UPDATE: see this new article on the issue,
“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data.
Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8 (left) and July 12 (right). Measurements from three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet had undergone thawing at or near the surface. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12. In the image, the areas classified as “probable melt” (light pink) correspond to those sites where at least one satellite detected surface melting. The areas classified as “melt” (dark pink) correspond to sites where two or three satellites detected surface melting. The satellites are measuring different physical properties at different scales and are passing over Greenland at different times. As a whole, they provide a picture of an extreme melt event about which scientists are very confident. Credit: Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI/NASA GSFC, and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory
I covered this over the weekend when Bill McKibben started wailing about the albedo going off the charts. I thought it might be soot related. The PR below and quote above is from NASA Goddard. I had to laugh at the title of their press release, where they cite “Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt”, then contradict themselves when the main researcher goes on to say “melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889“. Do these guys even read their own press releases? Climatologist Pat Michaels concurs saying: “Apparently NASA should start distributing dictionaries to the authors of its press releases.”
I’ve sent off a note to the NASA writer, seen here. Maybe she’ll get the headline fixed.
That, and they seem surprised that the Greenland ice sheet would suddenly start melting in summer. Though, not every part of the ice sheet is melting right now, so perhaps their calibrations might be a bit off:
There may have been a brief few days of melt, but it appears to be over:
Satellites See Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt
For several days this month, Greenland’s surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its two-mile-thick center, experienced some degree of melting at its surface, according to measurements from three independent satellites analyzed by NASA and university scientists.
On average in the summer, about half of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet naturally melts. At high elevations, most of that melt water quickly refreezes in place. Near the coast, some of the melt water is retained by the ice sheet and the rest is lost to the ocean. But this year the extent of ice melting at or near the surface jumped dramatically. According to satellite data, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July.
Researchers have not yet determined whether this extensive melt event will affect the overall volume of ice loss this summer and contribute to sea level rise.
“The Greenland ice sheet is a vast area with a varied history of change. This event, combined with other natural but uncommon phenomena, such as the large calving event last week on Petermann Glacier, are part of a complex story,” said Tom Wagner, NASA’s cryosphere program manager in Washington. “Satellite observations are helping us understand how events like these may relate to one another as well as to the broader climate system.”
Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was analyzing radar data from the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Oceansat-2 satellite last week when he noticed that most of Greenland appeared to have undergone surface melting on July 12. Nghiem said, “This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: was this real or was it due to a data error?”
Nghiem consulted with Dorothy Hall at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Hall studies the surface temperature of Greenland using the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. She confirmed that MODIS showed unusually high temperatures and that melt was extensive over the ice sheet surface.
Thomas Mote, a climatologist at the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga; and Marco Tedesco of City University of New York also confirmed the melt seen by Oceansat-2 and MODIS with passive-microwave satellite data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder on a U.S. Air Force meteorological satellite.
The melting spread quickly. Melt maps derived from the three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet’s surface had melted. By July 12, 97 percent had melted.
This extreme melt event coincided with an unusually strong ridge of warm air, or a heat dome, over Greenland. The ridge was one of a series that has dominated Greenland’s weather since the end of May. “Each successive ridge has been stronger than the previous one,” said Mote. This latest heat dome started to move over Greenland on July 8, and then parked itself over the ice sheet about three days later. By July 16, it had begun to dissipate.
Even the area around Summit Station in central Greenland, which at 2 miles above sea level is near the highest point of the ice sheet, showed signs of melting. Such pronounced melting at Summit and across the ice sheet has not occurred since 1889, according to ice cores analyzed by Kaitlin Keegan at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather station at Summit confirmed air temperatures hovered above or within a degree of freezing for several hours July 11-12.
“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data. “But if we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome.”
Nghiem’s finding while analyzing Oceansat-2 data was the kind of benefit that NASA and ISRO had hoped to stimulate when they signed an agreement in March 2012 to cooperate on Oceansat-2 by sharing data.
============================================
h/t to WUWT reader Ole Heinrich
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Regarding Entropic’s claim that the 1998 El Nino was an “anomaly”…
Odd, but when it was happening, climate scientists were telling us that these types of El Ninos were here to stay.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/25433.stm
This is typical of the kind of stuff that was being said:
Hmmm…”a decade or so”…
…1998….
Hmmmm… Anomaly indeed!
But hey, this is climate science.
How deep does the melting go? One millimeter? One centimeter? One decimeter? One whole meter, maybe? That would be 0.0003333… of the icecap. Those recurring threes look dangerous to me.
Got corn? Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee haaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
(he cried out as he helicoptered … total hot dogger … )
Recent comments here have once again raised the point that CO2 is thought to have climbed from about 280ppm to 390ppm during the industrial era – a roughly 40% increase.
But can we be confident of even these widely accepted figures? There is evidence that ice core CO2 measurements may understate past atmospheric CO2 levels by 30-40ppm, when compared to plant stomata counts (C3 type plants have fewer stomata, or openings, on the underside of their leaves when CO2 levels are higher). Pre-industrial CO2 levels, as estimated by stomata counts, probably averaged around 310ppm, with a range of 250-350ppm.
