Got this in the mail just as I posted my open thread announcemnt. I’m too busy this weekend to say much else except to post this tweet from Bill McKibben and some past blog excerpts and invite discussion.
The reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet has…literally dropped off the bottom of the chart. This means MELT. http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=514
That graph says one thing to me – black carbon soot, especially since lower levels of Greenland, near the oceans and glacial terminae don’t exhibit the same effect:
CO2 doesn’t change ice albedo, but smoke from the industrialization of Asia does, and I think it is a factor. See why below.
It is possibly the same reason for the sea ice decline and the melt pools we’ve been seeing on the surface. Note that this year the melt accelerated quickly once the sun was regularly over the horizon in May…so that an energy dissipation in the ice when soot absorbs solar radiation.
Recall this experiment with soot on snow done by meteorologist Michael Smith of WeatherData where soot made a huge difference.
I also covered the issue in:
Greenland Ground Zero for Global Soot Warming
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, this moulin in Greenland a real eye opener:
He writes:
In the winter a huge among of snow are accumulated on the Ice (2-3 meters, sometimes more) and we are not talking about 1 or 2 square-miles, it’s about 100.000′s of square miles (up to 1 million) on the Westside of the Ice cap and a similar picture on the Eastside… when the melting season starts in april-sep… the meltwater has to go somewhere, and for sure it goes downhill in huge meltwater rivers.
The black stuff on the bottom of the lakes is carbon dust and pollution in general… but not from one year, but several decades (the topographical conditions don’t change from year to year). On a flight over the Ice Cap a sky clear day, you can see hundreds of huge lakes with the black spot on the bottom.
– Anthony
The website of Jason E. Box, Ph.D. meltfactor.org has more graphs and says:
Latest Greenland ice sheet reflectivity
These albedo visualizations are discussed here and here.
About the Data
Surface albedo retrievals from the NASA Terra platform MODIS sensor MOD10A1 product beginning 5 March 2000 are available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) (Hall et al., 2011). The daily MOD10A1 product is chosen instead of the MODIS MOD43 or MCD43 8-day products to increase temporal resolution. Release version 005 data are compiled over Greenland spanning March 2000 to October 2011. Surface albedo is calculated using the first seven visible and near-infrared MODIS bands (Klein and Stroeve, 2002; Klein and Barnett, 2003). The MOD10A1 product contains snow extent, snow albedo, fractional snow cover, and quality assessment data at 500m resolution, gridded in a sinusoidal map projection. The data are interpolated to a 5 km Equal Area Scalable Earth (EASE) grid using the NSIDC regrid utility April and after September, there are few valid data, especially in Northern Greenland because of the extremely low solar incidence angles. The accuracy of retrieving albedo from satellite or ground-based instruments declines as the solar zenith angle (SZA) increases, especially beyond 75 degrees, resulting in many instances of albedo values that exceed the expected maximum clear sky snow albedo of 0.84 measured byKonzelmann and Ohmura (1995). Here, we limit problematic data by focusing on the June–August period when SZA is minimal.
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I’m with James Sexton at 6:01 pm. Has anyone checked the instruments? That graph looks plain wrong. If it were me I would check three times and get someone else to re-check it again before I published that graph.
In Washington State we call that chlamydomonas nivalis. Ours is pink when it’s alive. It is an algae.
Hmm. I hope that possibility is checked out.
Say, if it turns out to be Asian soot (which could be identified by sophisticated fingerprinting), then WE could start getting line line for reparations!
James Sexton says:
July 21, 2012 at 6:09 pm
Well, okay curiosity got me. Now I’m even more skeptical of the measurements….. we have albedo at 500-1000m, but none at 2000-2500m, but then magically we have some at 2500-3200m.
http://polarmet35.mps.ohio-state.edu/albedo/2500-3200m_Greenland_Ice_Sheet_Reflectivity_Byrd_Polar_Research_Center.png
I don’t know enough about what exactly they are measuring, but that’s bunk. Light doesn’t work that way. It’s just another thing to get hysterical about and a method to ignore the fact that our temps haven’t risen in 15 years.
James’s comment that “light doesn’t work that way” is incorrect. I live in the Swiss Alps and climb on snow fields and glaciers frequently. Where you get a dark coloured stone sitting on the snow/ice, the melt around it is clear to see. Everyone knows that dark coloured objects absorb more light and infra-red than light coloured ones, hence water solar collectors are black.
