I’ve been watching the JAXA sea ice data on the WUWT sea ice page intently for the last few days. Click to enlarge.
I was ready to call the minimum this morning, but thought I’d get a second opinion, so I wrote to NSIDC’s Dr. Walt Meier
On 9/19/2012 8:34 AM, Anthony wrote:
> I think we’ve reached the turning point for Arctic Sea ice today, do
> you concur?
> Anthony
who responded with:
Yep: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
If you’re interested I could write up a guest post some time soon (maybe
this weekend); might be useful to expound a bit more on the differences
between NSIDC and MASIE/IMS (it’s still just a bit higher than us, but
as you’ve probably seen it did pass below its 2007 level). Nice
interview on PBS by the way.
walt
__________________________________________________________
Walt Meier Research Scientist
National Snow and Ice Data Center Univ. of Colorado
UCB 449, Boulder, CO 80309 walt@xxxx.xxx
Tel: 303-xxxx-xxxx Fax: 303-xxxx-xxxx
“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be
called research, would it?” – Albert Einstein
__________________________________________________________
Walt, thanks for the compliment about my PBS interview. As for the guest post, I’ll trade you.
I’ll trade you a guest post on WUWT for making good on your promise of NSIDC “eventually” publishing your daily data like JAXA and other sea ice monitoring outlets do.
Quite a lot of time has passed since that promise was made. Thanks for your consideration – Anthony
Worth noting is this statement from the NSIDC today:
On September 16, 2012 sea ice extent dropped to 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). This appears to have been the lowest extent of the year. In response to the setting sun and falling temperatures, ice extent will
notnow climb through autumn and winter. However, a shift in wind patterns or a period of late season melt could still push the ice extent lower. The minimum extent was reached three days later than the 1979 to 2000 average minimum date of September 13.This year’s minimum was 760,000 square kilometers (293,000 square miles) below the previous record minimum extent in the satellite record, which occurred on September 18, 2007.
I think Walt meant to say “will” instead of “will not” here: In response to the setting sun and falling temperatures, ice extent will not climb through autumn and winter.
[update: he says its been fixed to read “will now”, I’ve corrected text here also. -A ]
At 3.41 million sq km, that means that in the ARCUS forecasting contest, everybody missed the forecast mark:
Download High Resolution Version of Figure 1.
Note that NSIDC’s Dr. Meier and WUWT had identical forecasts of 4.5 million sq km submitted to ARCUS, so we share the failure equally. That big storm in the Arctic really busted up the ice as well as the predictions.
Mario Lento says,
BA: Quote from Hansen: “If governments keep going the way they are going,” Hansen added, “the planet will reach an ice-free state.” This to me implies, the Antarctic would be completely gone.
Sure, eventually it does. But that’s not what I said that David declared “Wrong.” What I said was to ask who had predicted a death spiral in Antarctica already. It’s 2012. If “the climate models” as well as James Hansen predicted an Antarctic winter death spiral by now, where are those predictions? I’m honestly curious. But conversely, if they made no such predictions we can’t claim that conditions in winter 2012 prove them wrong.
That is the daily lowest extent. The ARCUS forecasts are for the whole month of September.
Even so, it is virtually certain that the lowest of the predictions made in August will still be higher than the September average. But this year there was a late entry in the ARCUS forecasts:
Forecasts for daily minimum were as follows;
NOAA-FOCI / Wetzler………….. 3.3
Beitsch et al………………………. 3.4
Morison…………………………….. 3.5
Meier et al ………………………… 3.7
Folkerts…………………………….. 3.8
Canadian Ice Service………….. 3.9
Zhang and Lindsay……………… 3.9
Netweather.tv……………………… 4.3
Naval Research Laboratory….. 4.4
http://www.arcus.org/search/seaiceoutlook/2012/august/update
Anthony, did you get the announcement? Just curious.
Here is another link surfaced with goggling Mercer paper:
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070329/full/news070326-11.html
Remarkably, the other person is mentioned there as well.
dvunkannon says: “There are several papers by Kato and Loeb that look at this issue, sadly behind paywalls. But you can see from the figures available that the albedo of open sea water is always significantly lower than ice, even at high latitudes.” [bold by jk]
“Always?” Such a flat statement raises a flag. Your statement is untrue. There is significant overlap between high zenith angle ice and water albedos, especially for old, snow-covered, or dirty ice. Water albedo is complicated, dependent on zenith angle, temperature, wind velocity, wave action, humidity, cloud cover, and even plankton. Even at modest zenith angles, with some chop, the reflection of the afternoon sun off the ocean is often too bright to look at.
