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.
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BA,
read this from the Warmists at Skeptical Science.
This is heresy!!!! But consistent with climate models. 😉
jorgekafkazar says:
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.
So jorge you can write angry, but can you read in that condition? Show me where I slip and slide, waffle and flip. Where did I say one thing and then change it? I kept quoting myself to avoid that.
My weasel words, where did you read those? When Jimbo linked a graph of this winter’s antarctic ice growth, I asked whether anyone had predicted a death spiral in the antarctic already, especially in winter. In your not-weasel words, does “already” mean the same thing as “in a century”? Does “winter” mean “summer”?
@jorge, David M Hoffer
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011JD015804.shtml
Figure 2
The albedo of open sea water is always below all other lines. The albedo of clouds over open water is lower than the albedo of clouds over ice (clean or dirty).
The appeal to our own experience is unfortunately non-scientific. The blinding nature of a reflection of the sun off of water vs. ice is subjective. There are confounding circumstances, such as the rest of our filed of vision being filled with light from other reflecting snow/ice vs the surface of the water being darker than the sun’s reflection. Do we remember events six months apart accurately, and how do we compare my recollections and yours? These are the kind of reasons that appeals to experience and common sense cannot be set against scientific research.
David, I think clouds can form even over cold surfaces, and there is a small difference in the freezing temperature of seawater and pure water. The plain fact is that if you look at any of the sea ice graphs they don’t return to near average conditions until November, so for several months there is about 2 million sq km of open water that can put water vapor into the atmosphere where before there was none. There might be a direct effect on the following winter’s weather (Warm Arctic, Cold Continents) but for now I think we are just getting thinner and thinner ice, which melts more quickly in the next summer.
Always pays to cite.
IPCC says that warming is enhanced at high latitudes, but also that the Arctic will warm twice as much (fast?) as the Antarcitc over the 21st century.
James Abbot: The mean surface temperature (Land-Ocean) has indeed risen by about 0.8C over the last century and…
While this is the popular consensus on both sides of the fence, the statement is scientifically indefensible. There is way too much noise in the various temperature measuring technologies employed over the last 100 years, and way too much fiddling with what data there is to resolve to less than a degree, and even a degree change is suspect. At best, its an anecdotal observation that has yet to be resolved and won’t be resolved in anyone’s lifetime here. We can’t teleport technology back in time, and we haven’t establish trend monitors with any kind of usable, applicable universality on a global scale. And we’re trying to draw short term conclusions on phenomena that have cycles that occur in 10**x periods. Gigo.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
September 19, 2012 at 1:35 pm
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/
Hmmm….I immediately wondered if another cyclonic storm or other wind event could drive it lower, and I see this on the NSIDC page:
“Please note that this is a preliminary announcement. Changing winds could still push ice floes together, reducing ice extent further.”
Hang on… Extent is extent. Are we talking about the actual extent of ice cover, or are we talking about the extent of ice cover over a narrowly defined geographic area? Ice extent measure has no resolution below presnece or absence? Huh?
Roger Sowell says:
September 19, 2012 at 10:45 am
@ur momisugly D J Hawkins at 10:23 am
Exactly. Heat lost to space from open Arctic water is vastly under-rated by the Warmists.
Ice is primarily an insulator.
So, if we have a big radiator up north, the next big question would be – what is the temperature of the water that leaves the polar regions and what is it trend line.
If we tracked this wouldn’t this be a rough approximation of the total energy being returned to the tropics and have some effect on the over mass energy balance?
@davidmhoffer
>>Water has a very high emissivity so it is going to freeze very rapidly but once there is nice white ice on top, that consideration is largely gone.
>Fresh water yes, salt water no. Salt water bodies have to cool to the freezing point from top to bottom before ice can form. So, once you’re talking about open water, that’s a lot of heat the ocean has to give up to start forming ice again.