The stomata-based CO2 variability is supported by controversial wet chemical measurements of CO2 in the air, which were undertaken from the early 1800s. They show variability peaking at around 410ppm in 1825 and show an average for the 19th century of about 310ppm – again in keeping with plant stomata data.
If ice core measurements are indeed giving us an erroneously low pre-industrial CO2 level, we may have to re-evaluate our estimates of the rise. It may well be 80ppm or less, rather than 110ppm, i.e. an increase of about 28% not 40%.
Entropic man says:
July 24, 2012 at 3:54 pm
“I’m quite happy with the null hypothesis. Indeed, the null hypothesis that there has been no change in global temperature in the last century […]”
???????? Where have you been? You’re singing from the wrong page of the hymn book. The null hypothesis (Ho) is that the climate is doing nothing out of the ordinary. The alternative hypothesis (Ha) is that increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause catastrophic runaway global warming and we have to act now or WAGTD!!!!!
BTW, Climate Change is merely a distraction; a mincing of terms. Climate has always changed, is always changing, and will always change. The evidence is in my back yard where glaciers have cut grooves in the limestone that settled out from the shallow seas that were there before. Right now, my back yard happens to be a pleasant place to kick back and relax. If the glaciers return or the seas rush in during my lifetime, I’d like to think I’m smart enough to abandon my backyard and move. Now as for stopping the glaciers or holding back the seas? Well, I won’t claim to be that bright; I haven’t a clue how to do that.
Austin says:
July 24, 2012 at 12:44 pm
> Ice and snow will melt if the solar insolation and air temp combined are above a specified value. A strong sunny day with little wind and temps in the mid 20s are sufficient.
I assume you’re talking Fahrenheit.
> If it was 36 degrees on the 12th then that would be a major melt event. My guess would be that you would have snow become slushy to the depth of several feet.
Feet? I think that’s way, way, way beyond anything reasonable. The fastest snow melt I’ve seen was 8″ on an April day at latitude 43.74N with a high temp of 80°. Real snow sops up a remarkable amount of water, corn snow much less so, but that would require a lot warm temperatures or time.
If the dew point is below freezing, then snow stands up pretty well to sun and temperature. Even at 50° it does pretty well. Dew points well above freezing of then bring the “snow eating fogs” (that have cause and effect reversed) that can melt a lot of snow at cool temperatures.
> Given that the sun just circles the sky for most of Greenland’s latitude, then you would even see melt on all sides of the compass. It would be like a July day at altitude in the Rockies or Sierras.
I’ve only been in Colorado in December, April, and May, so you may have more experience than I do. According to http://www.summitpost.org/pikes-peak-weather-statistics/337874 an average July day has a high of 47.6°F, low of 33.7°F, and a 25% chance of snow. Not very good melting weather, I think. The thin air will further suppress melting by air and condensation.
From the lat/long at http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/04416 , the mid-July maximum solar elevation is 39°, so insolation is sin(39) = 62% of what the sun would overhead. At Pikes peak, its latitude of 39 degrees means elevation 73° and maximum insolation of 96% of overhead. The 24 hour sunlight at Summit certainly helps. I might even exceed Pike’s Peak, Steven Goddard had a fairly snarky post about that ages ago.
BTW, Lora Koenig spent a winter at Summit, see http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GreenlandBlogKoenig/
1889 + 150 = 2012??? Interesting maths Anthony. The thing that is worrisome about this is that it has come very early, some 27 years early. One can only wonder how bad the melt will be in 2037 which will be “right on time”, when the natural melt cycle is overlaid on the anthropogenically induced melting we are seeing now. Interesting to note that albedo on Greenland is also at an all-time low as well. http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=532
Only the warmists could claim that something that happens every 150 years is unprecedented while keeping a straight face.
NASA used to stand for greatness, now it’s been reduced to global warming lies.
From uknowispeaksense on July 24, 2012 at 8:07 pm:
Take it up with “Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data”. ‘About every 150 years’ has some wiggle room there.
Interesting site you have, following the link at your name.
Then you provide a crappy image hacked-up from a screenshot without any link to the post or the specific comment.
“You know I speak sense”? After perusing your site, noting your enthusiastic use of the “d-word” and heavy derision of skeptics (mentally unbalanced, paid shills for polluters, etc), I Know You Speak Hate Speech, are incapable of being reasoned with, and unsuitable for engaging in polite reasoned discussion such as found on skeptic blogs.
Now feel free to return to your tiny blog and write a detailed post about how those mean climate deniers deliberately and callously hurt your sensitive feelings. Don’t forget to fill out the relevant internet abuse complaint form. You may return here and ask where you can file the completed printed-out form.
Oh KD, I have much thicker skin than that and if you think “skeptic blogs” are full of “polite reasoned discussion” then you are kidding yourself. Was your little rant just now an example of “polite reasoned discussion”? Perhaps you need the form since you seem to be so hurt.