BA: Agreed my comment was imprecise… However, which study predicted temperatures would be much higher by today under the best case scenario where we drastically cut WW CO2 levels? We are cooler than the best case scenario, yet CO2 production is pretty much at the worst case scenario. It was IPCC or Hansen… cannot recall.
BA says: “Sure, eventually it does. But that’s not what I said that David declared “Wrong.” What I said was to ask who had predicted a death spiral in Antarctica already. ”
Slip and slide, duck and dodge, waffle and flip. Hansen’s statement is identical to predicting a death spiral for the Antarctic and no amount of weasel words will save you.
Forbes is reporting: Antarctic Sea Ice Sets Another Record
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/
Remember those pictures in books of the ice caps of Mars? When the north would expand, the south would recede and vice versa. I’ll be damned if I can find pictures of that using google.
From Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in 2009
================
Surprising Return of North Atlantic Circulation Pump
Sea Ice Decline May Actually Have Aided Ocean Overturning
January 5, 2009
One of the “pumps” contributing to the ocean’s global circulation suddenly switched on again last winter for the first time this decade, scientists reported Tuesday (Dec. 23) in Nature Geoscience. The finding surprised scientists, who had been wondering if global warming was inhibiting the pump—which, in turn, would cause other far-reaching climate changes.
The “pump” in question is the sinking of cold, dense water in the North Atlantic Ocean in the winter. It drives water down into the lower limb of what is often described as the Great Ocean Conveyor. To replace that down-flowing water, warm surface waters from the tropics are pulled northward along the Conveyor’s upper limb.
http://www.whoi.edu/main/news-releases/2009?tid=3622&cid=54366
=================
This refers to the winter following the summer of 2007 when arctic sea ice reached its previous low. Apparently the restart of the “pump” caused fresh water to enter the arctic and sea ice subsequently recovered. It would be interesting to learn what the pump is doing now.
@James Baldwin Abbott:
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. Please don’t assume however that all sceptics are trying to explain this phenomenon away. A lot of us have no problem accepting that the world has warmed recently. What we are mostly sceptical about is how much, the attribution of cause, and the prediction of catastrophe.
The low sea ice this year certainly has my attention. That is a massive continent sized hunk of ice that has gone MIA. I will be very interested in seeing what the effects of this change are likely to be. Higher snowfall in areas at high latitudes this winter looks likely for example.
Where I mostly strongly disagree with you is in your confident statement that this phenomenon is definitely global warming driven. I am very sceptical about that claim. What is clear is that the arctic and the surrounding land areas at high latitude have shown warming much greater than that observed anywhere else on the planet. Greenhouse gas theory actually predicts greater warming at the equator. If you want to claim arctic warming as a symptom of global warming you need to propose a mechanism by which the additional heat of global warming is channeled predominantly to the arctic (as opposed to the antarctic). The trouble as I see it is that it is very hard to propose a mechanism to do this that DEPENDS on global warming. Almost all such mechanisms will work equally well as an explanation for arctic heat quite independent of global warming.
For example warm ocean currents provide one possible mechanism for channelling global heat into the arctic. The trouble is that while warm arctic currents could carry heat up to the arctic quite nicely, one is left struggling to conjure up an explanation for why a slight increase in the overall global greenhouse effect should trigger such currents. And since climate is chaotic you cannot rule out the possibility that changes in these currents are simply a natural periodic variation unobserved until now because our arctic data doesn’t go back far enough.
Similarly a change in wind patterns triggered by global warming blowing ice out of the arctic might be another possible mechanism for channelling the heat up there (it channels the cold out of there which is basically the same thing). But once again such a change in wind patterns could be a periodic natural phenomenon unobserved up to now and that would explain the warming quite independently of CO2.
What makes this difficult is that the observed changes in temperature in the rest of the world are so tiny. To make the explanation work you need this tiny change to initiate a massive heat engine of some kind pumping heat into the arctic from all around the globe. I can’t see how that might work. That is why I am so sceptical. And if you could get it to work, I hope you realise that the very existence of such a powerful and exquisitely sensitive mechanism for pumping heat around the place would be absolutely devastating to the possibility of getting global climate models accurate enough to predict anything.