I understand your point howeverI am pretty sure water freezes on top long before it is colder underneath. Don’t be surprised if the re-freeze rate exceeds other years. The formation of freshwater ice on the surface takes place immediately enough heating ceases, from above or below. The cooling by radiation and evaporation is continuous, all year. The air picks up moisture if it is not particularly cold, or is chilled by the air from convection (a bit), or if by radiation into the dark, almost moisture-free sky. Obviously CO2 has virtually nothing to do with it in terms of ‘slowing down the cooling’ as the effect is miniscule.
The freezing water expells 100% 0f its CO2 as you noted later. I am happy to see someone other than me picking up on this sorta major and ignored phenomenon. As the sea freezes, the CO2 is expelled over a vast area. You can calculate the mass of CO2 involved by using 320 ppm (mass) and the mass of ice. If the ice volume increases very rapidly this year, the CO2 level should go up faster than normal. Let’s see. Warmists will blame this on anthropogenic emissions, rationalists will observe it arises from the sea, not because they are warming, but because they are freezing! Kinda puts a new perspective on it, doesn’t it!
Something worth looking at in light of the big storm and added melting this year is the cooling effect of broken-up ice. The ice melts not by absorbing lots of solar energy but by floating in warm water. It is warmer below than on top as ice is a pretty good insulator and captures radiant heat from below (water radiates omnidirectionally all the time, or course). If the ocean did not warm to a higher temperature this summer than before, what does that tell us? If the water was cooler in toto that shows the cooling effect of the rapid melt of the ice. It means it will refreeze even faster than usual. As I posted before, watch the refreeze rate, take the first derivative and learn.
Re the general circulation models that predicted polar warming as a major and preliminary sign of AGW: This has been falsified. The models predicted that both poles would warm. They are supposed to warm equally. There is no warming in Antarctica. The warming in the Arctic has been happening for more than 150 years and is nothing new. The ‘predicted’ polar warming is not happening according the the predicted method, that is, that CO2 would warm the atmosphere and this would lead to warmer air temperatures which would melt the ice at both poles. As this is not taking place, the models must be wrong in a major way.
Frankly I see no reason why the poles should warm first if the CO2 idea is correct – the mid-troposphere should warm first and that is not happening either – perhaps that is what is wrong in the models. Who knows. They have never predicted anything correctly yet. Currently the globe is cooling and they didn’t get that right.
In review, we have no net heat increase in the Arctic Ocean, we have no increase in the sea surface temperature, we have an increase in ice thickness over the entire interior of Greenland and colder conditions with increasing ice over nearly all of Antarctica. The CO2 goes up when the ice expells it, seasonally. That is not what the models said would happen. Far from it. Polar Amplification is BS thought up after the fact. The ‘fact’ that is was thought up after, is the absence of any equatorial mid-tropospheric hot spot, the first and primary claim of a greenhouse effect. Refer to Al Gore’s movie for the claim. No model foresaw the low ice level this year because they have no year-to-year predictive abililty. Next year, if there is a new record ice extent on the high side, they will say it was predicted by the GCM’s. It will be more BS thought up after the facts are in. Same old, same old.
Caleb says:
September 20, 2012 at 3:30 am
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
Note that the ice shown on the Russian map is above a concentration of 10% whereas CT has a limit of 15%. Also the amount around Wrangel which the various satellite agencies have shown through this season only consists of a few pixels, Modis images that clearly show Wrangel don’t show pack ice.
E.g. http://lance-modis.eosdis.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/single.cgi?image=crefl1_143.A2012260232500-2012260233000.2km.jpg
And higher resolution JAXA images showing some persistent ice:
http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/en/imgdata/topics/2012/img/tp120825_03e.jpg
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?
A couple of pixels in a region where the Healey was showing open water, most likely a remnant of the multiyear ice that has been swept into the Chukchi from north of the Canadian Archipelago over the last couple of years (most of which has melted away).
Here’s a shot from the Healey at about 80ºN 150ºW:
http://icefloe.net/Aloftcon_Photos/index.php?album=2012&image=20120920-1501.jpeg
There is pack ice further north.
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.”
Did you ever wonder why he only approached as near as 15 miles?
