The essay below is a result of some collaboration between Jeff Condon and myself. I’ve been wondering for quite some time if there was any trend difference between the truly “arctic” sea ice inside the Arctic Circle and the ice in the Hudson bay and other more southerly sea areas that really aren’t part of the Arctic, but that are included in sea ice measurements. I had noted in a previous post that “Dr. Walt Meier of NSIDC in an email exchange said that he agrees that the orange boundaries (in the graphic at left) are “somewhat arbitrary” and has agreed to explore a “what if” question for me.” Unfortunately, Dr. Meier hasn’t gotten around to it, but Jeff Condon, who recently did an impressive record-long sea ice video from raw NSIDC data had the time to run my request. One thing I noted, is in the graph he produced “Arctic Circle Sea Ice Area Anomaly“, that the variability was high until 1998, then variability was muted with a downturn, and then went highly variable again in 2007. Curious. Thanks Jeff! – Anthony
Comparison of Northern Hemisphere Perennial and Seasonal Sea Ice
Guest post by Jeff Condon
We have been looking at sea ice trends below the arctic circle at the request of Anthony Watts. It is a curiosity of his that he’s been asking Walt Meier of the NSIDC to consider for some time. I am a fan of the NSIDC because their data access is excellent and they answer questions very quickly and reasonably. This post is from the daily sea ice data as presented by the NSIDC on their FTP site. It is several gigabytes so if you are serious, fileZilla is a good free software to facilitate download.
From the video’s produced, it is apparent that a lot of noisy data exists at the extreme lower edge of detection. This data results in sea ice being detected in isolated squares of warm latitudes with no chance of having actual sea ice. The effect is visible in this video showing both poles through the history of satellite ice data.
You can see the great lakes around Michigan sparkle year round with sea ice detection noise yet we know that the beaches in July and August are 90F and and the only ice you will find would be in someones drink. So the false detection at the low end of the microwave sensor range is a known factor. Plotting the sea ice area outside of the circle above, we can see that the sea ice never quite hits zero. It gets pretty close though.
It is interesting that the minimum value has a shift at about 1998. Fluctuations in the minimums don’t seem to have much trend so I assumed the effect is instrument related. There are a number of different instruments on different satellites which have been combined to create this trend.
There is a statistically significant trend in the sea ice outside of the arctic circle. This ice is completely melting as expected every year so the trend we see is a result of reduced formation. I’m curious now what percentage of this new formation is in the open sea vs landlocked lakes but that will be a subject for a future post.
The Arctic trend shown next is comprised of everything above the arctic circle.
The trend is also significantly negative.
For confirmation of the above, these results differ very little from the UIUC cryosphere page. UIUC does infill the pole hole with estimated data whereas I simply leave it out. The pole hole is the region around the pole where the satellite instruments do not reach. This region changed size early in the record leaving some difficult choices as to how to handle the newly available data. I simply used the large mask throughout the record when creating trends. My trend may be slightly more negative than theirs due to the difference but the fractional differences are very small.
The purpose behind some of this work was to determine what percentage of the above trend is seasonal ice unrelated to polar cap melt. Taking 152000km^2/decade of seasonal ice out of the 518000km^2 total, that amounts to 29% of the melt trend is due to ice which, in the last 34 years, is completely seasonal in nature. Arctic circle ice also melts every year so it is a mix of seasonal and perennial (multi-year) ice. The ratio of the seasonal ice 152000 to the mixed seasonal/multiyear ice 366000 is 41% – not sure what use that is but it is interesting to consider that the multi-year ice loss is quite a bit less than these graphs show.
This next graph requires some interpretation. It is a ratio of the seasonal ice area outside the Arctic circle to the ice inside the Arctic circle.
In looking at this plot, I read it by observing the annual peaks only. There is a visibly evident trend in the peak values each year. This means that the peak seasonal ice is decreasing at a higher rate than the perennial Arctic peak ice. This seems to be a confirmation of gradual warming processes controlling the peak amount as we would expect the southerly ice to show the effects first. One problem with this graph is that it reads near zero during the time of greatest melting so we really only have good information at the peaks.
More work needs to be done. The next thing I want to do is look at landlocked ice to see if there are trends in satellite detection ability. After that, I have some new ideas to isolate whether the 2007 and 2010 arctic minimums were localized effects caused by ocean currents or if they were larger in scope.
My focus on this now is because the data is interesting and extensive and I haven’t seen much work done on regional effects in blogland. I am very much skeptical that we should be worried about any of this. If you add up all the sea ice in the world, we have a heck of a lot of it at any given time. About 19million Km^2 on average. If you take the global anomaly and offset it by the average amount, it gives a good idea what the sea ice death spiral is working out to be.