Yes the arctic is warmer than it has been for 30 years. Yes there are record low levels of ice up there right now. I’d like to know what the likely consequences of that are, what might happen if the trend continues, and I’m open to explanations of cause and possible mechnisms. I note your explanation (CO2 is to blame). As an explanation it seems flawed. The chain from your presumed cause to the observed effect seems to be broken in such a fundamental way that I don’t believe it can be easily repaired.
All I see is massive heat mitigation. Our lapdog media however completely devoted to humping a leg of lies make the connection between record summer ice melt, Anthropogenic CO2 and extreme weather events.
BA:
I cannot answer for David, but I can state the fact that the IPCC Working Group1 (WG1 i.e. the ‘science’ WG) clearly and unreservedly reported that the climate models show the same enhanced warming for the two polar regions with the warming being especially in winter.
The matter is clearly reported in Chapter 5 titled “Equilibrium Climate Change – and its Implications for the Future” which contains plots showing similar predicted warming in the Arctic and Antarctic regions especially in winter.
The chapter presents the information as plots for each month December to August. These are Figures 5.4 (a) to (f) in the Section of the Report by Working Group 1 (i.e. the ‘science’ report). The chapter considers the plots to be so important that it provides two versions of Figure 5.4: a monochrome version is on pages 141 and 142 with a colour version on pages 164 and 165. And the chapter provides similar plots from other projections as Figure 5.2 on page 140 and they also give the same indication.
If those predictions – which the IPCC has not altered in subsequent publications – suggest a “death spiral” then it is the same for both polar regions.
Hansen’s predictions will start to be credible when he gets to work by rowing a boat through the door of the office block he works in because he predicted he would be doing that by now.
Richard
Oops! The chapter is in the First IPCC Report. Sorry for the omission.
Richard
There are many possible reasons for such low summer sea-ice extents.This is what I suspect is happening.
1. Low winter solar activity leads to a large sea-ice formation.(more heat has escaped during the winter)
2. More sea-ice formation by its nature increases winter deep water formation
3. This water is slowly replaced by an increased North Atlantic drift.Increased upwelling occurs in a band across the lower latitute Atlantic quite visible on sst charts by mid february.Coupled ocean atmosphere affects from this cooler band alters European winter weather.
4. This increased THC in the Atlantic/artic is further increased by an increasingly active antarctic which due to its increased winter sea-ice formation should also add to total THC.
5. This increased THC pushes north leading to a greater arctic summer sea-ice melt.
Interestingly arctic ocean heat content is not increasing (the extra heat is escaping to space during winter), but the North Atlantic heat content is falling(draining into the arctic).See Tisdale OHC up till Dec. 2011.
It seams almost counter-intuitive to me that an increased winter arctic sea-ice build should lead to an increased summer melt but I blame an increased THC, which is also draining the North Atlantic OHC.
For those who are so confident that they ‘know’ what is happening to Sea Ice (both North and South) a simple challenge. Please predict the expected levels, min and max, in both hemispheres for the next two years (with a suitable error band) and approximate dates for these to occur.
NASA | Arctic Cyclone Breaks Up Sea Ice
North Atlantic’s SST is at the top of the cycle, Arctic – North Atlantic precursor appear to suggest about 0.5C cooling in the two forthcoming decades
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Fc.htm
I wonder how NSIDC will react in the next few years when ice recovers from this year’s low. I expect they will want to keep reminding us how “unusual” this year was!
First, let me be humble and state I did not expect the ice-melt to be so large, and my own forecast was incorrect. There. See? I’m still alive, although I admitted a mistake.
Second, I am afraid I am distrustful of the Cryosphere Today map, and any graph that depends on it. Please look at the area around Wrangal Island on this Russian map, which contains ice in waters Cryosphere Today states as “open.”
http://www.aari.ru/odata/_d0015.php?lang=1
There have been news items involving oil-drilling being suspended Northwest of Alaska due to an eleven by fifteen mile area of drifting pack ice, (165 square miles…how many Manhattans?) and stating some of that ice was 80 feet thick. Ice piled up by the storm?