In September 1879 another ship tried to land on Wrangel but was trapped in pack ice near Wrangel Island at 71°35′N 175°6′E. For the next 21 months they drifted NW and the ship was crushed in the ice at 77°15′N 154°59′E. That’s open water now. The ship was abandoned and the crew marched to Siberia. Search parties eventually landed on Wrangel in 1881.
Russian icebreakers landed there in 1911. Another Canadian expedition was crushed in the ice there in 1914, help was summoned by walking across to Siberia. The party sent to claim the island for Canada in 1921 was stranded there for two years and the final survivor was rescued. A Russian party that was left there in 1926 had to be rescued by icebreaker in 1929 which was able to force its way through the thick pack ice at a few hundred meters a day for about 3 weeks. (in August)
Nowadays it’s visited by cruise ships with tourists, things have changed there!
This open polar sea??? In 1867??? Hmmm.
Relatively speaking!
RE: “Hang on… Extent is extent. Are we talking about the actual extent of ice cover, or are we talking about the extent of ice cover over a narrowly defined geographic area? Ice extent measure has no resolution below presnece or absence? Huh?”
“Extent” can be compressed, in that it includes a certain amount of open water. For example, 15% extent is 85% open water. Therefore a strong gale could shove it all to one side, whereupon the 15%-or-more measure would be considerably less, even as the 30%-or-more measure might increase.
“Area” is a measure of the actual white pixels, and tries to be more accurate, but fails in other ways, I think largely because cloud cover messes up the counting.
One problem after that summer storm was a lot of the “open water” had ice floating about in it, but it was decided (by someone somehow) that it amounted to less than 15%.
barry says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/19/sea-ice-news-volume-3-number-13-2012-arctc-sea-ice-minimum-reached-its-all-gain-from-here/#comment-1083696
Henry says
I have two (weather) stations reporting in Anchorage that (air) temps fell by as much as 1.5 degree C since 2000. Anchorage, is that not in the arctic? so how do you figure that?>
As far as I could establish, because it is very difficult to get any “official” data from there,
the (air in the) antarctic has also been cooling since 2000.
Overall, my own data set shows it is cooling globally, about 0.2 degrees C since 2000.
Hadcrut3 says it is 0.1 since 2000.
But it will take some time for the arctic ice to come back….energy-in is not the same as energy-out.
I figure from this newspaper report in November 1922
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/16/you-ask-i-provide-november-2nd-1922-arctic-ocean-getting-warm-seals-vanish-and-icebergs-melt/
that the arctic ice was more or less as low tin 1922 as it is now
so it took from 1922 to 1945 to freeze back.
Give it another 2 decades from now, and I promise you the (arctic) ice will all be back again.
You can add as much CO2 as you like. It won’t help.
It is all natural. The cycles of warming and cooling. It is coming and going every 44 years, to make one full cycle every 88 years.
Climate reason says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/19/sea-ice-news-volume-3-number-13-2012-arctc-sea-ice-minimum-reached-its-all-gain-from-here/#comment-1082586
Henry says:
Thank you, Tony. I have saved that reference. We will come back to it,
in about 2 decades or so…
“Extent” can be compressed, in that it includes a certain amount of open water. For example, 15% extent is 85% open water. Therefore a strong gale could shove it all to one side, whereupon the 15%-or-more measure would be considerably less, even as the 30%-or-more measure might increase.
Um, no..o..o… Extent cannot be compressed. It may be physical located in a certain area of the base area under consideration, but if its 15%, its 15%, whether its all in a corner, all in the center or all equally distributed over the entire area. Its the total integrated area that is the “!00%” to which the ice cover is compared. You only get to compress it if you change (downward) the size of the reference area. This new math of climate science is downright confusing.
RE: “Phil. says:
September 20, 2012 at 9:53 am”
Thanks for the information. The point about the Russian map including 10% extent was a good one. However 10% is not “ice-free,” which is what the media blares about. And what do you suppose a 5% extent map might show?
And how big is a pixel? Sounds the size of a mouse, but it it’s a bit larger, is it not? Wouldn’t want to run into one eighty feet thick, at any rate.
