Image Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center IUP Bremen
From Live Science:
Months before Hurricane Sandy hurled the Atlantic Ocean into houses and cities along the East Coast, another record-breaking cyclone battered North America, helping push this year’s Arctic sea ice to a record low, a new study finds.
Arctic sea ice has been declining for decades, reaching a record low in September 2007 and hitting that record again in 2012.
“The Great Arctic Cyclone of August 2012” arose in Siberia on Aug. 2 and crossed the Arctic Ocean to Canada, lasting an unusually long 13 days. The cyclone hit a pressure minimum of 966 millibars on Aug. 6, the lowest ever recorded for an Arctic storm, professors Ian Simmonds and Irina Rudeva of the University of Melbourne in Australia report in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The pressure reading is only 26 mb higher than Hurricane Sandy’s record low of 940 mb. (A typical low-pressure system usually hits around 1,000 mb.)
“This pressure minimum and cyclone longevity are very atypical of Arctic storms, particularly in August,” the authors write in the study. “We conclude that [the storm] was the most extreme August Arctic cyclone.”
In terms of key properties, including pressure and radius, the Arctic cyclone ranks 13 out of all 19,625 Arctic storms on record since 1979, Simmonds and Rudeva report. “This storm truly deserves the title of ‘The Great Arctic Cyclone of August 2012’,” they said.
Impact on sea ice
Simmonds and Rudeva report that the storm greatly affected the record low sea ice in the Arctic this September.
“[A]nalyses we have conducted indicate [the storm] caused the dispersion and separation of a significant amount of ice, while its removal left the main pack more exposed to wind and waves associated with [the storm], facilitating the further decay of the main pack,” they write in their report. Read More
Here’s the paper, the abstract follows:
Key Points
– Analysis and diagnosis is performed on the dramatic Arctic storm of August 2012
– Storm’s evolution and longevity tied to baroclinicity and a tropopause vortex
– Storm is the most intense Arctic August system in the record (since 1979)
On 2 August 2012 a dramatic storm formed over Siberia, moved into the Arctic, and died in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago on 14 August. During its lifetime its central pressure dropped to 966 hPa, leading it to be dubbed ‘The Great Arctic Cyclone of August 2012’. This cyclone occurred during a period when the sea ice extent was on the way to reaching a new satellite-era low, and its intense behavior was related to baroclinicity and a tropopause polar vortex. The pressure of the storm was the lowest of all Arctic August storms over our record starting in 1979, and the system was also the most extreme when a combination of key cyclone properties was considered. Even though, climatologically, summer is a ‘quiet’ time in the Arctic, when compared with all Arctic storms across the period it came in as the 13th most extreme storm, warranting the attribution of ‘Great’.
Paul Homewood says:
December 27, 2012 at 9:14 am
“A warmer Arctic has been blamed by some scientists for this phenomenon, but surely they are (wilfully?) confusing cause and effect.”
Yes and they should know better because of the obvious correlation between loss of summer Arctic sea ice, and negative NAO conditions, especially when there is also a strong easterly QBO.
It would be worth while to also take note of what a large storm does to the water temperatures of the warm water it passes over. It cools them substantially and due to wave mixing, blends that cooled surface water with warmer waters below. A large storm is a heat engine that very effectively cools off the warm water it draws its energy from. By breaking up the ice and allowing it to move out into warmer waters it is also indirectly cooling waters outside the arctic.
The planet is starting to shed heat, and ice free waters in the arctic are one of the ways it dumps substantial heat to space. We have traded a highly localized reservoir of ice for a general cooling of the arctic ocean basin and surrounding oceans and land areas. Net effect is loss of heat that would have been retained if the insulating ice was thicker.
I suspect that this is another thermostat mechanism like the thunderstorms in the equatorial region that begins the process of dumping heat to space at the end of a warming cycle and starts us into the next cooling cycle.
Once substantial open water exists in the arctic, it “switches on” this cooling process of large storms which flush out ice into warmer ocean basins, and cools the arctic ocean waters then when the arctic winter comes with no insulating ice cover, the re-freeze process dumps enormous amounts of heat as the open waters freeze and radiate away their latent heat of fusion to the open arctic night sky and space.
Rather than a sign of run-away heating these episodes are signs of the planets self regulatory feedback thermostats which strongly resist any run-away climate catastrophe. Just like there is a critical convective potential energy that allows thunderstorms to suddenly form and pump enormous amounts of heat energy high up to the tropopause where it can be easily radiated away in the stratosphere, in the arctic substantial open water in the arctic at the onset of re-freeze in the winter and sunless days turn on the equivalent process in the arctic as the tropopause essentially vanishes (see chiefio’s page on the height of the tropopause as a measure of heat input http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/tropopause-rules/ ).
Once arctic nightfall occurs this open water is free to radiate tremendous amounts of heat energy from the open waters surface directly to space, and build up a new ice cover which in following seasons will be broken up by similar storms and flushed out into the northern oceans cooling them just like the ice you put in your glass of iced tea.
This I believe is one of the key mechanisms driving the 30 year cycles of heating and cooling of the oceans as this arctic heat pump to space turns on and off as the ice thins or thickens.
Larry
The 2007 record low was also cauesed by weather, not AGW http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-20071001.html.
“Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. “Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic,” he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.”
Steven Mosher says:
December 27, 2012 at 9:36 am
lets recall again when I came on here and announced that a storm was brewing and that the reccord would get smashed— people here.
1. denied it.
