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
Am I the only one interested in the unusual persisting indentation of open sea North (and North East) of Svalbard? What is up with that?….
The photo with the Skate in clear water shows it without the modifications to the tower that were made to enable it to penetrate ice as shown in the other photo.
Julienne Stroeve says:
March 18, 2012 at 8:08 pm
[…] The Walsh and Jonson reference you pointed to was for sea ice anomalies from 1953 to 1977. Using their “baseline” for the anomalies, they would have seen lower ice conditions in the 1950s (peak was in 1969) than in the 1970s. But extending the record through present shows the last two decades have considerably less ice than the 1950s/1960s (more than a million sq-km less in terms of the annual ice extent and more than 2 million sq-km in terms of September ice extent for the last decade).
OK, I think I get it. I’m trying to make conclusions about sea ice extent based on a comparison of anomalies between series that use different baselines. So let me avoid that trap and ask about actual areas of sea ice extent. According to the NSIDC, September 2007 had the lowest sea ice extent in history at 4.28 million square kilometers. You are arguing that during the dramatic negative anomaly of 1960, the sea ice extent that September was still more than 2 million sq-km greater than that of September 2007, right? Has anyone created a monthly chart for 1953-2011 that either shows anomalies based on a common baseline for that period or, alternatively, shows sea ice extent in sq-km? In other words, can we get the whole picture for the period we know we have good data?
P.S. I just learned that you are an accomplished Research Scientist at NSIDC. Thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge with us. I hope you will continue to contribute.
P,S. I meant to close parenthesis after the first paragraph.
On the revision of the NAVSOURCE citation for the USS Skate image, the date of the photo was amended at the request of Graham P Davis of Bracknell.
“The original fault appears to lie with this site http://www.navsource.org/archives/08/08578.htm – I’ve asked them to correct the misleading description of the photo.” NewsGroup uk.sci.weather
Discussion 53 “Years Of Anthropogenic Global Warming” Oct 18, 2011
Davis’s authority was his reading of the book Surface at the Pole by Commander James Calvert.
I doubt that the photograph was taken on the date of the famous North Pole surfacing given the pack ice conditions at the time. There is an edited 15 minute 16mm colour film recording taken by crew members that shows the conditions over parts of the time the vessel was on the surface at the pole in 1959, including activities to melt the ice on and about the submarine and showing part of the Wilkins service. Classified ops apparently prevented the release of other photography.
@Bob B
Figure 5 is scaled in hundred thousand squarekilometers (10 exp 5), not million square kilometers, so the dip is not bigger than 2007.
Max says:
March 18, 2012 at 8:35 pm
Am I the only one interested in the unusual persisting indentation of open sea North (and North East) of Svalbard? What is up with that?….
Possibly the warm sea surface temp anomalies in the North Atlantic
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/satellite/index.uk.php
The photo of Skate sticking through the ice cannot be from 17 Mar 59 because it’s sunny there.
“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.”
did anybody catch that? 10%+is considered sea ice… I thought it was 15%? how much would that change the data? seems to me, at 10% the data will show larger mass. Maybe I am making a big deal out of nothing.
Quick Google and found a couple of references to USS Skate being there fore March 17th 1959, even found a philatelic item of note-
http://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleID=109
http://www.south-pole.com/aspp05.htm
Skimmed the thread and am surprised nobody has asked:
Where on earth is the ICESAT data?
It was released with great fanfare last year and is allegedly the answer we are all looking for on sea ice questions.
So why is it not answering those questions?
According to the paper linked to above, satellite ice data has been available and included in studies since the early 1970’s.
Where is that data?
I smell something fishy, and it’s not the contents of Baldrick’s apple crumble.
Doug Proctor says
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,
————-
Doug since you seem to be investigating this with some enthusiasm, may I suggest that you take into account how changes in the satellite resolution will affect estimates of ice extent.
Just a guess, but if ice extent is estimated by counting pixels, a naive method would give a resolution dependent result. Fractal nature of dispersed floating ice and all that.
The Wikipedia article on the USS Skate was revised yesterday by “DLH” :
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=USS_Skate_%28SSN-578%29&diff=482595885&oldid=480138714
Adding this reference from an Ohio State University Libraries Exhibition for the March 17, 1959 surfacing date, with photos:
http://library.osu.edu/projects/under-the-north-pole/afterwards.html
Okay I managed to have a bit of sleep and am able to once again communicate in english which is not my native language.