Thanks for that satellite picture. Wrangle Island is towards the top left? Under all those clouds? I think I see some ice in that sea to it’s west, though it’s hard to tell, and there seems to be a pretty huge chunk to the north, to the east-southeast of that storm center. I see no hint of that huge chunk on the cryosphere map. That is why I like looking for myself.
I hope they forgive me for being distrustful. They may have some sort of mechanical way of sensing ice, in an attempt to remove human subjectivity, and perhaps it misses some details. I don’t know.
By the way, to counter your history lessons, (which I appreciate, as I love history,) some more Wiki stuff about Wrangal Island: “The first recorded landing on the island was in 1866 by a German whaler, Eduard Dallmann.” That is not a steel windjammer, but a wooden whaler. Those guys had to be darn greedy for the oil profits (from whale oil) to risk going up there! The feeling I get is some were lucky, and found things relatively ice-free, while others were not so lucky, and got crushed. Also they had to high-tail it out of there around this time of year, or they’d be frozen in, and that often got the ship crushed as well.
Me? I prefer firewood. But I need oil and gas for my chainsaw.
Fingers not in sync(sink(sic)) with the mind:Its the total integrated area that is the “100%” to which the ice cover is compared….
“This new math of climate science is downright confusing.”
That’s because a fair amount doesn’t add up.
However, if you look at the SeaIce Page you can see the Cryosphere Today map has various pretty colors. The purple is up near 90-100% “extent.” As the ice cracks apart and becomes bergs drifting about, with areas of sea water between the bergs, the pretty colors shift to alarming red, which shows 60% “extent,” and finally turn a morbid, sickly green, which shows 30% “extent.”
A wind could shove all the 30% and 60% ice together, making it cover less area but be 90-100% ice, “extent-wise.” Get it? Is there some other word they should be using?
What I’m watching to see is if the red ice abruptly turns purple, which might indicate meltwater pools freezing over, after they were accidentally called “sea-between-bergs.”
Actually I shouldn’t be sitting in here by the computer at all. However once in a while I need a good long break.
“Forecasts for daily minimum were as follows;
…
Folkerts…………………………….. 3.8
No, my forecast is for the month of September, not the lowest daily extent. I don’t know, but I expect some (all?) of the others were also for the month. So I still have some reasonable chance of being pretty close. It all depends on how quickly the ice starts refreezing.
Jimbo says,
BA,
read this from the Warmists at Skeptical Science.
Over the Earth’s history, there are times where atmospheric CO2 is higher than current levels. Intriguingly, the planet experienced widespread regions of glaciation during some of those periods. Does this contradict the warming effect of CO2? No, for one simple reason. CO2 is not the only driver of climate…………………….Atmospheric CO2 levels have reached spectacular values in the deep past, possibly topping over 5000 ppm.
This is heresy!!!! But consistent with climate models. 😉
I did go over and read the skeptical science piece. I can’t judge the science but see nothing heretical about it (where did you get that?). Of course “CO2 is not the only driver of climate.” I would be quite skeptical if any scientists had said that CO2 *is* the only driver of climate, looking back 440 million years when the solar output was 4% lower. Can you quote scientists who actually said it was?
For my part, I hadn’t even mentioned CO2.
Great to see the Arctic sea ice starting to recover again. By the time solar cycle 25 works its magic, the worry will be over it getting too expansive and affecting commerce and transportation, and not over its disappearance.
It looks to me that the current sea ice extent is roughly 6 standard deviations from the mean. Some people would call that a black swan event. You can’t blame all of it on one storm. This is a radical state change with amplification from a positive feedback mechanism. There could be some seriously weird weather over the next Northern winter.
And for all of you jonesing for more top-of-atmosphere albedo, sea ice albedo feedback goodness, a not behind the paywall article is available at
http://www.npolar.no/npcms/export/sites/np/en/people/stephen.hudson/Hudson11_AlbedoFeedback.pdf
Said article features the Kato and Loeb figure I mentioned in a previous comment. It also has this interesting scenario:
Hmmmn.