This data was compiled from the daily Ease grid files presented by the NSIDC. Code for this post his here. ice code Save it and change the extension to R as WordPress won’t allow upload of text or R files. It is written in several sections: functions, Northern hemisphere ice, Southern hemisphere ice, plotting calls etc. Authors of the various parts include RomanM, RyanO, Nic, Steve McIntyre and myself. Nearly all of their work has been modified so many times by me they may not recognize it but still deserve credit for the good parts. Any errors are my own.
RACookPE1978 says:
February 5, 2012 at 12:21 pm
“…But this value of water is the ONLY albedo used by so-called “climate” scientists
in their classes for lectures, tests, and summaries…!”
But what do they use in their models?
Excellent comments, btw! Thanks for the references. I sometimes drive along a high cliff when the rising sun is 30° above the horizon, and the sunlight reflecting off the water is still too bright to look at. At times, a slight chop seems to also give high reflectance even at low solar zenith angles. Ocean albedo is very complex, even without the ice variation.
A runaway greenhouse as proposed for Venus seems absurd to me. The SB equation says a radiative power of ~16101 W/sq m is associated with a temperature of 730 K whilst AGW climate scientists claim the insolation to Venus is 132 W/sq m.
That is absurd to my way of thinking – how anyone can actually keep a straight face while claiming that the greenhouse effect of an inert gas like CO2 “creates” an extra 15970 W/sq m over solar input of 132 W/sq m is beyond me.
Everything in the Universe is cooling down in the absence of an external power source – even the power sources.
I would like to see a study performed which compares northern ice levels with ocean temperatures from the Gulf Stream, among others.
One thing I noted, is in the graph he produced “Arctic Circle Sea Ice Area Anomaly“, that the variability was high until 1998, then variability was muted with a downturn, and then went highly variable again in 2007. Curious.
The explanation for this is trivial. For the “arctic-only” record, the winter maximum changes very little, because most of the winter-variable regions are outside the Arctic circle. However, the summer minimum has been dropping steadily year-on-year, so the size of the annual cycle has been steadily increasing.
Using anomaly data subtracts out the average annual cycle. Thus, at the start of the data series it there will be a positive anomaly every summer, since summer losses in these years were less than the series average. At the end of the data series the opposite applies: there will be a negative anomaly every summer since the summer losses are now greater than the series average. In between the extremes, there is a stretch of a few years where this balances out, leaving no residual annual cycle in the anomaly data, and thus reduced anomaly variability for a few years.
You can see this effect in the whole-hemisphere data too, it’s just a noisier because the winter maxima for the hemisphere as a whole are more variable than the maxima for the Arctic circle region.
Note that both the winter max and summer minimum are trending down, it’s just that the latter is trending down more strongly.
To add: the exact same effect is visible in the data south of the Arctic circle, but in the opposite direction, in the opposite season, for the opposite reason!
South of the Arctic circle, the summer minimum is fixed at zero since it’s all seasonal, while the winter maximum is getting lower year-on-year. In the anomaly charts therefore, the start of the data series shows positive winter anomalies, and the end of the data series shows negative winter anomalies. Once again, the period from ~1997 to ~2006 marks the transition between the two regimes.
An important fact to point out is that the “transition” is not symmetrical: there are ~18 years with the residual cycle showing one polarity, then ~10 years of transition, then ~5 years with the reversed residual cycle. Why is this? Consider the fact that the anomalies are measured relative to the whole data set, so the total sum of anomalies must be zero. i.e. the negative/positive anomalies (whichever season and region they apply to) during the most recent 5 years exactly offset the positive/negative anomalies from the first 18 years. That is, the rate of change is accelerating.
Nice work Anthony and Jeff. My apologies for not getting to doing this myself, but it’s been a busy few months.
I don’t see anything surprising in the analysis, but it’s interesting. While the Arctic Circle is rather arbitrary, the two areas do conform to a seasonally-dominated region and a region marked by a mixture of seasonal and perennial ice. There have been many peer-reviewed analyses of seasonal vs. perennial ice, which this study confirms.
A couple of notes:
First, regarding the lake ice, I wouldn’t use this data to estimate lake ice. While it does in a broad sense capture the phase change in lake ice, the algorithms are generally derived for ice that forms in the saline oceans and thus will be less reliable for freshwater ice. Also, the spatial resolution is really too low to use with lakes due to the mixture of land and lake within a substantial fraction of grid cells around lakes.
