From the University of Colorado at Boulder
Warming North Atlantic water tied to heating Arctic, according to new study
The temperatures of North Atlantic Ocean water flowing north into the Arctic Ocean adjacent to Greenland — the warmest water in at least 2,000 years — are likely related to the amplification of global warming in the Arctic, says a new international study involving the University of Colorado Boulder.
Led by Robert Spielhagen of the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany, the study showed that water from the Fram Strait that runs between Greenland and Svalbard — an archipelago constituting the northernmost part of Norway — has warmed roughly 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century. The Fram Strait water temperatures today are about 2.5 degrees F warmer than during the Medieval Warm Period, which heated the North Atlantic from roughly 900 to 1300 and affected the climate in Northern Europe and northern North America.
The team believes that the rapid warming of the Arctic and recent decrease in Arctic sea ice extent are tied to the enhanced heat transfer from the North Atlantic Ocean, said Spielhagen. According to CU-Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, the total loss of Arctic sea ice extent from 1979 to 2009 was an area larger than the state of Alaska, and some scientists there believe the Arctic will become ice-free during the summers within the next several decades.
“Such a warming of the Atlantic water in the Fram Strait is significantly different from all climate variations in the last 2,000 years,” said Spielhagen, also of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Keil, Germany.
According to study co-author Thomas Marchitto, a fellow at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, the new observations are crucial for putting the current warming trend of the North Atlantic in the proper context.
“We know that the Arctic is the most sensitive region on the Earth when it comes to warming, but there has been some question about how unusual the current Arctic warming is compared to the natural variability of the last thousand years,” said Marchitto, also an associate professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department. “We found that modern Fram Strait water temperatures are well outside the natural bounds.”
A paper on the study will be published in the Jan. 28 issue of Science. The study was supported by the German Research Foundation; the Academy of Sciences, Humanities and Literature in Mainz, Germany; and the Norwegian Research Council.
Other study co-authors included Kirstin Werner and Evguenia Kandiano of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Steffen Sorensen, Katarzyna Zamelczyk, Katrine Husum and Morten Hald from the University of Tromso in Norway and Gereon Budeus of the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany.
Since continuous meteorological and oceanographic data for the Fram Strait reach back only 150 years, the team drilled ocean sediment cores dating back 2,000 years to determine past water temperatures. The researchers used microscopic, shelled protozoan organisms called foraminifera — which prefer specific water temperatures at depths of roughly 150 to 650 feet — as tiny thermometers.
In addition, the team used a second, independent method that involved analyzing the chemical composition of the foraminifera shells to reconstruct past water temperatures in the Fram Strait, said Marchitto.
The Fram Strait branch of the North Atlantic Current is the major carrier of oceanic heat to the Arctic Ocean. In the eastern part of the strait, relatively warm and salty water enters the Arctic. Fed by the Gulf Stream Current, the North Atlantic Current provides ice-free conditions adjacent to Svalbard even in winter, said Marchitto.
“Cold seawater is critical for the formation of sea ice, which helps to cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back to space,” said Marchitto. “Sea ice also allows Arctic air temperatures to be very cold by forming an insulating blanket over the ocean. Warmer waters could lead to major sea ice loss and drastic changes for the Arctic.”
The rate of Arctic sea ice decline appears to be accelerating due to positive feedbacks between the ice, the Arctic Ocean and the atmosphere, Marchitto said. As Arctic temperatures rise, summer ice cover declines, more solar heat is absorbed by the ocean and additional ice melts. Warmer water may delay freezing in the fall, leading to thinner ice cover in winter and spring, making the sea ice more vulnerable to melting during the next summer.
Air temperatures in Greenland have risen roughly 7 degrees F in the past several decades, thought to be due primarily to an increase in Earth’s greenhouse gases, according to CU-Boulder scientists.
“We must assume that the accelerated decrease of the Arctic sea ice cover and the warming of the ocean and atmosphere of the Arctic measured in recent decades are in part related to an increased heat transfer from the Atlantic,” said Spielhagen.
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This statement prompts some things I’d point out that temper it:
“Air temperatures in Greenland have risen roughly 7 degrees F in the past several decades”.
In those remote locations like Nuuk, Greenland, what have we there? Remote pockets of humanity. Humanity building little cities of warmth in the cold Arctic, growing cities:
With 15,469 inhabitants as of 2010, Nuuk is the fastest-growing town in Greenland, with migrants from the smaller towns and settlements reinforcing the trend. Together with Tasiilaq, it is the only town in the Sermersooq municipality exhibiting stable growth patterns over the last two decades. The population increased by over a quarter relative to the 1990 levels, and by nearly 16 percent relative to the 2000 levels.