.29 watts/m^2.
Net Radiative Forcing.
But what is the net” evaporative (heat loss) for the newly-exposed seawater previously covered by the sea ice that is assumed to be melted during this period? 117 watts/m^2 (increased heat loss) is much larger than .29 watts gain.
Therefore, greater ice loss – But ONLY at the time near minimum sea ice extents in mid-September at the equinox – mean colder Arctic air temperatures, right?
By the way, at 4.0 million km2 sea ice extent, essentially all the sea ice can be compared to a single mass centered in the Arctic Ocean between 80 north latitude and the pole. Actual minimum sea ice extents very closely resemble this approximation, with only minor areas still frozen off of Greenland’s east coast, and few km square down by Ellesmere Island at latitude 78 north.
There is no positive “Arctic sea ice amplification” possible, despite the CAGW claims of disaster if the Arctic sea ice melts: at 10 degrees maximum sun elevation at noon at the equinox (the time of the sea ice minimum!), and with all other times of day seeing the sun angle much less than 10 degrees (if not already below the horizon) what little solar energy gets through the atmosphere is reflected from the water on a clear day. On a cloudy (stormy) day, the inbound solar energy “could” be absorbed by the open water – since the clouds force a widely distributed scattered solar energy direction and therefore a much lower water albedo – but if it is cloudy, then the solar energy is cut by 35% to 50% by those same clouds. There still is no solar energy absorbed by the newly open water surfaces.
Further, the “air mass” at the equator = 1.0 By definition.
Beyond 80 north latitude, the air mass varies with time of day and latitude and day-of-year, but is between 6.0 and 11.0 Each increase in air mass (beyond 1.0) decreases incoming solar radiation (the amount of solar energy actually capable of “touching” the water (or ice) at sea level) exponentially. To illustrate this effect even at our lower latitudes, use a welding helment to look at the sun at noon. Then, later that evening, right before sunset, look again at the sun setting ….. with your naked eye.
That difference in intensity is even greater up where the sea ice remains – at time of minimum sea ice extent.
Do you like stating the obvious? Now let’s move one step up again. Would you be skeptical of scientists who say that Co2 is now the main driver of climate?
November 2011, Co2 390 ppm.
Yet you see no problem that at lower ppm co2 IS the main driver of climate yet at 5,0000ppm its not the main driver of climate?????? CAN YOU SEE THE PROBLEM?????
Jimbo says:
BA says:
September 20, 2012 at 12:24 pm
……………………………
I did go over and read the skeptical science piece. I can’t judge the science but see nothing heretical about it (where did you get that?). Of course “CO2 is not the only driver of climate.” I would be quite skeptical if any scientists had said that CO2 *is* the only driver of climate, looking back 440 million years when the solar output was 4% lower. Can you quote scientists who actually said it was?
Do you like stating the obvious? Now let’s move one step up again. Would you be skeptical of scientists who say that Co2 is now the main driver of climate?
Sometimes I state the obvious because people miss it, like you just did. I asked where you got “heretical” … no answer. I asked if you could quote scientists who actually said that CO2 is the only driver of climate, looking back 440 million years … no answer. Earlier on this thread I asked which scientist had predicted a death spiral in antarctic winter ice already, and caught a bunch of flak for asking that question … but no answer.
Yet you see no problem that at lower ppm co2 IS the main driver of climate yet at 5,0000ppm its not the main driver of climate?????? CAN YOU SEE THE PROBLEM?????
What I didn’t say, despite your emotional SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS, is anything about
“the main driver of climate.” Although I see no problem, and apparently the real scientists don’t either, in thinking that when you find temperatures different, you look for what else is different to explain that. If the sun’s output was 4% lower over tens of millions of years, then since that’s the source of just about all our heat it seems reasonable to figure it might explain why things were cold regardless of what CO2 was doing at the time. Maybe without all that CO2 it would have been much colder; I haven’t done the math — have you? On the other hand if you look at a short time period when the sun’s output has not varied so much, then something non-solar, perhaps CO2, should explain the difference.
