While the Arctic recently set a new record low, lower than that of 2007, the Antarctic is at near record highs similar to that of 2007 according to University of Illinois Cryosphere Today data:
Here are the values:
2007.7206 1.1396104 16.2323818 15.0927715
2012.7316 1.1447686 16.2041264 15.0593576
Source: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/timeseries.south.anom.1979-2008
At NSIDC, they show extent at near peak, and we’ll likely see a downturn begin soon:
Though, it is possible we’ll see some additional gain before the downturn starts, and a new record high for Antarctic sea ice area is still possible.
I find it interesting that we apparently have this “bipolar” relationship going on. On years of far lower than normal record lows in the Arctic 2007/2012, we have record highs and near record highs in the same years, 2007/2012.
At the blog “sunshine hours” it is reported:
Antarctic Sea Ice Area 28,255.4 sq km short of an all time record
The graph there shows 2012 and 2007 in red and blue respectively:
Ice Area is 1.964296 million sq km higher than the lowest amount ever recorded for this day in 1986.
I find it interesting that we apparently have this “bipolar” relationship going on.
They have a common cause, decreased cloud cover, particularly low level cloud.The effect of decreased clouds is greater ice melt through increased insolation, and increased ice formation in winter. As BC is almost completely absent in the Antarctic, we don’t see the accelerated melt of older ice from decreased albedo we see in the Arctic, and there isn’t much multi-year ice in the Antarctic anyway.
Unfortunately climate4you’s data doesn’t go 2012, so I can confirm 2012 had a low level cloud low.
http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAndClouds.htm#Cloud data
And reduced cloud cover is also the main cause of surface warming as Roy Spencer has documented.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/20/spencers-cloud-hypothesis-confirmed/
Dermot O’Logical:
At September 27, 2012 at 11:37 pm you ask three questions. I assume several people will provide answers and I write to offer mine.
Q1.
What’s the mechanism for this inverse correlation?
A1.
Random chance in a small sample. (Weather is not the same everywhere at any time.)
Q2.
Are there any models which have accurately forecast this?
A2.
No. None. Not any.
Q3,
Does this pattern appear anywhere in the historical record?
A3.
The “historical record” is so short that any observed repetition of the pattern would be meaningless.
I await other answers with interest.
Richard
“one wonders if maybe you don’t have some sort of alert system setup to watch for Sea Ice News posts on WUWT”
I work for Interpol, Anthony. 😐
BTW, what is your view – as a trained meteorologist – on the potential consequences for weather patterns on the Northern Hemisphere, caused by the rapid retreat of Arctic sea ice (you know, extra warm waters releasing all that heat and moisture to the atmosphere in fall, the temperature gradient between the equator and the Arctic becoming smaller, jet stream slowing down, becoming wavier, etc)? There’s an ever increasing amount of talk about that, which probably won’t decrease as the decline in the thickness of the ice cover is increasingly noticeable in sea ice area and extent numbers, no matter what the weather patterns are. And the rapid spring melt of snow on NH land masses doesn’t help either. WUWT?
Looking at the above chart, the ice seems to swing between about 2msqk to about 16msqk each year. Remarkably stable if you ask me.
Nothing to see here folks, move on.
Günther:
At September 28, 2012 at 1:45 am you list a load of speculation and say
Yes, I have noticed that, too. It is clearly an indication of an increasing amount of desperation among warmists as nothing they have predicted has come to pass and there are no signs that anything they have predicted is likely to happen.
Richard
I do like the Antarctic news. It goes some way to confirm the seesaw of sea ice cover between both poles. Yes it would be good to see a graph of total sea ice. Help sink the alarmism.
Günther says:
September 27, 2012 at 10:11 pm
….
You recommend Grant Foster (‘prince’ Tamino) !?
He isn’t true scientist, he is just an agit-prop peon in service of his masters. When encountered by a problem (on Gavin’s RealClimate) similar to one shown here
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MidSummer-MidWinter.htm
he could only retort with primitive, vulgar and abusive language.. For good measure he was joined by his good friend Daniel Bailey from Skeptical Science.