Nuuk population growth dynamics in the last two decades. Source: Statistics Greenland
Nuuk is not only a growing city, where UHI might now be a factor (but don’t take my word for it, see what NASA had to say about it at AGU this year), it is also a place where the official GHCN thermometers used by NASA are right next to human influences…like turboprop jet exhaust, such as this one in Nuuk’s airport right on the tarmac:
Nuuk Airport looking Southwest Image: Panaramio via Google Earth
Nuuk Airport, Stevenson Screen. Image from Webshots – click to enlarge
Hmmm, I wonder what happened in Nuuk? The plot below is from NASA GISS (see it yourself here). That “instant global warming” line seems out of character for natural variation in Nuuk. Note the data discontinuity. Often that suggests a station move and/or a change in station environment.
Sometimes a line like that with indicates airport construction near the thermometer, something I documented here.
And here’s the interesting thing. Nuuk is just one data point, one “raging red” anomaly in the sparsely spaced hands-on-human-measured NASA GISS surface temperature dataset for the Arctic. The patterns of warm pockets of humanity with airports and GHCN stations repeat themselves all over the Arctic, because as anyone who has visited the Arctic knows, aviation is the lifeline of these remote communities. And where do they measure the weather data? At the airport of course. Aviation doesn’t work otherwise.
See my complete report on the weird temperatures from Nuuk here. And while you are at it, read my report about the weird temperatures from Svalbaard, another warm single data point from NASA GISS. Interestingly, at that station a local citizen did some science and proved the UHI effect at the airport.
Yes these are just two examples. But there is no denying these facts:
- Remote communities in the Arctic are islands of anthropogenic warmth
- These communities rely of aviation as a lifeline
- The weather is measured at these airports, it is required for safety
- Airports release huge amounts of waste heat, from exhaust, de-icing, terminal buildings, and even tarmac in the sun.
- The majority of GHCN weather stations (used by NASA GISS) in the Arctic are at airports.
Remember Nuuk and Svalbarrd’s thermometers, and then ask Jim Hansen why NASA GISS, a “space studies agency”, doesn’t use satellite data but instead relies upon a surface record that another division of NASA says likely has significant UHI effects that NASA GISS doesn’t filter out sensibly (they only allow for 0.05°C downward adjustment).
And finally, can you really trust data from an organization that takes incoming data for that station and shifts it more than an entire degree C in the past, making a new trend? See the difference between “raw” (which really isn’t raw, it has a scads of adjustments already from NOAA) compared to the GISS final output in this chart:
The data is downloaded from GISS for the station, datasets 1 and 2 were used (raw-combined for this location and homogenized) which are available from the station selector via a link to data below the charts they make on the GISS website. The data is plotted up to the data continuity break, and again after. The trend lines are plotted to the data continuity break, and there’s no trend in the raw data for the last 100+ years.
The curious thing is that there’s no trend in the raw data at Nuuk until you do either (or both) of two things:
1. You use GISS homogenized data to plot the trend
2. You use the data after the discontinuity to plot the trend
I believe the data discontinuity represents a station move, one that exposed it to a warmer local environment. And clearly, by examining the GISS data for Nuuk, you can see that GISS adds adjustments that are not part of the measured reality. What justification could there possibly be to adjust the temperatures of the past downwards? What justification in a growing community (as shown by the population curve) could there be for doing an adjustment that is reverse of waste energy UHI?
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Lucy Skywalker says:
January 27, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Lucy,
I am curious, the website you link to, is that your website? The reason I ask, a long time friend of mine has a daughter who is really quite smart, and who has been asking a lot of questions about “Global Warming”. I wish to direct her to that site you link, but it would reinforce her education, I believe, if she felt it was a woman offering these suggestions for a path of inquiry. Despite 100 years of advancement, many still believe that women do not, or cannot, contribute to the advancement of science. In spite of the evidence to the contrary. I wish to dispel those types of myths for her, by providing a shining example, namely you.
I have been a long time ‘lurker’ on this blog, and have come to respect your opinions and interpretations of the science at hand. If the website is yours, it closely resembles my own path to understanding ‘The Inconvenient Truth’.