Second, as has been noted numerous times before, “global sea ice” is not a meaningful climate indicator due to the very different nature of the sea ice between the Arctic and Antarctic.
Once again, nice job, and thanks!
Walt Meier
NSIDC
RACook: thanks for that comprehensive explanation – much appreciated.
Linear trends, though loved by the warmists and used by necessity by skeptics (I presume), are frightening when projected into the future. But is not the future only as reasonable in this view if we projected similarly into the past?
If the linear trend has an validity, then taking the trend to (say) 1970, should be good. But of course very quickly this would be absurd: go back to 1960 and areas of the Arctic were ice-clogged all year (like the decades of the Franklin expeditions?) when they were not.
If we can’t straight-line backwards another 10 years, then why do we say we have a straight-line function? A non-linear trend is more likely to reflect real-world processes anyway, but then the future might be more friendly. And not reflecting CO2.
We need a better trend for sea-ice data than a straight-line. Something that can be used for predictions. If the warmists use a straight-line, fine. The skeptics need something more in keeping with skeptic models.
To my eye the biggest difference between the Arctic sea ice at the beginning of the satellite record and the present is found in a triangular area formed by the west boundary of the Barents sea, Svalbard island and a line east to the coast from there. In the early years that area was almost always completely covered, now it is nearly ice free. Given the numerous reports of increased warm water flows in the North Atlantic this is probably understandable, but not necessarily related to CO2 in the atmosphere
Completely a side note. It looks like the clockwise rotation of the sea ice around Antarctica over millions of years has warn away the land into it’s current shape. Are there studies about that?
New Paper by Abdussamatov:
Bicentennial Decrease of the Total Solar Irradiance Leads to Unbalanced Thermal Budget of the Earth and the Little Ice Age
Habibullo I. Abdussamatov
Received: September 22, 2011 Accepted: October 9, 2011 Published: February 1, 2012
Abstract
Temporal changes in the power of the longwave radiation of the system Earth-atmosphere emitted to space always lag behind changes in the power of absorbed solar radiation due to slow change of its enthalpy. That is why the debit and credit parts of the average annual energy budget of the terrestrial globe with its air and water envelope are practically always in an unbalanced state. Average annual balance of the thermal budget of the system Earth-atmosphere during long time period will reliably determine the course and value of both an energy excess accumulated by the Earth or the energy deficit in the thermal budget which, with account for data of the TSI forecast, can define and predict well in advance the direction and amplitude of the forthcoming climate changes. From early 90s we observe bicentennial decrease in both the TSI and the portion of its energy absorbed by the Earth. The Earth as a planet will henceforward have negative balance in the energy budget which will result in the temperature drop in approximately 2014. Due to increase of albedo and decrease of the greenhouse gases atmospheric concentration the absorbed portion of solar energy and the influence of the greenhouse effect will additionally decline. The influence of the consecutive chain of feedback effects which can lead to additional drop of temperature will surpass the influence of the TSI decrease. The onset of the deep bicentennial minimum of TSI is expected in 2042±11, that of the 19th Little Ice Age in the past 7500 years – in 2055±11.
Full Text: PDF at http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Applied Physics Research ISSN 1916-9639 (Print) ISSN 1916-9647 (Online)
I’ve been keeping an eye on weather patterns in my part of the World and how they seem to be impacting upon sea ice in the Barents and Kara Seas. Over this Winter we seemed to have had mainly low pressure systems move in from across the Atlantic and then head North towards the Barent Sea, crossing the Northern part of the UK but not impacting on the south. These weather systems have brought plenty of rain to the North but have left the South of the UK drier than normal.
I point this out as it seems to be a popular theory that low ice cover in the Barents is the cause of the low pressure, rather it would appear that the low pressure systems and their related weather patterns originate elsewhere.
I wish I had more time to study this as it would seem that winds blowing mainly towards the North have been a limiting factor in Barents sea ice extent this year and may also have had an impact on the normal flow of ice South into the Atlantic via the Fram Strait.
Can it be a coincidece that this all seems to tie in with a colder Pacific?
Thanks, Dr. Meier.
“Also, the spatial resolution is really too low to use with lakes due to the mixture of land and lake within a substantial fraction of grid cells around lakes.”
I didn’t understand Jeff to be suggesting that the spatial resolution should be used with lakes. I think he was pointing out that the data appears to show ice in the great lakes in July and August — which clearly cannot be the case. Are those white areas not really data? Are they included in the Arctic sea ice calculations? If they are spurious data are they usually substracted out before the data is processed?
