In today’s report
- Arctic Sea Ice on the rise again, presently in the range of normal levels
- Antarctic Sea Ice is at slightly above normal levels
- Why is early satellite data for Arctic and Antarctic Ice extent referenced in the first IPCC report missing from today’s data?
- Is revisionism going on with the date of the famous USS Skate photo in the Arctic?
- Bonus – it seems NOAA is taking Arctic soot seriously
First the Arctic from NSIDC:
Source: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
After being out of the ±2 STD area since before peak melt last year, Arctic extent has spent most of March in near normal territory. After what looked like a maximum earlier this month, it was false peak, and ice is on the rise again.
NORSEX SSM/I shows the current value within ±1 STD
Source: http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_area.png
A caution, as we saw in 2010, extent hugged the normal line for quite awhile, and that didn’t translate into a reduced or normal summer melt. So, forecasting based on this peak might not yield any skillful ice minimum forecasts.
Antarctic Sea Ice is at slightly above normal levels, as it has been for some time:
Source: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
Why is early satellite data for Arctic and Antarctic Ice extent referenced in the first IPCC report missing from today’s data?
In a post last week, Steve Goddard pointed out that in the original IPCC FAR in 1990, there was an interesting graph of satellite derived Arctic sea ice extent:
This is from page 224 of IPCC FAR WG1 which you can download from the IPCC here
And here is figure 7.20 (a) magnified:
The IPCC descriptive text for these figures reads:
Sea-ice conditions are now reported regularly in marine synoptic observations, as well as by special reconnaissance flights, and coastal radar. Especially importantly, satellite observations have been used to map sea-ice extent routinely since the early 1970s. The American Navy Joint Ice Center has produced weekly charts which have been digitised by NOAA. These data are summarized in Figure 7.20 which is based on analyses carried out on a 1° latitude x 2.5° longitude grid. Sea-ice is defined to be present when its concentration exceeds 10% (Ropelewski, 1983). Since about 1976 the areal extent of sea-ice in the Northern Hemisphere has varied about a constant climatological level but in 1972-1975 sea-ice extent was significantly less. In the Southern Hemisphere since about 1981, sea-ice extent has also varied about a constant level. Between 1973 and 1980 there were periods of several years when Southern Hemisphere sea-ice extent was either appreciably more than or less than that typical in the 1980s.
I find it interesting and perhaps somewhat troubling that pre-1979 satellite derived sea ice data was good enough to include in the first IPCC report in 1990, but for some reason not included in the current satellite derived sea ice data which all seems to start in 1979:
Since the extent variation anomalies in 1979 seem to match with both data sets at ~ +1 million sq km, it would seem they are compatible. Since I’m unable to find the data that the IPCC FAR WG1 report references so that I can plot it along with current data, I’ve resorted to a graphical splice to show what the two data sets together might look like.
I’ve cropped and scaled the IPCC FAR WG1 Figure (a) to match the UUIC Cryosphere Today Arctic extent anomaly graph so that the scales match, and extended the base canvas to give the extra room for the extended timeline:
Click image above to enlarge.
Gosh, all of the sudden it looks cyclic rather than linear, doesn’t it?
Of course there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth over my graphic, and the usual suspects will try to pooh-pooh it, but consider the following
- Per the IPCC reference, it is data from NOAA, gathered by the American Navy Joint Ice Center
- It is satellite derived extent data, like Cryosphere Today’s data
- The splice point at 1979 seems to match well in amplitude between the two data sets
- The data was good enough for the IPCC to publish in 1990 in the FAR WG1, so it really can’t be called into question
- If Mike Mann can get away with splicing two dissimilar data sets in an IPCC report (proxy temperature reconstructions and observations) surely, splicing two similar satellite observation data sets together can’t be viewed as some sort of data sacrilege.
Of course the big inconvenient question is: why has this data been removed from common use today if it was good enough for the IPCC to use in 1990? Is there some revisionism going on here or is there a valid reason that hasn’t been made known/used in current data sets?
If any readers know where to find this data in tabular form, I’ll happily update the plot to be as accurate as possible.
Is revisionism going on with the date of the famous USS Skate photo in the Arctic?
It seems our favorite photo of the USS Skate has had it’s date revised.
Since yesterday was the anniversary of the March 17th surfacing of the USS Skate, WUWT contributor Ric Werme was interested in what the photographic conditions might look like on March 17th 1959 when the sun was just below the horizon, and so found a sub and attempted to recreate the photo conditions himself to see if the photograph was actually possible.
