Arctic Sea ice data collected by DMI 1893-1961
Guest post by Frank Lansner
I came across a number of maps showing Arctic ice extend from 1893 to 1961 collected by DMI in “Nautisk Meteorologisk Aarbog”. Each year DMI have collected information on sea ice extend so that normally each of the months April, May, June, July and August ice extend was published.
There is much more to be said about these, but this is my summary for now.
Fig 1. 1901-1910 Arctic sea ice data collected by DMI. Click to enlarge!
Sadly, just for a few years we also have March or September available, and thus we normally can’t read the Arctic ice minimum (medio September) from these maps. The August trends will have the main focus in this writing.
First of all I would like to thank “Brunnur” in Iceland for making these maps available on the net beautifully scanned. This is a gold mine and I’m sure you know this, Brunnur.
Fig 2. August 1902.
The August data in the beginning of the century normally resembles December ice area for recent years. Year after year in the period 1901-1920 we see pretty much same picture. The sea east of the Russian island Novaja Zemlja is often frozen over even in August, and there is still sea ice between Baffin Island and Greenland.
Fig 3. 1911-1920. Click to enlarge!
Fig 4. August, 1916. The December-like August ice area continues to be observed year after year, and in 1916 most of the ocean between Baffin Island and Greenland is ice filled (- even in August!).
Fig 5. 1921-30
Fig 6.
Finally in 1923 something new happens: The ice east of Svalbard and east of Novaja Zemlja is on retreat.
Fig 7.
In 1930, the retreat has gone even further: Svalbard Is ice free, and ice free waters have been observed far east of Novaja Zemlja. In addition, the Baffin bay is now almost ice free. Puzzling is, that the ice extends on the pacific side of the Arctic remains rather constant in all these years.
Fig 8.
In 1932 we see in August open ice almost all along the Russian shore. So even though we do not see the September ice minimum here, we almost have an open NE passage.
Fig 9.
After a rather icy 1934, then 1935 again in August shows an almost open NE passage and in 1935 open waters are observed not that far from the North pole.
Fig 10.
In 1937, more open waters are observed in the Pacific and East Siberian areas.
Fig 11.
1938: Unprecedented areas of open waters.
(And again, this is not the ice minimum but just the August ice area)
Fig 12. 1931-1946
Already the year after, 1939, the ice extend resembles the pre 1923 extend.
We see that a decline in Arctic ice area from around 1921 ends possibly in 1938.
Fig 13. 1947-1956
Sadly we don’t have the Arctic warm years 1940-45, but just the colder years 1946-56.
Fig 14.
In 1952, The August sea ice area once again appears like the 1900-1920 extend. If Arctic ice areas reflects temperature well, then years around 1946-54 should be as cold as before 1923. It appears that the ice cover from 1938 to 1946 has recovered quickly.
Fig 15.
Here is an August–September comparison for 1901. For most of the Siberian shores in September we see open waters as far back as 1901.
Fig 16.
Some warm Arctic years in the 1930´ies from DMI compared to recent Cryosphere Today August graphics.
It seems that ice area for 1935 and 1996 were roughly similar (and it seems that ice area for 1938 and 2000 were roughly similar etc.):
Fig 17.
However, Cryosphere Today do not show 1935 ice area similar to 1996. Instead Cryosphere has added roughly 1,9 mio km2 to the ice area 1935 compared to 1996 (- The size of Greenland is 2,1 mio km2… ).
Fig 18a. We can also illustrate the missing Cryosphere ice decline after 1921 in another way.
The Cryosphere Arctic ice area data actually suggests a little more ice in 1937 than 1921 – but as shown above DMI, suggests a strong decline after 1921.
Fig 18b – and here the ice decline 1921-38 in four stages.
Fig 19. Also in another context it appears that the ice area data on Cryosphere has added area to older data:
If we compare the Cryosphere annual sea ice extend with the IPCC SAR 1996 data, we can see that the dive in 1996 data before 1979 is not represented in Cryosphere data. The divergence is perhaps 0,9 mio km2 over just the period 1973-1979.
Fig. 20, NW Passage in DMI data.
In September 1901 we are not far from having open NW passage and in September 1907 we do have an open NW Passage. We don’t have September images later thse to have an open NW passage.
What have we learned according to DMI´s international compilation of sea ice data?