Gavin not only had to step in and inform both of these ‘science wizards’ that data is correct and, and then promptly deleted their abusive garbage.
As ‘true scientists’ both took an exception to this and didn’t come back to the RC for number of weeks or possibly months following the incident
Günther, just to mention, I am not in the Gavin’s Xmas address book.
It’s worse than we thought!
[My bold]
Further references:
http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/17923/
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/press/press_releases/press_release.php?id=1786
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17707200
I think Günther’s response is quite telling. Given “warm waters releasing all that heat and moisture to the atmosphere in fall”, I would expect increased snowfall. The Arctic is too cold for the “heat” to turn much of the increased precipitation to rain. In addition, since we generally regain most of the ice extent during the winter there’s no logical reason to assume a “rapid spring melt of snow” will occur on a regular basis. The net would likely be increased albedo over northern land masses.
It interesting that the warmists are trying to spin this into something that supports “the cause”.
Günther says:
September 28, 2012 at 1:45 am
“…caused by the rapid retreat of Arctic sea ice…”
Gunther – get a grip! The arctic sea ice is NOT retreating – it’s freezing back up as we speak, just like it always has (and always will). Do you remember the record amounts of snow and brutally cold conditions Alaska got earlier this year? WUWT? Arctic ice is NOT worth worrying about – there are MANY more important problems in this world (none of which involve climate “science”).
Gunther says…“warm waters releasing all that heat and moisture to the atmosphere in fall”
So is this, along with the increasing N.H snow cover ( http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/ipcc-forecast-decreasing-winter-snowcover/
a negative (cooling) affect.? Most notably true when you consider that SH ice is at lower latitudes then NH ice, and during the SH sea ice melt the sun is closer to the earth so increased SH ice reflects sun light which is both more direct and intense. (Up to 7 percent more intense)
Last winter, just as Arctic sea ice was poised to set a high record, the methodology of the data set was ‘corrected’ and the new high record was averted. Since then the slope of Arctic ice extent has not followed the trend of the previous years.
I was not surprised that a new low was established. Perhaps another instance of “hide the” correct data?.
We have reached the tipping point. Here comes the cold!
Günther says:
jet stream slowing down, becoming wavier, etc)?
BS? Data link please!
****
Günther says:
September 28, 2012 at 1:45 am
BTW, what is your view – as a trained meteorologist – on the potential consequences for weather patterns on the Northern Hemisphere, caused by the rapid retreat of Arctic sea ice (you know, extra warm waters releasing all that heat and moisture to the atmosphere in fall, the temperature gradient between the equator and the Arctic becoming smaller, jet stream slowing down, becoming wavier, etc)?
****
Childish baiting. Go back to Closed-Mind.
I’ve long presumed that the overall earth temperature, was approximately constant. A region significantly warmer than average is likely to be offset by another region cooler than average. Those regions don’t have to be antipodal. If they happen to be then low ice in one pole will correspond with higher ice on the other pole, but it could be, in the case of 2011, that low ice at the North pole corresponded with a region of cooler than usual temperatures in Africa or the south pacific or elsewhere.
An interesting point made further up. The Antarctic is indeed unconstrained by land in its winter coat of sea ice. Any trends could be delved into for possible markers of, wait for it, natural oscillations. In the winter Arctic, not so much given the constraints of land.
Should such markers be found in Antarctica, a nonsensical argument would reign King and be the butt of jokes on late night TV. Anthropogenic global warming would have to be given sentient thinking, showing its hand by having it in for the North.
Kelvin Vaughan says:
September 28, 2012 at 6:37 am
“We have reached the tipping point. Here comes the cold!”
Yes – it’s called Fall/Winter 🙂
I predict that the temperatures in the northern hemisphere are going to trend cooler over the next 3 – 5 months – and if I extrapolate that trend for the next 10 years, average temperatures are going to reach -50F in 2015!! Whoa…hold it…sorry – I was having a “climate science” moment there for a few seconds…
The inverse relationship was noted and discussed at length a number of years ago and posted at junkscience. My take away at that time was that the globe could warm and ice increase at the south pole with a force for lowering sea level (as opposed to, and an order of magnitude greater than, northern hemisphere land-sited ice).