Well, you may notice one small detail. The IPCC and the UUIC graphs overlap by about 10 years, starting with 1979 (start of UUIC) and ending with 1989 (end of IPCC). Despite the poor quality of the IPCC graph which likely was printed out and scanned with significal loss of detail, it is possible to make out not only the running mean of these 10 years but actually a lot of details of the monthly anomaly shape. And just by comparing this shape with appropriate shape on the UUIC graph (after resizing both graphs to common units in both dimensions) you may notice they are in fact very similar, with one detail – as long as you put zero to zero, the IPCC anomaly shape lies way below the UUIC over all the 10 years. Taking into account that both are anomaly graphs and that UUIC baseline is 1979-2008, half of which was not available for the IPCC graph, it is clear that they use different baselines. Adding a different baseline to one of them to produce a fit of the overlapping part is the easiest way to reasonably put the two together, based on assumption that annual cycle did not change much (which didn’t or they wouldn’t fit at all).
Exactly that could be seen on the two images I created and posted. It’s said image is worth a thousand words but mine unfortunately failed to act as such so I had to produce all the words anyway.
I must say one thing. One of the most common “warmist” arguments is that “skeptics” produce pseudo-science to prove their points. I hate that argument, but it’s hard to fight it if things like this keep appearing.
http://blackswhitewash.com/ says:
“According to the paper linked to above, satellite ice data has been available and included in studies since the early 1970′s. – Where is that data?”
The Walsh and Chapman compilation time series surveys of Arctic ice extent (1870 to 2008) are public data and available at the webpages of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois.
The seasonal and annual summary is tabled at http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/SEAICE/timeseries.1870-2008
Manfred, you’re right—my bad–thanks!
Kasuha–you ust be joking right? So Mann uses 2 bristle cone trees and hides the decline after 1960’s and this piece of crap is displayed prominently on an IPCC cover and you are saying sceptics use pseudo-science to prove their points?
The Milwaukee Sentinel – Mar 28, 1959 reports the second arctic voyage of the Skate
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=v21QAAAAIBAJ&sjid=hhAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=1876,3611833&dq=north-pole&hl=en
The Glasgow Herald – Mar 30, 1959 Reports the scattering of Huberts ashes at the North pole (he died in November 1958).
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qXhAAAAAIBAJ&sjid=rJsMAAAAIBAJ&pg=2411,3314305&hl=en
Now I know what it felt like living in the old USSR…. where folks where just airbrushed out of photographs and all history was up for a rewrite….
Note, too, that the statement ON the card says the cruise was during the WINTER…
Anthony, someone needs to make a stink about whoever at the official Navy site changed that caption. They are capriciously changing Recorded History and it is a flat out LIE.
IF that picture had been taken in mid summer, the lighting would have been much brighter, the camera stopped down more, the depth of field deeper and, unless the sky was cloudy, the lighting more direct and harsh.
The photo itself says winter by its features. The written records of the crew say winter. The postage stamp says March and the postcard says winter cruise. To suddenly change that to August is just wrong. Terribly terribly wrong.
(On the bright side, it makes it all the more obvious that the temperature records from NOAA / NCDC and HADCrut simply can not be trusted. GIVEN that we have folks blatantly pressuring the Navy to re-write history, the idea that they are not changing the records under the direct control of “Climate Zealots” becomes untenable….)
The ESMR and SMMR are not the satellites being discussed in IPCC AR1 on sea ice. This shouldn’t be a surprise, given that the curve starts before ESMR’s Dec 1972 launch, and has no break between ESMR (end December 1976) and SMMR (start 28 October 1978).
A full discussion is at my blog.
>> Because it became clear that the data from the different instruments can’t be merged; the ESMR stuff is incompatible with the SSMR. http://nsidc.org/data/nsidc-0077.html perhaps.
> Who says the ESMR and SSMR data are incompatible? Your link to the NSIDC web site certainly doesn’t say that. I can’t find anything in IPCC AR4 that says that. Indeed, section 4.4.2.1 of AR4 WGI says “The most composite record of sea ice extent is provided by passive microwave data from satellites that are available since the early 1970s.”
s/composite/complete.
> Why start with 1978 data when…
Try reading on to the next page, 4.4.2.2: “Most analyses of variability and trend in ice extent using the satellite record have focussed on the period after 1978 when the satellite sensors have been relatively constant.”
However, in this particular case, my mention of ESMR is probably a red herring, since the IPCC ’90 figure doesn’t use ESMR. http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/tempest-in-ice-pot.html provides the background that is missing here. Motto: if you have a puzzle, ask someone who knows rather than generating conspiracy theories.
Warmists will simply say that area and extent are meaningless and it’s ice thickness that really matters.
mike abbott says:
March 18, 2012 at 9:30 pm
Mike, if you email me at NSIDC, I’m happy to send you either the Had1SST data that I have, and/or also the Chapman and Walsh data. I have actually adjusted the Had1SST data down to match with the merged ESMR/SMMR/SSMI data set (so the extents are lower than in the original data set from 1953-1972), and even doing that, the September ice extent remains above 7 million sq-km (before the adjustments, it’s 8 million sq-km). The Chapman and Walsh data set also has the extents above 8 million sq-km in the 1950s, dropping to 4.10 in 2007.
As Anthony mentioned at the start of this blog, NSIDC has acquired a bunch of film from the 1960s that we’re processing so that we can provide more data as input into these older time-series.