– That sea ice data has declined strongly even in the recent past before human CO2 outlet.
– That Sea ice from a level not far from the 2006 level has recovered very fast 1938-1946.
– That the Sea ice decline documented year after year in DMI maps after 1921 apparently is not shown in Cryosphere data for some reason.
We do not have the WW2 data, but the maps of 1957-61 ice areas EXIST!
These are the years where we had a strong Solar max and photos of US Navy submarine on a slushy North pole.
If ANYONE have these maps, I would be grateful to see them!
Further, this series of maps as I understand it was also published by DMI for the years 1962-72 in a series called “Oceanografiske Observationer”. Do anyone have these?
Link to Brunnurs scans of DMI maps:
http://brunnur.vedur.is/pub/trausti/Iskort/Jpg/1935/1935_08.jpg
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Paul Westhaver says:
“Frank Lansner! So who are you!…”
Hmmm, try:
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/10/messages-from-the-global-raw-rural-data-warnings-gotchas-and-tree-ring-divergence-explained/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/30/co2-temperatures-and-ice-ages/
http://www.hidethedecline.eu
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/ruti.php
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/posts/a-brief-overview-of-chosen-frank-lansner-articles-in-english-208.php
K.R. Frank, and thank you for your interest.
Let’s notice that the decline of sea ice correspond roughly to the Dust Bowl period in the 1930s during which pressure increased on continental US, bringing extended periods of anticyclonic stability and heatwaves… Leroux of course identified this period as a rapid mode of circulation and the renewed advection of warm air displaced by more powerful MPHs meant Arctic Sea ice melting along the corridors of advection. Just as we see today… Once again Marcel Leroux got it right as he explained that sea ice extent is a counter intuitive proxy. Dynamic Analysis of Weather and Climate, 2010, 2nd ed. Springer/Praxis
Alan the Brit says:
May 2, 2012 at 3:38 am
Yes, but for exactly that reason there should be good records on sea ice. The convoys wanted to sail as far North of Norway as possible to avoid the Stukas (not sure where those bases were, but there were several north of Trondheim — Narvik perhaps?), and the U-boats based in Bergen and Trondheim. The convoy courses should be a good indicator of sea ice.
ICEGATE!
J Bowers says:
May 2, 2012 at 2:52 am
“And CCIS, when we see photos of US navy submarine surfacing near the north pole around 1960, does that really suggest extremely thick ice back then?”
Or more likely surfaced at Ice Station Alpha. Closer to Barrow, Alaska, than the North Pole.
=======================
Or more likely . . . What’s this about?
That surfacing is known:
“. . . the U.S. nuclear submarines Nautilus and Skate (when they) first entered the Arctic Ocean in 1958. The USS Skate surfaced at station Alpha on 11 August 1958, . . .”
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1966/sep-oct/smith.html
Posts and comments regarding surfacings of subs near the North Pole have been the topic on many occasions. Maybe I misinterpret this comment but will point out these links anyway:
April 26, 2009
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/26/ice-at-the-north-pole-in-1958-not-so-thick/
August 3, 2010
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/03/open-water-at-the-north-pole/
Follow the many links in the comments.
March 17, 2012
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/17/submarines-in-the-winter-twilight/
Julienne Stroeve
When will John Walsh produce his final product and how do we gain access to it? Thanks.
tonyb
Interesting that the time period of declining ice corresponds with the large forest fire years in the mountain west (U.S.) from 1919 to 1935. Those years were about as severe as the more recent period 1988 to 2003.
The maps have been online since 26-Oct-2010 according to the server date.
Tony, the data set (when complete) will be archived at NSIDC. I would anticipate it being ready sometime in 2013, though I’m not sure how far along they are with their processing.
NSIDC is also digitizing satellite imagery (that is saved as film) from the 1960s to extend the satellite estimates of sea ice back to 1964. Most of this is visible imagery though, so clouds don’t allow you to see the surface. Thus, we will be looking at producing a monthly sea ice extent and ice edge product from that earlier satellite data.
It is indeed important to go back as far as we can with the ice records to better understand the last 30 years of changes and what it means for the future of the ice cover.