Now for the polite reasoned discussion, I am fully aware that the comment was made Lora Koenig, I just found it interesting that Anthony didn’t try and make a comment about it. After all, aren’t all the climate scientists wrong about everything all the time? Why not then mention the “wiggle room”? That would further strengthen the …… “skeptics” side of the argument but of course that might have also meant having to include the rest of Lora’s statement too. Nope, just easier to overlook these things when you’re quotemining. By the way, thankyou for doing exactly the same thing other …..”skeptics” do at places like Bishop Hill and Climate Audit when they can’t address the actual comment being made. Its an interesting pattern of behaviour that is all too predictable.
Sorry, messed up the complaint form link. Here it is. Enjoy.
This is just another example of lunar declinational tidal effects, the moon was crossing the equator headed North on the 8th, of July, was Maximum culmination North on the 16th. The relatively warm humid air mass that was pulled North off of the great lakes area may have been responsible for the surface layer of snow melting to slush due to condensation of the warm moisture onto/into the snow surface.
At lower latitudes we often get snow eating fogs as these same type of tidal effects surge into snow covered areas in the spring, when the dew point of the air is above the soil temp, then rapid condensation onto/into the snow/soil, roads, driveways, and can be seen on garage floors at the same time.
It is one of the ways that latent heat of condensation can be pushed into the soils, at the same time it increases the moisture content of the soil, there are a lot of lunar phase attributed old wives tales about planting times and the phase of the moon.
Small seeded shallow planted crops benefit from the additional moisture of this mechanism and it protects new grass seedlings from dying from rapidly drying out, as this tidal feature is often accompanied with fog and clouds for most of the day as seen in the Greenland summit station records.
Yo kadaka ( KD Knoebel ) , when you wash the head of an ass you lose both your time and your soap. You did clean him up as for as this post goes though. And he is still ugly inside. And I see Smokey smoked another one by ripping entropic man . A good deed done there too. These alarmists are used to bulldozeing people with a lot of verbage but when they come on Anthony’s site their stuff turns to garbage thanks to the efforts of the knowledgeable crew that hangs out here !
The title begins “Satellites see…”
Unless there were satellites around for the last similar melting event 150 years ago, then this view of the extraordinary melt is indeed unprecedented. All we know is that melt events like this one seem to occur at 150 year intervals. This is the first time we’ve observed such large-scale surface melting, and it is ‘unprecedented’ by that metric. That is – we’ve never observed this much surface melt before.
It’s easy enough to find sensational headlines, but this one is hardly worth the comment.
@ur momisugly uknowispeaksense on July 24, 2012 at 9:50 pm:
Thank you for supplying an additional demonstration.
Have a nice day.
@kakada (KD Knoebel) on July 24, 2012 at 11:04 pm:
Thank you for again failing to address my questions.
Have a very nice day.
No mention of the term ‘heat capacity’. Warm air can melt ice. But not much. To melt enough ice to be ‘worrisome’ and raise global sea levels by say just one metre, something like 400,000 cubic kilometres of land borne ice must melt. Work out the heat energy needed which can only be delivered by the atmosphere. The sea does not melt land borne ice directly.
97%………oh dear, here we go again…..
>>
Entropic man says:
July 24, 2012 at 5:25 pm
Links, please.
<<
Really? You should do your own homework, but here are some links to tide you over:
Taking Greenhouse Warming Seriously
Limits on CO2 Climate Forcing from Recent Temperature Data of Earth
Global Warming: Correcting the Data
Global Climate Models Violate Scaling of the Observed Atmospheric Variability
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
Does a Global Temperature Exist?
Does CO2 really drive global warming?
Jim
From uknowispeaksense on July 24, 2012 at 11:18 pm:
The only part of your first post that was a question, with a question mark, was addressed at the beginning of my reply post.
You also noted the Greenland albedo thing, which was already noted and discussed days ago.
What hidden questions were there in your first post that you feel should have been noticed?
I had to laugh at the title of their press release, where they cite “Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Melt.
That title is meaningless. It is not complete. It could be followed by this week, this month, this year, this decade, this century, this millenium, ever etc.
It’s like saying “My car is 20!”
“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data.
I think she is saying that 150 years is their statistical frequency, not that there is some cycle involved. Which is not to say there isn’t.
Although, she does seem guilty of the Gambler’s Fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy
“Maybe she’ll get the headline fixed.” Maybe, maybe not. I saw the story in the Danish on-line news (main story), and immediately went here to get the full truth. The point is that the NASA press release has already done its job, spawning head-line stories around the globe – nobody will check the details. They can change the headline all they want, it doesn’t matter now – minds and hearts have already been captured. The Danish story was accurate, but as is always the case, didn’t contain the full truth. And so it goes.
Interesting to note a paper by Pedro et al studies what’s called the ‘Bipolar seesaw’
http://www.clim-past.net/7/671/2011/cp-7-671-2011.pdf
The Arctic may be warming, but we see that the Antarctic is cooling, even though CO2 is supposed to be well mixed and its rise global.
Pedro is in the news currently with his new paper claiming that CO2 lags temperature by ~400 years as opposed to the previously thought ~800 years.
Jo Nova has a post about it
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/07/spinning-more-bad-news-to-pretend-it-answers-skeptics-when-400-equals-zero/