A final note, once melt begins, the passive microwave data underestimates the true ice area (which is one reason why NSIDC only reports the extent in the sea ice news and analysis site, as it’s a more reliable metric). I only compared extents thus far.
From: http://www.usscod.org/fact.html
“The USS SKATE (SSN 578) was the first vessel ever to surface at the North Pole, when on March 17, 1959 she surfaced there to conduct memorial services for the renowned Arctic explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins”
http://archives.nbclearn.com/portal/site/k-12/flatview?cuecard=41751
has newsreels…
The image at the top of the newsreel page is not the same as the one in question here, and is dated 1958, so I suspect they used earlier footage of the sub in snow with this particular story while the event was underway. The key thing for me is the statement of the mission being to surface during the winter.
Clearly the sub was there in winter, and surfaced.
http://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/work/exploring/exploration/
The Smithsonian has a slightly different picture (less water around the boat, the ice looks ‘fresher’ on the boat and three people on the deck. It looks like they put one person on the ice then backed off for the other picture above here.) To me, it looks a bit more contrast enhanced and you have more of a view of the stuff on top of the deck (like the photographer is on slightly higher ‘ground’.) Also, from the bow, the water in the background looks about the same.
captioned:
If you can’t trust the Smithsonian, who can you trust 😉
The ice chunk on the bow looks very similar to me. I think it’s the same chunk, just the picture here was taken a bit later with crew on top deck and the boat backed off a bit from the first position (thus the different perspective and the different look to the foreground.) Same ‘foggy’ look to the stern of the boat. The picture here does look like the perspective is from a crouch position to emphasize the foreground water.
From: http://www.fact-index.com/u/us/uss_skate__ssn_578_.html
So in early August 1958 she headed to the arctic, ending in Norway on 23 August. But no mention of a north pole surfacing. Saying only ‘reached it’. (but ambiguous). We again have confirmation of a surfacing AT the pole on 17 March 1959.
http://www.tutorgig.info/ed/Submarine
dedicated to preserving submarine history says:
Again emphasizing the originality of that 17 March 1959 at the north pole.
The New York Times looks to have been influenced. This is the obit for Capt. Calvert from 2009 (though who knows when the last ‘edit’ was done… Wayback?):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/us/16calvert.html
Note, though, it says “near” not “at”. The article has a picture of the sub locked in ice that it claims is 1959 “at” the pole. So one of these sources has something wrong.
Though, at a minimum, the ‘near’ the north pole is still a winter shot almost at the North Pole… (but I think the original view is correct and by 2009 the Times was not being very careful).
http://www.examiner.com/military-news-in-charlotte/submarine-veteran-remembers-first-polar-surface-3
has an interview with a crewman who was there, but has a small picture of a more ice bound boat labeled as “near” the north pole (so I think they chose one with more snow):
So it looks to me like it’s very clear that DID surface AT the pole on 17 March 1959. There was no problem surfacing at a dozen or more places around the Arctic near the pole. There were pictures taken on more than one or two of these events. Close attention has to be paid to the details of ‘at’ vs ‘near’ the pole. At least some places were open areas and some were more iced over. Unless you have a provenance, knowing which picture was AT vs NEAR will be hard to prove (though the balance, IMHO, leans to the one here and the Smithsonian one being “AT” and the one surrounded by snow being “near”, based on repeated captions and the similarity of the Smithsonian and this one). Older labels / references are more likely to be accurate. (Things to not become more certain with the passage of time…)
http://www.pelletierson.com/NuclearSubmarines.html
has yet another variation on the same photo. 3 men on deck, up against the ice in the foreground. Same chunk of ice on the bow (though maybe even ‘fresher’ looking – or just a larger picture 😉 Clear water behind the bow.
So I think that the ones showing the boat from the same basic point of view, with the same background, same ice on the topside, and various numbers of people were just taken at different times during the North Pole surfacing, and during one point they backed the boat off from the ice flow into the open water behind it for the picture here.
That there are even more folks on deck also implies to me that it was later in the series, after the ‘tension’ of the first guy ashore was past and they’d pretty much figured No Bad Thing was happening, so more folks could get some air…
http://www.factbites.com/topics/Skate-class-submarine
Again has August as ‘under the ice’ and 17 March as AT the pole:
So the pattern I’m seeing is that if the picture says AT the pole, it was 17 March 1959.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-201893873.html
continues that theme per August 1958
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/ssn-578.htm
Has a rather interesting story, again confirming the “not at, but near” for August:
So on the August trip, we have a circling of the pole, but not a surfacing. Were I crossing UNDER a north pole with open water, and circling around it looking for a hole, if there were one in existence, I’d have surfaced. That the later trip (with stiffened gear) lets her surface AT the pole, seems pretty clear,
My conclusion: If the picture is AT the pole, it’s not August.