Lastly, regarding that area being ice-free in the past: Wrangal Island was discovered by whaling ships. Also, it was named, according to Wikipedia, as follows:
In August 1867, Thomas Long, an American whaling captain, “approached it as near as fifteen miles. I have named this northern land Wrangell [sic] Land … as an appropriate tribute to the memory of a man who spent three consecutive years north of latitude 68°, and demonstrated the problem of this open polar sea forty-five years ago, although others of much later date have endeavored to claim the merit of this discovery.”
This open polar sea??? In 1867??? Hmmm.
D. J. Hawkins says:
September 19, 2012 at 10:23 am
>>
I don’t believe the open water will have aborbed much in the way of incoming energy due to the high effective albedo as a result of the angle of incidence. However, I think it will be a huge radiator because of the loss of insulating ice cover. Any back-of-the-envelope estimates on how much more heat will be lost in the Arctic before the ice cover is re-established as opposed to the 1979-2000 average? What effects might this have elsewhere on the planet?
>>
Hey! I had just the same though yesterday as I was looking at rate of change of sea ice extent to see if there was any drift in the dates of min and max ice extent.
They are always screaming about tipping points (+ve feedback) and I started to wonder how much negative feedback all that bear water would have. Albedo is a two edged sword. Lower albedo also means more heat radiated to space in the winter (polar night) and then cloud cover comes back into play.
I figured the best way to look at this was to take the daily ice extent data, calculate the daily rate of change, filter out short term weather bumps (13 day low pass gaussian filter) and plot to see where the zero crossing points are . It is a lot easier to see a zero crossing that estimate just where the bottom of a curve is.
I cropped off the negative (melting) phase then zoomed in on the end of summer periods to see when ice extent turned around.
http://i50.tinypic.com/25q3sk3.png
The start of each line is the point at which meling turned around. Dates are in fractions of a year, 0.68 being early Sept. I see a couple of things here. First, a long term drift to later turn around , there is also a drift in the onset of melting so this needs further analysis before infering what it may mean.
More interestingly, there appears to be a clear decadal variation in there. My initial thought that it may be correlated to solar cycle does not seem bear out.
Bruce: It seams almost counter-intuitive to me that an increased winter arctic sea-ice build should lead to an increased summer melt
There does seems to be increased variation in recent year. Back at the beginning of the record things were smoother “sine” waves during the year. Now there is more rapid melting AND more rapid freezing.
This would seem to be a logical result of thinner ice coverage over a proportion of Arctic. So it’s not the increased winter build-up that is causeing the summer melting but both effects are due to ice area being more volatile since ice is thinner.
There is a core area of thicker ice that draws a line under all this.
Newsfeed in The Netherlands today on the popular TV-text channel, the weather info normally provided by the KNMI:
url tiny pic
Translation:
“See ice on the North Pole this summer melted more than ever before. On 16 September satellites observed 3,41 km2 sea-ice left. With winter coming now ice is increasing again.
The last 30 years the total surface area of sea ice has declined strongly because of the warming of the earth. According to scientists the the melting speed continues to increase. Summer 2000 the ice surface area at the North Pole was twice as big.
Polar researchers more often have to face polar bears, that cannot hunt seals on the ice. Because of this researchers have to take more shooting lessons.”
Hm… so the real danger to the polar bears are scientists shooting bears…
“…3,41 km2 sea-ice …” should read “… 3,41 million km2 sea-ice…” – my mistake
Good stuff! You are coming along nicely. 😉 Now take a look at the following and then let me know how much air temperature alone has to do with the Arctic decline?
The satellite record started in 1979 when the Arctic was at its maximum extent. Arctic decline and growth has happened before. Did you read about the massive storm in the Arctic this summer?
Historic Arctic ice variations
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice-tony-b/
Asian haze.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5913/470.short
Dr. Meier is making the news:
http://news.yahoo.com/arctic-ice-shrinks-time-low-half-1980-size-175242723.html
“The polar regions”—but nothing about Antarctica in this story.
/Mr Lynn
Then what do you think of the following quotes from Dr. James Hansen?
and this
Ice free central Arctic ocean during the Holocene and beyond.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.08.016
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMPP11A0203F
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14355-missing-fossils-could-warn-of-extreme-climate-to-come.html