See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/17/submarines-in-the-winter-twilight/
Turns out it was, but then he stumbled on something he didn’t expect to find. The date for the surfacing has been changed from March 17th, 1959 to August, 1958 (with no day given) in Wikipedia and in NAVSOURCE. He at first thought I’d made a mistake in citation, but it turns out dates have been changed since I wrote my original article on the USS Skate on April 26th, 2009.
I wrote about how the original date remains on NAVSOURCE in the Wayback machine
Anthony Watts says:
Navsource, in the Wayback machine, had it stated as March 17th 1959, just days before my original article. This is the April 18th 2009 snapshot from Wayback:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090418161606/http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/08578.htm
The caption then reads:
Skate (SSN-578), surfaced at the North Pole, 17 March 1959.
I remember checking NAVSOURCE for accuracy before publishing, my caption then says:
Skate (SSN-578), surfaced at the North Pole, 17 March 1959. Image from NAVSOURCE
History on that photo changed there at NAVSOURCE since then, probably due to alarmist pressure from Wiki etc. and other folks like Neven who went ballistic over the picture when I highlighted it. It is “inconvenient” in March (during peak ice season) but soothing for them in August (during near peak melt season).
The picture may have been taken a couple of days after the funeral photo in March alluded to upthread.
Se EM Smith comment in my original thread. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/26/ice-at-the-north-pole-in-1958-not-so-thick/#comment-122932
Oddly, NAVSOURCE now shows a caption of:
So what had been certain and unchallenged for years now all of the sudden is uncertain and may be in August 1958. Seems like a case of the tail wagging the dog.
Obviously there is a need to pin this date down, but I’m amused that so much attention has been brought to this photo since I first blogged on it.
BONUS: I’ve always said that the current drop in Arctic Ice Extent might have roots in soot from the industrialization of Asia causing an albedo change which really took off in the 1990’s, would show up in the summer melt season when solar irradiance is at a peak in the Arctic. Now it seems NOAA is taking Arctic soot seriously:
From the video description:
Small, new, remotely-operated, unmanned aircraft are being flown in the Arctic to measure black soot. The soot is produced by burning diesel fuel, agricultural fires, forest fires, and wood-burning stoves. It is transported by winds to the Arctic, where it darkens the surface of snow and ice, enhancing melting and solar warming. See http://saga.pmel.noaa.gov/ and http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/edd/manta.html
As always, check the latest sea ice conditions on the WUWT Sea Ice Reference page.
UPDATE: Robert Grumbine disputes some the the points related to the IPCC1 report and sea ice with EMMR equipped satellites here. – Anthony
Here is a near surface map of temperature which shows a temperature of -25 C (-13 F) near the North Pole on 17 March 1959:
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/marka/1959031718.1000mb.temp.gif
Open water would be very unlikely in mid March of any year including 1959 given a likely temperature well below zero F. 17 March is only about 2 weeks beyond the date of lowest temperature in the deep Arctic in a normal year. In fact, if you take a look at Alert at the far northern end of Ellesmere Island you will see monthly normal temperature varies little from January through March at the peak of winter chill:
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/marka/west/yt/yt.normals.html
I think it is much more likely this picture was taken during the August 1958 cruise to the Arctic and was later mislabelled somehow.
-Mark Albright
Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment (1974-1978)
There is an article in the January 1959 National Geographic covering the historic 1958 trips of both Nuatilus and Skate.
Page 21
” …that superb atomic submarine in attaining her “first”: a west-to-east crossing of the Arctic via the North Pole, August 1-4, 1958.
One week later the nuclear-powered Skate appended a highly significant chapter to our own tale of exploration. On August 11, captained by Comdr. James F. Calvert, she became the second vessel in history to reach the Pole, entering and departing the Arctic Ocean by the Atlantic side.
Skate surfaced several times in open leads in the ice pack, once within 40 miles of the Pole, and another time directly in front of the manned IGY Drifting Station Alpha on a huge ice floe.”
Sorry, should have been Nautilus
Even more interesting, there you hava actually two distinct polar cruises, an easy one in summer 1958, and a not-so-easy one in 1959. In both cases Skate surfaced at the pole severa times :
http://www.northofseveycorners.com/history/skate.htm
“In August 1958, SKATE made her first cruise to the Arctic where she operated under the ice packs for ten days. During this period she surfaced nine times through openings in the ice, became the second ship to reach the North Pole, and successfully navigated over 2,400 miles beneath the ice. On her return to the United States, the ship was awarded the Navy Unit Commendation for “… braving the hazards of the polar ice pack…”
In March 1959, SKATE again headed north, this time to pioneer arctic submarine operations during the period of extreme cold and maximum ice thickness. In twelve days under the pack, SKATE forced her was up through the thin ice to the surface ten times and steamed over 3,000 miles. In a dramatic high of this cruise, on March 17, 1959, SKATE became the first submarine to surface at the North Pole… Where the ashes of famed explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins were committed to the arctic waste. On her return to port, SKATE was awarded a Bronze Star in lieu of a second Navy Unit Commendation for demonstrating “…for the first time the ability of submarines to operate in and under the arctic ice in the dead of winter…” “
Go here…..
