cycle sends global temps back down, or if the the last 30+ years in Arctic Sea ice decline is not just a natural fluctuation, but instead, the downward trend continues until we reach a seasonally ice free Arctic later this century as predicted by the GCM’s.
One side note: The current record setting moisture hitting California this week is exactly consistent with the acceleration of the hydrological cycle expected with higher amounts of CO2, and exactly the way the planet has responded to higher elevations of CO2 for millions of years. No proof of anything of course, but consistent with both theory and millions of years of earth history. How much energy does it take to move all that moisture from the Pacific to California? If it is “record setting” moisture now hitting California, then somewhere there was “record setting” energy to transport it…
If the north pole loses the same amount of ice that the south pole gains, is it still global warming?
Jeff T says:
December 21, 2010 at 10:58 am
“Since the change in the Arctic is so much faster and more certain, it deserves more attention.”
###
BS. There have been too many examples of insignificant observations being trumped wide and far by you AWG propagandist, when those observations support the narrative, to justify you being able to claim insignificance for an excuse to disregard the observation when it is contra-narrative.
Here’s an honest question for once: Would the Arctic, southern Greenland, having “tons of” snow and ice if we in most of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere didn’t get everything? Again.
Or would there be no difference in those parts?
I mean if so, the envirofanhippies wouldn’t be happy anyways and would probably be linking thicker arctic ice and more snow cover above 80° to global warming just like the probable thinning ice of antarctica. Just like they try and do now with more snow and ice south of the 80°.
R. Gates says:
December 21, 2010 at 11:13 am
One side note: The current record setting moisture hitting California this week is exactly consistent with the acceleration of the hydrological cycle expected with higher amounts of CO2, and exactly the way the planet has responded to higher elevations of CO2 for millions of years. No proof of anything of course, but consistent with both theory and millions of years of earth history. How much energy does it take to move all that moisture from the Pacific to California? If it is “record setting” moisture now hitting California, then somewhere there was “record setting” energy to transport it…
###
“Record Setting Moister” hardly …
Sorry but the rest of your arguments are lame. You might want to try them on someone else. The earths global climate cam be summed up as “Warm and Wet” or “Cold and Dry”. Atmospheric CO2 always *follows* temperature.
A couple of questions for those who specialise in this sort of thing.
Does Arctic ice growth around Greenland at this time of year depend more on sea temps or air temps?
If air temperatures have a greater effect on ice growth then how much have the North Atlantic Jet Stream variations impacted on ice growth this year?
http://www.stormsurfing.com/cgi/display_alt.cgi?a=natla_250
I ask this as it would seem that looking at the jet streams recently that the winds have been blowing at times from the North East coast of America towards Greenland rather than flowing across the Atlantic towards the UK. Probably why we’ve had more Arctic air and less of the usual Atlantic weather patterns this year so far. Just pondering!