Here is another set of historical ice maps (for the North Atlantic sector of the Arctic). They tell essentially the same story:
http://acsys.npolar.no/ahica/intro.htm
And for the war years, it is correct as somebody has remarked that there are military records at least for the Barents Sea and the Fram/Denmark Strait. Some can be found e. g. in Roskill’s Official History of the British Navy in WW2.
There are much more unused data, for example the declassified Corona satellite photographs from 1960-1975 (the very first satellite photo ever taken, in August 1960, shows that the waters off Mys Shmidta in northeastern Siberia were ice-free that autumn):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CORONA_first_image.jpg
Further the USAAF photographed the whole of Greenland in the summer of 1946, and (surreptitiously) most of the siberian coast in 1956 (though these latter images may still be classified).
I’d like to repeat the caution of expressed by tjfolkerts at 6:14 am. The most trustworty data on these maps are the red data from reports. The rest is cartographer’s guestimates based upon prior year’s reports, theory, and conjecture.
Let us not forget: “Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it is essential.” (Monmonier, 1996). These maps are valuable finds! They should be respected as representing the best information of ice extent made and used by people who need to navigate the Arctic Ocean. But let’s be carefule of what we don’t know.
For instance, do we know WHEN in August the data was collected? In any given year, the Arctic Ice extent drops by approx. 2 million km^2 from Aug. 1 to Aug 30. About 20-25% of the ice on Aug 1 is gone by Aug 30. So the red points are good, with an error bar (or uncertainty bar) on date, and the white area are “maximum extent that fits the control.” BTW, don’t assume that the uncertainty is symetrical, indeed the uncertainty in “ice area” may be highly skewed toward smaller areas where there are no observations.
When the methods used to draw the maps are calibrated lemme know.
REPLY: Rather than poo-poo this, you should embrace more data, especially data where there was little. Tsk. – Anthony
Frank Lansner says:
May 2, 2012 at 6:38 am
Hi Mick J,
Heres where I originally found information that there existed this “Nautical” yearbook,
From DMI, see page 30 in the middle:
—————
Hi Frank, thanks for that, very useful. So much information made freely available. 🙂
Mick.
Marvelous post. Always good to hear from Frank Lansner. Kudos to Brunner, too.
Additional information perhaps
Admiralty Sailing Directions NP10The Arctic Pilot Vol. 1 , vol 2 and vol 3
Steven Mosher says:
“When the methods used to draw the maps are calibrated lemme know.”
Steven, you have been handed over the BEST data.
I may be wrong, but as I understand it you have not really analysed it as a “sceptic” should. You have just examined the whole data pile havent you?
Did you check out if De Bilt in BEST was the adjusted one or the raw one???
Darwin? NZ data? Milano? Berlin? Durban !!? Beyruth?
Did you find the obvious fraud in Mozambique data?
Did you try?
Why should BEST results tell something else than Hadcrut/GHCN etc if several IN data sets are in fact the adjusted ones??
J Bowers says:
May 2, 2012 at 2:52 am
Or more likely surfaced at Ice Station Alpha. Closer to Barrow, Alaska, than the North Pole.
No. All official DoD photographs which were mailed for public release (and they were mailed prior to the mid-’90s) were either stamped or had a label affixed to the back of the photo with an official caption describing the unit or person involved, the event, the date, and the location, along with the photographer’s name. If the description was “USS Fishname surfacing at the North Pole,” it was a photo of the USS Fishname surfaced at the North Pole — not Ice Station Alpha.
This is perfect and exactly what one would expect based on the documented high temperatures in the Arctic at that time. With present concentrations of CO2 at most adding 0.2 C, all this Arctic warming must be caused by heat flux from the ocean into the air, and therefore there had to be low sea ice during that time. The Cryosphere Today’s early century representation of steady ice concentrations of sea ice always throughout that time s directly contradicted those observed temperatures. In a 2004 paper “The Early Twentieth-Century Warming in the Arctic—A Possible Mechanism” by BENGTSSON had reported that
“The largest warming occurred in the Arctic (60–90N) (Johannessen et al. 2004) averaged for the 1940s with some 1.7C (2.2C for the winter half of the year) relative to the 1910s. As can be seen from Fig. 1, it was a long-lasting event commencing in the early 1920s and reaching its maximum some 20 years later. The decades after were much colder, although not as cold as in the early years of the last century. It is interesting to note that the ongoing present warming has just reached the peak value of the 1940s, and this has underpinned some views that even the present Arctic warming is dominated by factors other than increasing greenhouse gases (Polyakov and Johnson 2000; Polyakov et al. 2002).”