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/products/products_on_demand.html
……and click on “Arctic weekly”. The charts go all the way back to January 1st. 1972. Appears to be a pretty complete record too.
17 march 1959 seems confirmed – The US Navy should have a lot of pre-satelite arctic ice data complied during all these polar voyages. The abilty to surface in all seasons was crucial for the mission – firing missiles towards USSR.
http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/s13/skate-ii.htm
Last but not least, John Daly had it too, and with a winter 1959 photo as an illustration :
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/skate.jpg
Photo taken from US Navy archive :
http://www.csp.navy.mil/asl/ScrapBook/Boats/Skate1959.jpg
Caption :
“Fig.6 – USS Skate during an Arctic surfacing in 1959. (US Navy Photo)”
Reference :
http://www.john-daly.com/polar/arctic.htm
Skate-related section :
“As early as 1959, the first US submarine to surface at the North Pole, the USS Skate, did so in late March, and surfaced at 10 other locations during the same cruise, each time finding leads of open water or very thin ice from which to do so. It did a similar cruise a year earlier in August 1958, again finding numerous open leads within which to surface. Here is a photo of the Skate during one of its surfacings in 1959. As can be seen in all three photos, the flat new ice is scarcely different between 1959 and 1999, while the 1987 photo shows the extent to which open water can occur.”
Bob B says:
March 18, 2012 at 10:02 am
As Bob noted, eyeballing the stitched graph suggests that the scaling is different in that the ice extent was relatively underestimated in the prior-to satellite records. Which seems reasonable.
The impact of different scales or ability to estimate extent, however, AGAIN works in the alarmists favour. The range of change is much greater when both growth and loss are underestimated. If you were to scale up the pre-1979 data so that the 1977-1979 time looked like the 1979-1981 range style,
I’ve photoshopped the image to at least LOOK like it fits the post-79 data. Now it looks like the Arctic sea-ice extent did not dip below the 1972 level until 2005. Which means we have only 7 years of “anomalously” low extent.
The issue of start date is, by this crude thinking-it-through, of supreme importance to the sea-ice debate of the Arctic. Whatever cyclicity exists to sea-ice waxing and waning – of course the CAGW assumption is that prior to ’79 the Arctic sea-ice was stable to the terms of +/-1.0E6 km2, it appears that we have not have a full-cycle historical dataset.
I will post this image to my website (if I can figure it out, being only the second attempt).
The winter surfacing at the North pole was described in May 1959 in Life magazine, by the captain. From his account is is clear that there was enough water to surface a nuclear sub.
http://books.google.com/books?id=YEgEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA130#v=onepage&q&f=false
To help set the record straight, the Universal Ship Cancellation Society http://www.uscs.org/
records at http://www.uscs.org/collectingtopics/submarine/submarine4.htm
Collecting Submarine Covers – Page 4 of 4 by Ned Harris (USCS # 3608)
The photo shows the official date on the cancellation stamp.
I would like to thank William M. Connolley for showing up here, observing local guidelines regarding civility and on-topic posts, and attempting to engage the science and not the politics.
I’d like to thank the moderators for allowing him to hold that presence.
I’d ask comments to respect civility guidelines when responding to Mr Connolley.
I’d remind those interested what happened when, and after, Judy Curry began to engage the denizens at Steve McIntyre’s “Climate Audit” page.
I challenge all who, like me, have doubts about one or another aspect of the conventional consensus regarding catastrophic unprecedented anthropogenic global climate change to see our mission as changing Mr Connolley’s mind on that topic; not destroying his general opposition.
And that said, meant, and documented…
Why, in principle, CAN’T early records of one or more types (say, tree ring density, varve thickness, etc) be harmonized (I won’t say “spliced”, that would be a non-sensible thing to do) with later records of other types? If in principle the harmonization is possible, why has the IPCC made the decision not to make an attempt in this case? Are you saying the IPCC lacks technical skill? Are you saying the Ford administration was unreliable in data-gathering? Please elaborate on your conjecture.
looks like if NSIDC included 2001-2008 (making it a full 30 period) in their ‘average’ period, current ice levels would be well into the normal and maybe even above-normal range. Its the same with NORSEX choosing a rather strange cutoff date for their average period (2006).
have you ever contacted them Anthony to ask why they dont use at least 30 years of data now that its available?