Roy Weiler
Ken Lydell says:
January 27, 2011 at 1:46 pm
You can wave your arms at the paleoclimatological reconstruction but what about the instrumental measurements over the last 150 years. The difference between informed skepticism and knee-jerk denialism is evident in some of the comments above.
__________________
New here? Check some of the older posts on the reliability of those instrumental measurements over the past 150 years.
Then ask yourself this: who was measuring the temperature in the arctic on January 30, 1879 and how accurate was that reading?
“the study showed that water from the Fram Strait that runs between Greenland and Svalbard — an archipelago constituting the northernmost part of Norway — has warmed roughly 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century.”
Link below is current ice extent in Fram Strait as of Jan 26 2011. Orange line is average extent. Ice area is above normal for that region!
http://picasaweb.google.com/daviditron/ClimateGraph#5567025930747508130
When warm water is at the poles, the heat will soon be lost to 4°K deepspace. Counting it is pointless.
@R. Gates says: “…there is a record amount of open water being struck and warmed by sunlight that once was being reflected by sea ice. This is not insignificant as a lot more w/m2 is being absorbed by the oceans, exactly as predicted by GCM’s when looking at the effects of polar amplification of AGW.”
The solar reflectance of sea ice and open water aren’t that different at the high azimuth angles near the poles. Their ranges of values overlap, depending on age of the ice, time of year, latitude, clouds, wind, and, yes, plankton. And the statement “exactly as predicted by GCM’s” is entirely erroneous. The complexity of ice & water albedos make exactitude impossible. What the GCM’s attempt to predict and reality are quite different. They may get the sign right part of the year, at best.
I don’t get it!
If the Hypothesis of AGW based on the CO2 Hypothesis is claiming that the more “Greenhouses Gases” (i.e. CO2) we produce the more heat is trapped…then why would they be reporting that the Heat Transfer is based on convection from the ocean?
Doesn’t that leave humans out of the mix? I don’t get it?
I was actually thinking this yesterday when I watched this animation for the umpteenth time:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/z500_nh_anim.shtml
Note how a high pressure area appeared to the East of Greenland in the last week. I thought, where is this energy coming from, if not from the ocean?
This might also help to explain why the Northern Polar Vortex hasn’t coalesced into a single funnel this winter…
Graeme W says:
January 27, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Looking at the combined (Global Sea Ice Area) anomaly totals, it looks low… but how close is it really to a record low? The global sea ice graph seems to imply that while the level is low, from the point of view of an anomaly, it’s not particular low.
___
Oh no, it’s very close to the record low set back in 2006. Here’s a direct link to the data as supplied to me by Bill Chapman from the Cryosphere Today website:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/timeseries.global.anom.1979-2008
As you can see from the data, Global sea ice area is very very close to a record low period now for the 1979-present. 14.41 million sq. km as of today vs. 14.39 million sq. km in 2006. Keep watching over the next few days to see if it dips under as it well could.
The point is that sea ice represents a part of the total albedo of the earth, and as such, when the Global Sea ice is at or near a record minimum, the extra sunlight that is not being reflected is being asborbed into the ocean. The 5 lowest Global Sea Ice Area years on satellite record occurred in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010, and now, 2011, which is 2nd lowest, and may very well become the lowest of all.
It is worthwhile to pull the GISS data for Nuuk and plot plot all of it (monthly averages rather than annual averages). I did that recently for Nuuk and Coral Harbour (recently highlighted on desmogblog). To do it, I copied the temperatures from Excel into MS Word and replaced the “white spaces” with paragraph marks, then imported the resulting single column of temperatures back into Excel.
The exercise gives you a better idea of the magnitude of the natural variability and therefore how truly noisy a change of a few degrees is. If Nuuk has warmed at all, the change is meaningless. Coral Harbour is a flat line.
R Gates,
“The 5 lowest Global Sea Ice Area years on satellite record occurred in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010, and now, 2011, which is 2nd lowest, and may very well become the lowest of all.”
O.K. but what does it mean? Lowest since 1979….what does that mean?
I really want to care……but I just don’t know what I should be caring about?
My question is, what percentage of global surface area does the Arctic sea ice represent? And how much it could it possibly contribute to cooling the planet based on reflecting the Sun’s rays. I think the Arctic is a cold sink because it spends a lengthy period in total darkness, and it has nothing to do with the amount of sunlight being reflected because of reduced summer sea ice. I have a problem with a lot of alarmists naive theory about that point.