Caleb says:
September 20, 2012 at 10:51 am
RE: “Phil. says:
September 20, 2012 at 9:53 am”
Thanks for the information. The point about the Russian map including 10% extent was a good one. However 10% is not “ice-free,” which is what the media blares about. And what do you suppose a 5% extent map might show?
No 15% is typically what’s used, basically originated with shipborne observations, more than that not easily navigable.
And how big is a pixel? Sounds the size of a mouse, but it it’s a bit larger, is it not? Wouldn’t want to run into one eighty feet thick, at any rate.
On those plots from the satellite used about 12.5×12.5 km.
Thanks for that satellite picture. Wrangle Island is towards the top left? Under all those clouds? I think I see some ice in that sea to it’s west, though it’s hard to tell, and there seems to be a pretty huge chunk to the north, to the east-southeast of that storm center. I see no hint of that huge chunk on the cryosphere map. That is why I like looking for myself.
Wrangel is the island at the top left other than that all I see is clouds which is consistent with the microwave image.
I hope they forgive me for being distrustful. They may have some sort of mechanical way of sensing ice, in an attempt to remove human subjectivity, and perhaps it misses some details. I don’t know.
The microwave imaging systems distinguish ice and water from the polarisation difference of the brightness temperature, it is an automated system.
By the way, to counter your history lessons, (which I appreciate, as I love history,) some more Wiki stuff about Wrangal Island: “The first recorded landing on the island was in 1866 by a German whaler, Eduard Dallmann.” That is not a steel windjammer, but a wooden whaler.Those guys had to be darn greedy for the oil profits (from whale oil) to risk going up there! The feeling I get is some were lucky, and found things relatively ice-free, while others were not so lucky, and got crushed. Also they had to high-tail it out of there around this time of year, or they’d be frozen in, and that often got the ship crushed as well.
The reason they had to go close to the ice edge is because that’s where the Bowhead whales were (aka Greenland Right Whales). They’d typically overwinter at Herschel Island off the Yukon Territory in Canada, Amundsen joined them there after he cleared the NW Passage and had to overwinter there (forced to stop there by ice on Sept 2nd as did 12 whaling ships). He was able to leave there by the middle of August the following year).
” David L. Hagen says:
September 19, 2012 at 10:38 am
COntrast: Antarctic Ice Area Sets Another Record – NSIDC Is Silent
Posted on September 16, 2012
Day 258 ice area in Antarctica is the highest ever for the date, and the fifth highest daily value on record.
Antarctic ice area is more than one million km^2 larger than the highest value ever recorded in the Arctic. By definition, excess ice has more impact on the climate than missing ice, because it occurs at lower latitudes where the sun is less oblique. There is no sun at the North Pole now, but lots of sun shining on the excess Antarctic ice at 70S.”
First I should point our that the average altitude/elevation of the Sun at 70N latitude is approximately the same as at 70S latitude for this time of year, around 20 degrees at noon. Secondly, the reflectance of open water at low solar altitudes even at say 10 degrees is very low even for direct radiation even for calm water (see for example http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%281954%29011%3C0283%3AAOWRW%3E2.0.CO%3B2). In the case of diffuse radiation, which dominates on non clear days, the reflectance as a function of solar elevation is nearly constant. Thirdly, the area of open water in the Arctic now is approximately 4 million square kilometers below the 1979 to 2000 average. This is 4 times the 1 million square kilometers referred to above. Fourthly, the fact remains that sea ice extent around Antarctica goes to 0 during the summer months and has done so for a very long time (as opposed to the sea ice in the Arctic during the Summer/Fall). So the increase in ice extent at this time of the year has little impact on the Earth’s heat balance compared to the excess heat that is absorbed in the Summer/Fall in the Arctic with its record low ice extent (which has happened in just a few decades).
I would like to see the moderator of this site provide some editorial “balance” on the site concerning the “demise” of the Arctic sea ice, which is clearly going to have a major impact on the heat balance on this planet.