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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When I was researching my article ‘historic variations in arctic ice part one’ which covered the arctic ice melt from 1818 to 1860 I came across lots of contemporary science papers from the explorers -including the royal society-who went to investigate. Black soot was mentioned as being prevalent and a possible cause of the melting which was very extensive. It’s source was thought to be newly industrialising America and also Europe. deja vu all over again
Tonyb
Can someone provide the geochemical data to show what the dark material is exactly and where it comes from? More interesting than all this speculation. And please include some data from the black material in the ponds.
Let’s not forget Dr. James Hansen’s paper in 2003.
Some images of grey snow and ice.
http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/175973.html
http://www.earthweek.com/2009/ew090501/ew090501b.html
http://www.science20.com/the_soot_files/soot_black_icebergs_and_arctic_ice
http://notrickszone.com/2011/04/23/soot-emerging-as-main-driver-of-arctic-warming/
Hey, let’s not allow soot to get in the way of a wonderful fairy tale about the causes of Greenland Arctic ice melt. Even warm waters and wind play their part. C02 alleged ‘warming’ is a bit player.
Could one explanation be new, clear snow at lower altitudes?
http://www.snow-forecast.com/maps/static/europe/last7days/snow
That map shows only a small area of Greenland but it seems that it has been snowing there.
Let’s see…
The “normal” summer melt season albedo minimum at 2000-2500 m is in the range of 0.77-0.82. The “bottom of the chart” is 0.72. The albedo of fresh snow is in the range of 0.80-0.90, ocean ice 0.50-0.70, desert sand 0.40, bare soil around 0.17 and pure black carbon soot around 0.04.
Presumably the current 2000-2500 m albedo isn’t very far below 0.72 and it’s close to the annual nadir… And “normal” is based on 12 years of data. I gonna go out on a limb and say that unless Mr. McKibben or Dr. Box can tell me what the 2000-2500 m albedo was in the years (AD) 1127, 1143 and 1939, during the vast majority of the Holocene or the Sangamonian, my response is, “Very interesting. Now, move along, there’s nothing more to see here.”
Either McKibben’s ignorance is breathtaking or he is an enviro-fascist partisan. Come to think of it, both statements are probably true.
Here is my crazy theory. The changing cathode ray type focus of Birkeland currents guiding iron rich black cosmic dust onto the area of concern which has fertilised bacteria.
Up to 300 tonnes of cosmic dust to be accounted for daily.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120329225140.htm
Every 28 days Jupiter re-farts the stuff in “narrowly focused streams”.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/06/science/fly-by-of-jupiter-detects-puffs-of-planetary-dust.html
If it is soot, it may be up there due to the interesting jet stream we had last winter. The jet was in a hybred pattern, zonal over North America, while a blocking pattern existed over Eurasia.
The jet looped south over Europe, and when it looped north again it may have scooped up soot from India and China. Then, when the jet was “flat” across Canada, the soot would move directly west to east to Greenland.
If soot was a factor, it might also explain the sea-ice melt on the north coast of Canada, which seemed surprisingly fast to me.
The above ideas involve no math. I’m just looking out the window and puzzling.
You can get Albedo charts and values from here.
http://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/Search.html?group=72
When I first read about this a few weeks ago, I did some checking. There is a big decline in central Greenland Albedos in the curent year, not so much previously.
Bu nothing special has been happening on the Greenland icesheet summits. Temps are normal (and well-below Zero) but there has been more cloud perhaps. So either there are data problems or it is soot or cloud interference.
Greenland summit webcam
http://www.summitcamp.org/status/webcam/
Looking awfully white.
I don’t pretend to know whether this phenomenon is real and important or not, but I have a question about this graph (and about many similar visual presentations). It is obvious that by limiting values on the Y-axis to a range of 72-92% rather than a full scale of 0-100% one makes the slope much more precipitous and thus the overall impression makes it seem that something drastic has happened. If they Y-axis were 0-100% it would look like a small dip rather than “off a cliff”…. (of course the real issues are with what it means scientifically, but I’m just asking about the presentation for psychological impact).
Is this kind of truncation of values on an axis considered scientifically worthy, or is it merely a propaganda type of effect?
One can make any change look much more (or less) dramatic by fiddling with the the values on the X-axis or Y-axis, and it seems this is done a lot in climate science.
The picture and original argument make it sound like there are lakes in Greenland that have pure carbon black at the bottom. Carbon black is valuable (~$700-1000/ton). If this carbon black is actually there, why isn’t it being harvested commercially?
Caleb says:
July 22, 2012 at 5:56 am
If it is soot, it may be up there due to the interesting jet stream we had last winter. The jet was in a hybred pattern, zonal over North America, while a blocking pattern existed over Eurasia.
Thinking along similar lines!
Does the jet stream act as a conveyer belt for aerosols? (like a fast flowing river hold more sediment). Are dry aerosol collected from high pressure, anticyclone, weather systems (where there might be lots of fires burning)
http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/imagery/firemaps/firemap.2012191-2012200.2048×1024.jpg
and are they then supplied to low pressure, cyclone, systems where they precipitate out?