“Skate” was in the arctic in both Aug. 1958 and Mar. 1959. Excerpt from a scan of the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1962 ed., vol. 2, pp. 306a, “ARCTIC”: http://twitpic.com/8y5h2y/full
Navsource has an enlarged image of the commemorative stamp of the USS Skate March 17, 1959 North Pole
http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/0857809.jpg
So no death spiral then?
And the July 1959 National Geographic covers the Skate winter trip to the Arctic.
Skate surfaced at the Pole 10:54 GMT March 17.
There are a number of photos in this article showing Skate surfaced though the ice. The ice seems to vary in thickness between 6″ and 9″. This is not the overall ice thickness but places of thinner ice. Photos on pages 14 & 15 show Skate at the Pole, but it is hard to work out how thick the ice is.
Sorry to spoil your fun but that splice is wrong by about half a million square kilometers baseline shift. Take a look:
Your version: http://i43.tinypic.com/igwx2v.png
My version: http://i41.tinypic.com/5ulpu8.png
It’s still good to know it was lower sometime in the past but 1975 was not really below 1992 and later values.
Eric says:
March 18, 2012 at 10:08 am
I have been reading WUWT for a few years now and I have been perplexed about the Sea Ice average. Why is it averaged from 1979-2000? Why is it not 1979-2009, since 30 years is the “holy grail” of time periods for climate?
Actually, it should now end in 2010. Ending date for “normals” will have a zero.
To do this means the average gray line and gray area in Anthony’s first graphic (cut and pasted from NSIDC) would be lower – and more embarassing to the “cause” – because an average is highly influenced by the outliers, for example, the warmists’ favorite year 2007.
Hope that answers your question. John
Warming makes for more ice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Gordon_Pugh
“”Arctic kayak
In September 2008, Pugh, accompanied by a team aboard a ship where he slept, attempted to kayak the 1200 km from Svalbard, across the Arctic Ocean, towards the North Pole, but team abandoned the effort 135 km from the start.[14] The aim was to further highlight the melting sea ice. The expedition coincided with some scientists predicting that the North Pole could be free of sea-ice in the summer of 2008, for the first time in thousands of years.[15] Pugh stated that despite several attempts, they were unable to find a gap in the ice. In 2002, Thomas and Tina Sjogren had skied and swam their way to the North Pole without any external support.[16] In his autobiography Pugh wrote:
“Ironically, global warming played no small part in undermining the entire expedition. We believed that the greater melting of summer ice would open up large areas of sea and allow us to paddle north at good speed. What we did not fully appreciate was that to the north of us there was a widespread melting of sea ice off the coast of Alaska and the New Siberian Islands and the ice was being pushed south towards us … The evidence of climate change was stark. Fourteen months before I’d sailed north and I’d seen a preponderance of multi-year ice about three metres thick north of Spitsbergen, but this time most of the ice was just a metre thick.”[17]””
From: The Papers of Sir George Hubert Wilkins at The Ohio State University
Anthony
Here are two further photos of the USS Skate (#578)at the North Pole after stating:
USS Skate surfacing at the North Pole, March 17, 1959. Wilkins 35-5-1.
Crew of the USS Skate during the memorial ceremony for Wilkins on March 17, 1959. Wilkins’ ashes were scattered over the Arctic ice. Wilkins 35-5-4.
T Gough says:
March 18, 2012 at 10:19 am
“He also mentions that the Skate undertook a similar cruise in August 1958, but (since the surfacing at the North pole in March 1959 was a first) presumably NOT at the North Pole.”
That’s probably the reason why they now claim that the picture was taken in 1958, so that it couldn’t have been taken at the North Pole…
Kasuha, this splice looks wrong by eyeball but to me the ordinate scale looks expanded on the right.
The BBC are showing a PIOMAS graph indicating a possible ice free arctic by 2015.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17400804
Climate ‘tech fixes’ urged for Arctic methane
This is from page 224 of IPCC FAR WG1 which you can download from the IPCC here
Here’s the relevant part, the actual individual chapter 7:
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/far/wg_I/ipcc_far_wg_I_chapter_07.pdf
Presented for those with a slow connection, and this chunk alone is 4.7MB.