“A physicist” alleges:
“When we plot these numbers, we discover that a Hansen-style acceleration fit to the Condon/Watts sea-ice data robustly predicts total loss of planetary sea-ice by the end of the 20th century.”
20th century is gone, my friend. I am sure you mean the 21st century.
Regarding your other weirdly triumphant claims about “disappearing ice”:
1) It so happened that the starting point of the satellite measurements coincided with the recent maximum ice extent and temperature dip. This coincidence is the only straw that sinking climate alarmists still hold in their hands.
2) The time scale of the existing planetary ice and climate data records is incompatible with the time scale of the significant, long-term planetary climate changes. Let’s talk some 5,000 years from now.
Interesting post. Link to the “ice code” not working …
w.
Thank you. I’m am though a bit confused how you have projected the blue slope lines before and after satellite data collection. This would imply that one upon a time there was nothing but ice and in the future there will come a time when there is no ice.
Alexander, Feht, please let me say that you are entirely correct — the intended phrase was “total loss of planetary sea-ice by the end of the 21st century.
For rational skeptics, there is of course nothing “weirdly triumphant” about Hansen-style predictions of total planetary ice-loss, and certainly we need not wait 5,000 years to determine whether these predictions are correct. Indeed, Hansen predicts that a marked acceleration of multiple “hockey stick” climate-change parameters will be plainly seen by the end of the next solar cycle (say, during the next 15-18 years).
More broadly, rational skepticism correctly appreciates that the statement “97% of climatologists agree that global warming is largely anthopogenic” does not imply a 97% chance that Hansen’s prediction of an ice-free planet is is correct. Rather, it indicates that there is a substantial likelihood (surely not 100%, and surely not 0% either) that Hansen’s predictions are correct.
Elevator Summary The Condon/Watts ice-data analysis presented is consistent with the rationally skeptical point-of-view that Hansen’s predictions of an ice-free planet are appreciably likely to be fulfilled.
A physicist,
Hansen’s prediction on record was that, by now, FDR highway in Manhattan would be under water.
Would you at least apologize 18 years from now, when there will be more Arctic ice than now?
In Wikipedia GW editorial page, I predicted years ago (circa 2002) that the “total ice loss” wouldn’t happen by 2007. As a result, odious troll William M. Connolley edited me out of Wikipedia entirely. Alarmists cannot stand the truth.
As WUWT’s own Willis Eschenbach often says “Citation please!” 🙂 🙂 🙂
In the meantime, rational skeptics are referred to the early, on-record, publicly verifiable predictions in Hansen’s 1981 article “Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.”
Remember the fundamental principle that skepticism and science both prosper when the the strongest skeptical criticisms are applied to the strongest scientific analyses. And conversely, weak forms of “gotcha” skepticism, as applied to weak forms of “not even wrong” science, amount to a plain-and-simple waste of everyone’s attention and time.
A physicist says:
February 6, 2012 at 6:36 am
“Elevator Summary The Condon/Watts ice-data analysis presented is consistent with the rationally skeptical point-of-view that Hansen’s predictions of an ice-free planet are appreciably likely to be fulfilled.”
I have a prediction that I feel is as “appreciably likely to be fulfilled” as Mr. Hansen’s prediction of a planet “free” of sea ice. I predict at some point in the future the commentor known as “A.physicist” will submit a comment here that actually suggests he possesses a level of intelligence greater than a doorknob. AP, back when I was subject to the tutelage and tender mercies of the nuns in my Catholic grade school they taught us about a phenomenon that seems to be a complete mystery to you and Mr. Hansen. This seemingly arcane theory suggests that when it is Summer at the North Pole it is actually Winter at the South Pole. The logical implication of this is that, even in the extremely unlikely circumstance that the Summer minima for both the Arctic and Antarctic were to decline to zero, the minimum for global sea ice is unlikely to drop below a value that is lrager than the area of the lower 48 States of the US
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
Unless,of course, you and Mr.Hansen are suggesting global temperatures will rise enough in the next 90 yrs that not only will the Summer sea ice will disappear, but it will not reform at all in the six months of near total darkness that both regions experience annually. Or perhaps you guys believe the magically potent gas CO@ur momisugly will alter planetary dynamics enough to do away with seasonality entirely.
But on the other hand Dave, when was the last time Earth had a C02 level as high as present (anthropogenic) levels?
Hmmmm … about 15 million years ago, right?
Which coincidentally, is the last time Antarctica was ice-free, eh?
What does rational skepticism make of that?
A physicist says:
February 6, 2012 at 1:53 pm
“But on the other hand Dave, when was the last time Earth had a C02 level as high as present (anthropogenic) levels?
