Sea Ice News Volume 3 Number 14 – Arctic refreeze fastest ever

R Korbs says:
October 19, 2012 at 12:25 am
—————————————————————–
Much ado about nothing! Lovely acronym, where have I seen that character sequence before?

Some AGW proponents have argued that less ice cover at the end of the melt season, which causes quite a bit of heat to escape from warmed Arctic waters, adds water vapor to the atmosphere which leads to catastrophic snow in the surrounding land areas. So we will see if snow is worse this year. That’s one issue.
Here’s the other one. This event can be explained by intrinsic oscillations better than anthropogenic causes. Why? CO2 cannot explain the warmer currents that entered into the Arctic (LWIR really sucks when it comes to heating water). But ENSO events can and do explain the warmer water entering the Arctic polar region. The same can be said for the teleconnection between oceanic conditions and atmopheric systems. So even the storm that broke up Arctic ice has natural causes.
The null hypothesis has yet to be refuted as a cause.

The start of the post says when seas lose their ice cover they lose a lot of heat due to LWIR, but if new sea ice is clear and transparent, doesn’t the sea still lose heat due to LWIR at near the same rate as it did before the sea froze? Once the ice becomes thick or loses its transparency then I can see how LWIR drops to near zero.

@ur momisugly sunshinehours1:
October 18, 2012 at 5:19 pm
2012 (to day 291) already has a higher average sea ice extent (NSIDC) than 2011 (which may change).
And is closing in on 2007.
I suspect the NORSEX data (if I could find it) would show 2012 higher than both.
————————————————————————————————————–
Is this what your after:
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/ice-area-and-extent-in-arctic

I agree with Gary. The 30 year trend is clearly downward. I understand the cyclical- negative feedback- and reversion to mean- thinking, however it seems to me that those things happen over a longer timespan than a few years.
Whether Mann and Lewandowsky are arrogant, or whether CO2 climate theories are wrong, the only sensible bet would be that next year’s arctic ice is below the 1990s average again. Maybe less than 2012, maybe more than 2012, but definitely below 1995.

The argument that some make regarding the % being higher because the extent got so low is interesting, but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. 2012 – 43.8%; 2007 – 25.1%. That puts 2007 at 16th on the list. Furthermore, if you look at km^2 refreeze per day, 2012 is 8th, while 2007 is 28th.
By the way, why would this blog writer have used refreeze as a percent of the end of the 31 days and not refreeze as a percent of the minimum?

We can play all the games you want about the arctic sea ice recovering, but it isn’t going to recover. In a few years, you’re going to run out of things to cherry pick, because that arctic sea ice isn’t going to be there in the summer and will be absent during a longer period each year. Most of the thick multi-year arctic sea ice is gone and what remains is starting to find new exits through the Canadian Archipelagos, like it has recently been exiting through the Nares Strait after the ice bridge collapsed. Spreading out ice volume with extent only looks good on paper and just means the sea ice can melt faster.
That arctic sea ice had a minimum area in 2012 about the size of Greenland, so think of them as two large areas far to the north with a high albedo, preventing warming. By June, the snow cover loss in the Northern Hemisphere was three times the area of that arctic sea ice, further south and with plenty of time to cause heating during the summer. This trend in losing snow cover is even more recent than losing arctic sea ice and may have contributed to that 97% melt on Greenland.
Specifically what I mentioned was looking for hope in a fast refreeze ignores the fact that sea ice insulates the heat in the ocean from the atmosphere. You could actually make more sea ice at this time of year by breaking up the ice and allowing the heat to escape. Only first year ice that gets lucky with drift can make it through a season.

Doug: “By the way, why would this blog writer have used refreeze as a percent of the end of the 31 days and not refreeze as a percent of the minimum?”
Because I screwed up. I have issued a correction.
It was 83.1%, not 43.8%. Still the fastest in percentage terms.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/fastest-arctic-ice-extent-refreeze-ever-in-31-days/
8th largest amount of ice in 31 days.

Sunshinehours1 said:
“Still the fastest in percentage terms.”
Who cares? The percent increase of sea ice extent at day 31 after that year’s minimum is a number without any significance. As the minimums approach zero the percent increases will approach infinity. If there were no ice at minimum, any ice that formed afterward would constitute an infinite percent increase. This is all a way to fool people into thinking that the ice is just fine, and that the volume of ice is not still at a record low (since May).

Sure, glaciers, snow cover, arctic sea ice, Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets and permafrost are all in retreat, but you think getting an antarctic sea ice maximum, because of extra wind and precipitation, means something besides it’s all going to melt away.
Tell me why there are two Patagonias, when there used to be one with the third largest ice sheet in the world!
The world will keep melting and when it runs out of ice, it’s going to start really heating things up in the arctic, lowering the temperature difference between the equator and the arctic. That will change the jet stream and exceptional weather will become a new reality.

vukcevic says:
October 18, 2012 at 11:05 pm
“Big (fresh water) ice melt = large volume of fresh water added
large volume of fresh water present = faster freezing”
Exactly – fresh water from the mainland melt is floating on the saltier sea surface as well as the snow accumulation which is also fresh water that when melted floats on the sea surface.