Dave from Canmore, facts are the least important things to consider fro these people…
thegoodlocust says:
Would you mind providing a link to where that has been said in the scientific literature? Maybe it has, but my impression is that such simplistic statements have been made instead by “climate skeptics” misunderstanding how the effects of greenhouse gases play out. They are the only ones who I have seen making claims that one can predict the region warming effects to appealing to such arguments.
Anthony,
I don’t know how to email you, so I’m just posting here, but I ran across a non-skeptic but honest blog posting on the claims of some scientists that “climate change” is responsible for a reduction in natural vegetative fixing of atmospheric carbon. It’s a good article, and the fellow tracks down the authors of the study and quotes from his email exchanges from them, where they openly admit to publishing results that fail many statistical measures because their findings “are so important to society”. You might want to take a look at this and make a post out of it for your readers.
http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2010/08/climate-alarmism-at-science-magazine.html
R. Gates says:
January 27, 2011 at 4:52 pm
“The point is that sea ice represents a part of the total albedo of the earth, and as such, when the Global Sea ice is at or near a record minimum, the extra sunlight that is not being reflected is being asborbed into the ocean. The 5 lowest Global Sea Ice Area years on satellite record occurred in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010, and now, 2011, which is 2nd lowest, and may very well become the lowest of all.”
================
O.K., ….and then what?
Someone writes:
“Which beg the question is this modern period really warmer than the Medieval Period?”
No, it raises the question. Do not listen to NPR. They will have you speaking and writing gibberish. “Begging the Question” is a classic fallacy, known as “petitio principii” to the Romans. It is arguing in a circle.
Given that the practical issue is whether we invest 99 gazillion dollars in CO2 mitigation, shouldn’t our measurement regime be improved. Why not have electronic equipment that reports a temperature once per second? Just think, if we did, we could see if those aircraft engines actually change the temperature reading. Would that not be worth its weight in gold?
Oh, by the way, it’s not just the aircraft engines. The thermometers are next to what is most likely the busiest parking lot in the region. And the thermometers are hedged in by asphalt. Please. Give us a break. We should not have to deal with this foolishness. Kill fifty percent of grants for studying warming, convene Warmista and sceptics to design a new measurement system, and implement it. 99 Gazillion dollars demands it.
how did this years” warm” north atlantic flow ever reach the arctic when there is no “warm” atlantic flow to begin with from last year, this is crazy or desperate.
[snip] How would airports interfere with ice core data? And how is it that these airports are melting glaciers?
This is excellent news!
The television told me Climate Scientists™ now believe (C)AGW is causing all the cold to leak out of the Arctic, because of how (C)AGW has caused there to be so much less Arctic sea ice thus disturbing the atmospheric patterns, thus (C)AGW is causing the record-breaking cold and snowfall accumulations during this Northern Hemisphere winter.
Now Climate Science™ is telling me how the hottest North Atlantic Ocean water EVAH is pouring into the Arctic Basin, which will accelerate the sea ice melt. With all that heat warming up the Arctic Ocean, with the remaining cold fleeing the Arctic in the air, and all the sea ice going away, it is clear what has happened.
A Tipping Point has been passed. The sea ice melt is irreversible. Due to (C)AGW, the sea ice went down, which caused the Arctic to lose its cool, which will cause more ice loss. This is obviously a Positive Feedback Mechanism. The (C)AGW-caused boiling hot water from the Atlantic is amplifying the feedback. The Arctic is now a lost cause. It is DOOMED. All the polar bears shall now commence drowning.
Great! As these Tipping Points keep getting passed, we will accept the futility of trying to fight what recent Paleo-Climate Science™ has identified as building up over thousands of years from mankind’s anti-Natural CO2 emissions. Soon we can focus fully on adaptation. And I can look forward to when my descendants, here on the family estate in central Pennsylvania, can reap bountiful harvests from the lush citrus groves, situated just mere miles from the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi Sea.
As opposed to the summers getting too cool for decent tomato growing, with winters of bone-freezing cold and the endless waves of never-melting snow and ice, as currently provided courtesy of (C)AGW.
Thank you very much for your response, and in particular, for the link to the raw data.
However, I have to question the accuracy of your analysis. The albedo of the part of the Earth that doesn’t face the Sun is irrelevant for the analysis you’re doing. On that basis, you should be excluding all of the Arctic that currently doesn’t receive any sunlight. Since the Antarctic anomaly is not particular low (it’s below average, but a long way from a record low), the current situation is not as dire as if both the Arctic and Antarctic were receiving sunlight.