Looking at images of icebergs and icebergs calving, you see both darker horizontal bands and scallop shaped dark areas. The former presumably from periods in the past when net surface melt occurred and the latter from BC accumulation in meltwater pools that subsequently got covered in ice.
This image shows how much faster the darker bands melt.
http://www.fotosearch.com/ULY059/u28213896/
read the cross validation info I posted.
it’s the same sensor for all the charts.
And check the page I posted for the albedo at other altitudes.
let me suggest before you run off with all your objections and theories that you actually read some of the data and the papers. then when you have an objection or insight it will be more productive.
The knee jerk reactions just look silly. As silly as mcKibben
Ric I think you are misreading that. In any case go get the albedo data and have a look.
processing it is a PITA, you are on your own
Ric Werme says:
July 21, 2012 at 7:31 pm
James Sexton says:
July 21, 2012 at 6:01 pm
Equipment failure was my first thought too, and had started to write a comment about that. Then I figured I should check where the data came from, and found it was MODIS. I figured it would be unlikely to fail just over Greenland, so then I read those other blog pages and saw the comments about a season’s snow melting and that made a lot of sense.
Also, it’s not zero at 2000-2500m, the bottom of that graph is 72%, and the 500-1000m graph goes down to 40%. The graphs don’t have a double slash mark to note that. Please gnash your teeth now.
============================================
Lol…gnashing done… I should have paid better attention to detail. That’s what I get for not caring and looking anyway! But, I see what you’re saying. Still, this looks odd. And, just because I’m a contrarian, I’ll just throw this out and go back to not caring.
With my new found insights on graph reading, we see the percentages for 500-1000m to be ~53%, for 1000-1500m it’s ~55%, for 2000-2500m its ~… well, somewhere under 70%, but 2500-3200 it is ~73%.
So far, so good, as one gets closer the impurities are more visible….less albedo. . But, from here is where I’m stuck. The albedo for 500-1000m is within normal limits. It looks like it’s about the same as the last 3 or 4 years…..(I hate spaghetti graphs) Now, again, this isn’t something I’ve pondered on much, so maybe this is possible, but it doesn’t seem to be.
At the 500-1000m it’s 53% pure. Exactly like it was last year (53%) and even cleaner than 2010 (51%). When we move to the 1000-1500m, we see that 2010 and 2011 follow closely the same relationship at the 500-1000m. 58% and 60% respectively. But, some how, magically, this year, the 53% at the 500-1000m doesn’t equate to 60% at the 1000-1500m like it did last year. This year, it equates to 55%. Can someones work that one out? I mean if the impurities causing the lack of albedo make it exactly the same albedo as last year, but only at the 500-1000m level. As we get further up in the sky the ground somehow manages to turn to crap this year. If you observe a particular gradient at one distance, then I think we can pretty well resolve what we see at further distances. This doesn’t typically change….. unless we’ve some new things in light theory I haven’t seen.
I don’t know…. still seems off to me. Maybe someone can explain what I’m missing.
Eli,
In addition to the problem of greenland being too far away for Asian soot there is the problem of why the albedo at those altitudes is impacted more than at other altitudes. It would be odd for the soot to only have that effect in a given altitude regime.
Here is what we predicted a decade ago, in 2002:
Our eight-point Summary* includes a number of predictions that have all materialized in those countries in Western Europe that have adopted the full measure of global warming mania. My country, Canada, was foolish enough to sign the Kyoto Protocol, but then wise enough to ignore it.
See #2 & #5 regarding REAL air pollution and SE Asia.
Summary*
Full article at
http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
Kyoto has many fatal flaws, any one of which should cause this treaty to be scrapped.
1. Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.
2. Kyoto focuses primarily on reducing CO2, a relatively harmless gas, and does nothing to control real air pollution like NOx, SO2, and particulates, or serious pollutants in water and soil.
3. Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity.
4. Kyoto will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and damage the Canadian economy – the U.S., Canada’s biggest trading partner, will not ratify Kyoto, and developing countries are exempt.
5. Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment – it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution.
6. Kyoto’s CO2 credit trading scheme punishes the most energy efficient countries and rewards the most wasteful. Due to the strange rules of Kyoto, Canada will pay the former Soviet Union billions of dollars per year for CO2 credits.
7. Kyoto will be ineffective – even assuming the overstated pro-Kyoto science is correct, Kyoto will reduce projected warming insignificantly, and it would take as many as 40 such treaties to stop alleged global warming.
8. The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.
If it is all due to the MODIS sensor, then how can the ASCAT radar be showing this (from this blog post)?