I’m just surprised that some alarmist hasn’t used the inverse relationship to predict that the world will tip over as a result of warming. (Yeah, yeah. If we go there and on the other hand, could it affect orbital wobble and “drive” the glacial/interglacial cycle? Should we start melting the Antarctic ice to keep climate from – you know – changing? So many questions to man-controlled climate and no answers! Thinking of Michael Crichton here.)
richardscourtney says:
September 28, 2012 at 1:37 am
Dermot O’Logical:
At September 27, 2012 at 11:37 pm you ask three questions. I assume several people will provide answers and I write to offer mine.
==================================================================
Here’s my “Joe-Sixpack” answers:
Q1.
What’s the mechanism for this inverse correlation?
A1.
Don’t know. We need more research funding to find out.
Q2.
Are there any models which have accurately forecast this?
A2.
No. More research funding is needed to produce them.
Q3,
Does this pattern appear anywhere in the historical record?
A3.
No. There are no tree rings at the poles. Perhaps with more research funding we could find one. One is all that is needed to manufacture the historical record.
A number of commenters have asked for a graph of TOTAL sea ice. It seems no one has looked at our own ice page references:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
The bright red line (at bottom) is total sea ice extent. Perhaps they mean total sea ice mass… which would be a different question. GK
How do North and South anomalies compare in absolute (square km) terms, as well as in percentage deviation from their 20-year averages. Can someone boil it down for the non-scientist?
What is the mechanism for the deposition of additional snow in the Antarctic?
North Pole Camera has drifted down to near 80 degrees north and 1 degree east, and Camera 2 finally had the frost sublimate off the lens, and during the brief day seems to show an open lead of water in the distance. Temperature has been well below zero and melt-water pools have frozen up, but we may soon witness the ice break up in Fram Stait, and say bye-bye to pictures for another year. (Soon the nights will close down the cameras, at any rate.)
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/NPEO2012/webcam2.html
The extra sea ice in antarctic corresponds with unusually strong westerly winds that in turn drive the Antarctic circum polar current of the Southern Ocean that through Ekman pumping is bringing unusually large volumes of Antarctic bottom water to the surface where some of it finds it way into the adjacent subtropical gyre and which in turn feeds the Gulf stream. The warm gulf stream feeds the AMOC which warms the arctic ocean and melts the arctic sea ice.
Although global circulation models show that most of the effect of the increased westerly Antarctic vortex winds would take as long as 3500 years to effect the Arctic, reserchers believe that teleconnections between the poles exist for time intervels of less than ten years due to wave propagation such as Kelvin and Rosseby waves.
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~hbrix/papers/brixdiss.pdf
Can anyone play this game? Why don’t we make it meaningful and list the “modeled” prognostications of your favorite modelers against some of the wild a_s guesses we throw out?
I’ll throw out a curious thought of mine as a possible result. All of that, warm, cough, moisture rising and filling the atmosphere with that horrible CO2 mitigating humidity just might end up as winter storms piling snow, ice and freezing rain into thse high latitude glaciers that the CAGWers are so worried about melting. Simplified, for your benefit, it means that the high latitude glaciers will again grow and glacier growth willl continue until all of the artic is ice covered year round when they will stabilize until the cycle begins downward again.
Sound logical? Does to me. Will it happen? Maybe. Maybe not. Like Anthony and many others here I don’t make glorified ‘I am Scientist, thou shalt not doubt me‘ claims. Those type of claims and insistances are generally a feature of CAGW religion. Identifying and explaining ALL existing climate effects is not a feature of CAGW beliefs. Like the ice burden at the South Pole versus the ice burdens at the North pole shifting back and forth in regular cycles. A feature that has been noted by astronomers on a number of planets, including earths.