Hmmmm … about 15 million years ago, right?
Which coincidentally, is the last time Antarctica was ice-free, eh?
What does rational skepticism make of that?”
Disregarding for the moment that your reply, as usual, completely ignores the main point of the comment you are responding too, I would suggest that the logical and rational reaction to what you wrote above would be to ask “Do we really “know” any of that?” and my logical and rational answer would have to be “Not hardly!” I can’t claim to have scrutinized every piece of paleoclimate proxy hoakum produced in the last several decades, but I have done so for a large enough sample to have established to my own satisfaction that the best that most of them could legitimately claim to produce is vague suspicions and nowhere near to “knowledge” In the early days when i had more enthusiasm and patience those examinations frequently included chasing all the way down the often more than six degrees of separation chain of logical reference between whatever precisely measured bit of minutia that served as the input and whatever proxied value they claimed to generate as output. In almost every case I found that chain of logic was full of more holes than a big wheel of Jarlsberg, Those holes included things like claims that isotope ratios that are often barely understood in the present behaved exactly as the authors wished over thousands and millions of years, papers cited as having “demonstrated” or established “knowledge” which supports the proxy process which, when examined with a critical eye, offer only as I said vague suspicions. I don’t claim to know much about what has driven, is driving,or will drive in the future the amazing climate of this planet but, after well more than a decade in rummaging about in this BS, I have come to consider anyone who confidently claims that they do as an epistemological mattress back .
I disagree with Dave Wendt. I think ‘a physicist’ has more intelligence than a doorknob.☺ But his repeatedly debunked belief system crushes any rational thought. He believes what he believes; contrary facts just get in the way of his beliefs.
There is nothing wrong with Antarctic ice cover. It is normal. So is Arctic ice cover. See, the planet is still emerging from the LIA. Rational folks expect ice cover to diminish. It’s normal and natural.
Posting yet another pal reviewed paper that tries to link CO2 with decreasing glaciation [“Decreases in pCO2 were apparently synchronous with major episodes of glacial expansion…”] is a non-starter: on all time scales, rises in CO2 follow temperature rises. How many times does ‘a physicist’ have to be told that verifiable fact? And I label as bogus the pal-reviewed authors their claimed ability to know that CO2 and temperature rises were “apparently synchronous” when looking back 15 million years. We know that in every verifiable geological instance, CO2 rises follow temperature rises. That is because warmer water outgases CO2.
There is wide variability in annual sea ice. The Arctic has been ice-free as recently as the 1920’s, and the early 1800’s before that. Only a cult member of the True Believer Church of Globaloney would arm-wave over the normal ebb and flow of polar ice. And anyone smarter than a doorknob knows that CO2, anthropogenic or otherwise, has nothing to do with sea ice variability. Changes in ocean currents fully explain the variability, and explains the fact that the Arctic is changing while the Antarctic isn’t.
Well somehow Dave (probably by pure luck) those wacky & morally bankrupt ice scientists have just this week drilled into Antarctica’s sub-ice Lake Vostok … a lake that was last exposed to the sky, the last time planetary C02 was this high. It will be plenty of fun to see what is hidden in this long-icebound lake: Russian Drill Penetrates 14-Million-Year-Old Antarctic Lake
A physicist,
if the Russians penetrate the lake and find organisms that are basically the same as what you see around you would you explain that by claiming:
1) evolution is bunk
2) the lake isn’t really 14,000,000 years old
Hypothetically now as I KNOW that you KNOW Evolution is an incontrovertible fact and the lake being 14,000,000 years old is an incontrovertible fact. 8>)
A physicist says:
February 6, 2012 at 1:53 pm
“Well somehow Dave (probably by pure luck) those wacky & morally bankrupt ice scientists have just this week drilled into Antarctica’s sub-ice Lake Vostok … a lake that was last exposed to the sky, the last time planetary C02 was this high. It will be plenty of fun to see what is hidden in this long-icebound lake: Russian Drill Penetrates 14-Million-Year-Old Antarctic Lake”
Only if you are willing to assume, as most proxicologists seem too, that the magical CO2 which supposedly mixes and equilibrates throughout the atmosphere on an almost instantaneous basis, is willing, once it reaches polar latitudes, to lay there like a dead dog just waiting for humans to come along with one of their pristine drillbits to harvest it for examination. As I recall most of the scientific world has been arguing forcefully against such a penetration because the technology didn’t exist to do it and guarantee that pristine lake wouldn’t be contaminated in the process. But then again the Russki’s have never demonstrated that they are much interested in such subtleties .