I think what James means is that you cannot have high albedo at 500 m, low albedo at 2000 m and high albedo again at 3000 m.
I mean if the impurities causing the lack of albedo make it exactly the same albedo as last year, but only at the 500-1000m level.
Ice melt is cause by a combination of air temperature and solar insolation. Air temperatures decrease with altitude. Solar insolation (ignoring clouds) increases with altitude. More melt from solar insolation and less from air temperatures would cause this effect.
See my comment above about more southerly tracks of north Atlantic low pressure systems this year.
Gary Pearse says:
July 21, 2012 at 5:18 pm
>>
North America and Europe cleaned up their “soot” and other particulates a few decades ago. This is definitely Asia’s contribution. The idiocy of chasing after CO2 when it is virtually all the other emissions that are the worry. If Asia let the West build their coal-fired plants, this would not be happening and yet, it is the West that is being villified by the (mainly Western) climate CO2 boffiins.
>>
Yes , the enviro movements simplistic and ill-formed obsession with CO2 is the main thing preventing them from protecting the environment.
I suspect that changes cloud cover means that they are no longer getting rid of cloud effects in the data properly – probs due to the 11 day averaging not working any longer.
Re: comment by Anymoose, take a look at all the black in this picture,
http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/volcano.cfm?vnum=1703-01=
and several of the currently active Russian volcanoes have been sporadically honking for a bit over a decade now.
The issue of soot is not only well known for Greenland but also for the Arctic Ocean and the Himalayas. Many Warmists know this full well but quite a few climate scientists remain silent allowing the willfully ignorant to spread disinformation about temperature / global warming and ice melt alarm.
Warmists can easily perform the soot experiment on any snowed in winters day with sunshine.
Bill McKibben has given the game away. 😉
Also, note that Greenland is a huge source of its own pollution. This is not soot:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rlcarney/2416512771/
I’ll bet there is orders of magnitude more of that stuff blown over and deposited on the ice cap than there is soot from China.
Good point ! May explain the bands in deposited ice.
Steven Mosher says:
July 21, 2012 at 11:12 pm
>>
Eli,
In addition to the problem of greenland being too far away for Asian soot there is the problem of why the albedo at those altitudes is impacted more than at other altitudes. It would be odd for the soot to only have that effect in a given altitude regime.
>>
I think there is consideralby more snow precipitiation at those altitudes. Air borne particulates would likely be deposited more at those altitudes.
Someone should fly up in a helicopter and take some samples from these black ponds. Anaysis would show whether it’s volcanic of asiatic.
Grímsvötn 2011? Fires in Russia?
But Mosher’s words need heeding.
Well it says ‘soot’ to you but it also says to me satellite sensor failure. It is not unknown for these to fail and the seeming sudden dropoff of the albedo signal shouts some sort of failure.
Mind you there has been a lot of Russian volcanic activity lately so ash fallout could be to blame depending on the wind strength and direction.
@ur momisugly James Sexton says:
July 21, 2012 at 11:06 pm
Please never say “Lol” again.
Tom Mazanec says:
July 21, 2012 at 5:19 pm
I could see Asia’a industrialization increasing Greenland’s ice melt significantly over a period of years.
But just from 2011 to 2012!?
China’s been bringing one coal-fired electrical plant per week on line since 2009 — that’s a lot of cumulative soot. That said, some of the crud in the photo of the moulin is probably bacterial mats.
Whatever happened to “pure as the driven snow?”
Urederra says:
July 22, 2012 at 12:00 am
John Wootton says:
July 21, 2012 at 10:25 pm
James Sexton says:
July 21, 2012 at 6:09 pm
I think what James means is that you cannot have high albedo at 500 m, low albedo at 2000 m and high albedo again at 3000 m.
================================
Thank you.
Philip Bradley says:
July 22, 2012 at 12:32 am
I mean if the impurities causing the lack of albedo make it exactly the same albedo as last year, but only at the 500-1000m level.
Ice melt is cause by a combination of air temperature and solar insolation. Air temperatures decrease with altitude. Solar insolation (ignoring clouds) increases with altitude. More melt from solar insolation and less from air temperatures would cause this effect.
====================================================
Thanks Phil…… I was confused about the distance noted on the graphs and took it to mean something entirely different. I reading your comment helped me find my error.
rogerknights says:
July 21, 2012 at 10:18 pm
“Say, if it turns out to be Asian soot (which could be identified by sophisticated fingerprinting), then WE could start getting line line for reparations!”
The Chinese have a word for that. FU.