BENGTSSON’s theory suggested warm water incursions from an earlier positive NAO had opened the Barents Sea, and those exposed warmer waters altered the winds which then maintained the open water even after the NAO went negative. All the recent buoy observations had also identified more rapid intrusion of warm water when the recent NAO was positive and we observe a very similar opening of the Barents Sea. With the PDO going negative the Bering Sea has had abnormally high ice extent and the Chukchi an d East Siberian are right at maximum average.The Barents is always the last to refreeze due to greater warm water intrusions. So with the NAO going negative, and about a 14 year life span of the warm water, via the Gulf Stream, to complete its circulation in the Arctic, I would predict the Barents Sea should begin to freeze over by about 10 years from now.
I started to post this argument on RealClimate, but being good climate scientists, they deleted half my posts and and stuck others in the borehole. You should post a link to Brunnar’s site so they can peruse real observations
Regarding the missing WWII records of ice conditions, why not try the Imperial War Museum? They should have records concerning the arctic convoys to Russian harbours, especially the PQ and JW convoys. The Yanks probably have something in their vaults as well.
Alan Watt says:
May 2, 2012 at 8:43 am
Yes, but for exactly that reason there should be good records on sea ice. The convoys wanted to sail as far North of Norway as possible to avoid the Stukas (not sure where those bases were, but there were several north of Trondheim — Narvik perhaps?), and the U-boats based in Bergen and Trondheim. The convoy courses should be a good indicator of sea ice.
The convoys were trying for speed — hugging the edge of the ice rather than making a direct run would not only have prolonged their agony, but simplified the U-boats’ search for them. Most aerial attacks on the Murmansk convoys were by He-111s, Bf-110s, and FW-200s (based at Stavanger), which had the range to pick up the convoys a day after they passed Iceland and follow them to Tromso, where they’d get picked up by the Ju-87s and get hit all the way to Murmansk.
Julienne
Thanks for that-look forward to seeing them
ttty said:
“May 2, 2012 at 9:07 am
Here is another set of historical ice maps (for the North Atlantic sector of the Arctic). They tell essentially the same story:
http://acsys.npolar.no/ahica/intro.htm ”
——
I am aware of these and was attempting to get them into a graphical format. Anyone know if that has already been done?
tonyb
Steve and Anthony interact thusly:
Steven Mosher says:
May 2, 2012 at 9:11 am
When the methods used to draw the maps are calibrated lemme know.
REPLY: Rather than poo-poo this, you should embrace more data, especially data where there was little. Tsk. – Anthony
I think a useful exercise would be to to accept the paper plots as-is but then to see if there is a cross-over point compared with modern satellite images. That would serve to calibrate the DMI methods and records. Also, it seems to me that it would fall within the frame of interest of the Cryosphere folks to look at it. It will certainly be better data than “Tree Ring” data as a proxy for satellite images. The Cryosphere folks are however infected with PolarBear-itis. and science has given way to activism.
With regard to info from the war years, as one or two posts have already said, ships logs may well contain much useful data. Warships especially had to keep accurate plots of their positions and that could be tied in to notes in the logs about the proximity to ice.
If memory serves the hunt for the Bismark is one example: she was shadowed by British cruisers along the edge of the ice for a couple of days.
Quite how such info could be excavated, I am not sure.
.
So Cryosphere Today are “Hiding the Decline” in the 1930s? Where have I heard that before??
Note also the 60-year nature of this cycle, which fits into the PDO rather nicely. Has anyone graphed the two together? Had Cryosphere Today not hidden this decline, the 60-year nature of the climate cycle would have been fairly obvious a decade ago.
.
J. Stroeve speaks for “the sea ice community” when stating they have been well aware of DMi information regarding historical Arctic sea ice. Which specific elements of the sea ice community are included in her statement? Have any of these elements gone on record explaining the significance of historical DMI type sea ice observations in comparison with “the last 30 years of data to better understand” what causes these fluctuations over time? Has NSIDC conducted or published any studies to date comparing ” the last 30 yrs” to DMI type historical ice measurements of the Arctic? Cites, if so. Any reasons, if not? Thanks in advance for response.