Also, as the global sea ice graph shows, historically global sea ice should start to recover shortly. I see no reason to believe that this year will be any different. The degree that the total global sea ice coverage is lower than average as a percentage of total sea ice does not seem to lend itself to any feelings of alarm, as shown by the total sea ice graph I linked to above (which I got from the WUWT sea ice page).
After all, based on the data you supplied, the anomaly in 2010 dropped to over -2 million sq km, and it’s currently only -1.64 (rounding up). So, as anomaly, it’s a long way from being as bad as it has been in the past. And, as I stated above, that’s a global anomaly – the Antarctic anomaly is considerably lower than that, only -0.382, and it’s the Antarctic sea ice that is currently critical if you want to analyse the effects of the albedo, not the Arctic sea ice levels.
KD, an informed skepticism with facts and figures is something I welcome. Knee-jerk post hoc flailing about in an attempt to explain things away doesn’t impress me. The instrumental data warrants examination — not arm waving.
Many climatologists display contempt towards knee-jerk denialists and for good reason. I despise knee-jerk alarmists for many of the same reasons. Most people can tell the difference between a well-reasoned argument and one that entails a defensive grasping at straws. Can you?
“The researchers used microscopic, shelled protozoan organisms called foraminifera — which prefer specific water temperatures at depths of roughly 150 to 650 feet — as tiny thermometers.”
Do they use the same tiny thermometers to measure the temperature for today?
Given that there are several periods of low ice documented in the historical record by early polar explorers, ships and the history of the vikings in Greenland. Given that based on those first person accounts, those low ice events, likely were as low or lower than today’s ice levels. Why should we consider the current level of global sea ice, and the “all time record” in what is a historically very short satellite series to be in any way remarkable rather than just a repartition of a normal cycle.
It is far more likely that this is just a normal part of the arctic ice cycle than that it is in any way unusual.
Also albedo is hardly significant in the arctic right now, given that the length of day on the 27th of January from sun rise to sunset is a whopping 2 hours and 31 minutes. Not to mention the minor detail that open water is a better emitter of IR radiation than old ice, open water looses more heat to the night sky this time of year than the arctic ocean would lose if it was covered with heavy ice.
Snow cover at northern temperate latitudes is far more important to the earths albedo than snow and ice cover in the arctic right now, because of length of day and the suns height above the horizon during mid day at these lower latitudes.
In short the global sea ice anomoly is not in any way out of the ordinary when you include historical accounts of previous ice minimums from just the last 100 years. The satellite record is simply too short to be of much concern because it hardly covers 1/2 of the apparent natural cycle in sea ice.
Come back in 70 to 100 years when we have enough data to at least make an educated guess how sea ice behaves on a century time scale. Until then we are simply throwing darts.
Larry
(bursting through like a freight-train through our single-wire barb-wire fence up near Amarillo)
I jus’ check’d. The fence is down.
Ronald Reagan, in negotiating nuclear weapons reduction agreements with the former Soviet Union, famously asserted that we should both trust and verify. As we have no reason to believe that the scientists responsible for the study in question were involved in an evil conspiracy to create a climatist global totalitarian regime, let us give them the benefit of the doubt. Let us assume that they were trying to get things right and were competent in selecting and analyzing proxies. In the absence of a failure to replicate their results, let’s give them a pass and trust that they did a reasonably good job. At the same, let’s verify in order to make sure that they didn’t overlook or fail to account for confounding variables. Was the methodology sound? If so, the results are sound.
Although I am a card-carrying skeptic with an ingrained loathing of warmist nonsense, I am inclined to believe that there may be something interesting here. I doubt that it can be explained in terms of CO2 increases or fractions of a degree increase in GMST. Given the woefully inadequate state of climate science I suspect that there may no satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon at present. Ocean circulation systems are poorly understood and the more we know about them the less we understand. Doug Hoffman has done a good job of characterizing the growing uncertainty in oceanography in a review article that you will find most informative. It can be found here: http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/conveyor-belt-model-broken
If there is a middle ground, a zone of useful engagement in the discussion of climate science, it will be between informed citizen skeptics with expertise in a variety of pertinent disciplines and climate scientists who don’t have a dog in the political fight. There is much to be said about finding a way to create opportunities for constructive engagement. Judith Curry, as I write this, is in Lisbon with others trying to figure out how to make this happen.
I have had more than a snootful of knee-jerk anything when it comes to climate science. I am sick of it whether it comes from the skeptical corner of the ring or from the warmist corner.