The jet (this July) http://metofficenews.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/upper_level_wind_earlyjuly2012-v2.png seems to follow the line of fires through Asia and China and over the high pressure heat wave in America.
If aerosols are ‘caught up’ in high speed jet stream winds their atmospheric lifetime would be extended, and they are likely to grow in size, sufficient to be incorporated into cloud droplets in cooler, humid areas like Greenland and UK. Just a thought! Sometimes here on the western seaboard of Ireland the rain storms bring ‘mucky rain’ with tiny lumps of black stuff in it. You can see on the velux (roof) window glass.
There’s a problem in this story. Soot from fossil fuel combustion floats. Power boaters all know this as the engine exhaust is underwater and you can see the film of soot on the surface. The following talks about maritime exhaust filters to eliminate this because it can sometimes get bad enough, especially at anchor in calm water with a genset running overnight, it’s enough to stain clothing black you if you jump into the water in the morning.
http://www.maritimejournal.com/features101/seawork/soot-gets-the-boot-at-seawork
So the picture with the black-bottom pool of water – that ain’t soot. It’s volcanic ash. And the spike this year is because of the recent volcanic activity in the area which produced huge ash clouds.
Due diligence is a forgotten art in the internet age where it’s just SO easy to dash off a narrative and publish it electronically…
John Marshall says:
July 22, 2012 at 2:10 am
Well it says ‘soot’ to you but it also says to me satellite sensor failure.
I’ve noticed the odd satellite sensor sometimes fails soon after a solar flare hits Earth!
Mike Bromley the Kurd says:
July 21, 2012 at 8:05 pm
Yes, it is precisely because black carbon floats that it’s such a problem. If it sank then during any partial melt when the meltwater infiltrated the snow it would pull the soot out of site with it. But because black carbon floats a partial melt simply concentrates it on the snow surface. Anyone who grew up near a highway with 18-wheelers on it in cold winters knows when a few feet of snow melts close to the road the surface gets darn near black before it finally melts completely. And it melts far faster than pure white snow too.
If McKibben was an engineer he would understand the strength of ice. Ice is strong under compression but virtually useless under tension. Ice shelves which protrude into a sea or ocean will eventually fracture and float away due to the rise and fall of tides.
Anthony
Is it possible there are to sensors for the two altitude readings? Looks like a failing sensor.
On the other hand, soot would explain the rapid arctic melt this year despite average arctic temperatures.
Bill
The graphs is normalised in Feb to precisely the same value, yet still ends up with 4% variation by november, when it must be totally snow covered again.
This instrument obviously has relatively large errors compared to the data presented, so lets not panic or draw unwarranted conclusions about soot or meltwater just yet.
Literally dropped off the chart = dropped below 72%… but how far? Albedo litrally starts at zero percent, so why doesn’t the chart begin literally at zero? Literally, this chart starting at zero wouldn’t exaggerate all
the little dips that naturally occur in a noisy data set.
I guess we are to believe there were no fires as part of the Russian heat wave last summer or any other summers if there is no news coverage of them! I suppose volcanic ash has stopped as any factor also as per the same selection bias on the assumption list.
Maybe the albedo is changing because the Icecap is melting.
Recent temperatures above freezing at the summit may have something to do with that.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html?entrynum=2156
And there are washed out bridges and a missing tractor.
David, UK says:
July 22, 2012 at 2:10 am
@ur momisugly James Sexton says:
July 21, 2012 at 11:06 pm
Please never say “Lol” again.
=====================================
(In best Captain Kirk voice) Difficult……. to…….. resist…….temptation…….
@Bob Droege:
Summit Station Past Month Temperatures
Looks like about 12 hours of 1-3C temp’s scattered over a three-week period in which the daily high rarely topped -5C.
I’m surprised that Dr. Masters didn’t quantify that and the missing tractor as another one-in-fifteen-gazillion odds against event.
I don’t believe the change in albedo has anything to do with ‘soot’. Rock dust/volcanic ash/forest fire soot is always present in greater or lesser quantities. I believe, like CO2, soot from power stations plays a very small role.
At 1800 on 11 July 12, Summit Camp in Greenland recorded a temperature of +0.5C and the maximum for the day was recorded as +1.0C. Obviously, a few hours (maximum of 6 since the other recorded temperatures that day were below freezing) above freezing will alter the surface characteristic of the snow and probably led to glazing the snow surface. This may have been widespread on the ice cap since Summit Camp is obviously at the highest point. Until snow or blowing snow covers the ‘glazed’ surface the albedo will remain as it is, lower than normal. It does NOT indicate ongoing melting since the temperature for the last week has been averaging around -11C.
This post reveals the inadequacy of naive use of albedo – the ice/snow sometimes remembers things that have happened to it to confuse the unwary.