2. claimed the storm was normal
3. argued that the record would not be broken
4. switched to looking at other records of ice decline (IMS)
5 attacked satellite records.
See: http://crushpessimism.com/2007/06/overgeneralization.html
“Overgeneralizing makes people stupid.”
Steve, did all of the “people here” do at least one of those 5 things? You do yourself no favors by your constant attempts at categorizing everyone on WUWT as one type of person. You would do better to discuss issues one-one with those you disagree with. You would come across much wiser.
Can anyone comment on the credibility of this statistic?
. It reads to me like the formation of about two Arctic cyclones per day on average. ?
Why is there this non-scientific narrative that low Arctic sea ice a bad thing ?? Or is this really about bragging rights on who can guess the sea ice extent most accurately ??
Kevin Kilty says:
December 27, 2012 at 11:44 am
Yes, but the “Arctic” – to 60 N – does have an area of some millions of square miles – nine or ten million, I think [long time since I did area of part of a sphere].
A dozen, or a dozen and a half, ‘Lows’ in that area, each week, seems not hugely out of order to me.
FijiDave says:
December 27, 2012 at 9:01 am
I agree that 1000 mb isn’t very low. Perhaps, as an average of all cyclones, it’s about right – if every cyclone, even the nine-hour-wonders covering a coupole of counties are included.
For what it’s worth, off NW Europe [roughly in the (UK) Met Office Shipping forecast areas], my rule of thumb [my guided guess, if you prefer] is
980 mb – Gales [Beaufort8]
960 mb – Storm [Bf 10]
940 mb – winds of ‘Hurricane force’, Bf 12.
free to use, with the usual caveats – guided guess in UK waters etc.
But with forty years in shipping, it seems quite robust as a rule of thumb [not exact – but a good guided guess].
Do kids do estimation today?
“Months before Hurricane Sandy hurled the Atlantic Ocean into houses and cities along the East Coast, another record-breaking cyclone battered North America, helping push this year’s Arctic sea ice to a record low, a new study finds.”
Nothing record breaking about Sandy as a storm, only the fact of where it occured made it some kind of “record” and I use the term loosely.
No and that is probably part of the problem no one seems motivated to make simple checks for reasonableness in any of the published articles or studies. If they did they would see that some of these problems are really non-issues or so far out of reasonable bounds that they can be disregarded as propaganda rather than science.
In the late 1960’s in engineering school some of our professors would insist that the students make an educated guess about the answer to the problem before they ever picked up their slide rules (calculators were not available then), If you had no idea what the order of magnitude of the likely answer was you could very easily get answers that were 100’s or 1000’s of times too big or too small with those tools, so the estimation of likely answers was an important double check on the likelihood that your answer was at least in the ball park if not correct.
If the answer you came up with was 100 times too big or small compared to your guess, then that was a big warning flag to go back and check your work AND your assumptions.
Larry
Thanks for your reply, but defining the Arctic to begin at 60N is much too far south and provides the Arctic with far too much area–66N is closer; and, to have two, or so, cyclones form in this region per day on average, simply seems too high. Where can I find some credible statistic?
I believe that this can be resolved very simply. There are three possible cases:
1) It is getting hotter.
2) It is getting colder
3) We don’t know WTF is happening
And according to the Precautionary Principle, we must prepare ourselves for all contingencies. I hope that makes everything clearer.
Larry Ledwick (hotrod) indeed so.
I am mostly self taught in math, and many years ago managed to acquire a small book called Numerical Approximation by B.R. Morton and edited by Walter Ledermann. This fine little book of the 1960s has helped me on many an occasions when reasonable estimation was required but not too much data was available. It has a most useful chapter on interpolation – how and when to use them – something I feel is lost today.
Let’s take a look at this “Death Spiral” of arctic ice.
Present Arctic ice minimums result from the higher SST of recent decades. These minimums reflect the new equilibrium between winter ice formation and summer ice melt, attained in the past decade. The year 2007 showed the lowest ice extent, excepting only the 2012 minimum which was due to the extraordinary storm of early August, and not reflecting increases in arctic SST. The new equilibrium is quantified by an average of the minimums of the past decade, with minimum ice extent fluctuating around this average. Hence, future season-end ice extent should not drop significantly below this average. Note that winter sea ice extent has not altered much in recent decades.
The global SST trend has remained flat for sixteen years and SST have actually decreased, and so we can reasonably expect decreasing Arctic sea ice melt in the coming years. The “Death Spiral” is rank propaganda and has served its purpose very well, but it soon will be discarded and replaced by a new slogan: acid oceans and Pickled Polar Bears.
Martin van Etten says:
December 27, 2012 at 8:30 am
this is the period your Lord Monckton is describing as : 18 annual climate gabfests: 16 years without warming (Dec 1 st on wuwt) ;
is this a paradox, a contradiction or just stupidity (by Monckton)
None of the above.
To the nearest year, there has been no warming at all for 16 years, statistical or otherwise, on several data sets.
Data sets with a o slope for at least 15 years:
1. HadCrut3: since May 1997 or 15 years, 7 months (goes to November)
2. Sea surface temperatures: since March 1997 or 15 years, 8 months (goes to October)
3. RSS: since January 1997 or 15 years, 11 months (goes to November)
See the graph below to show it all.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.33/trend/plot/rss/from:1997.0/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.1/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.25/plot/rss/from:1997.0/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.1
However in view of the significance of the 16 years lately, I would like to elaborate on RSS. The slope for 15 years and 11 months from January 1997 on RSS is -4.1 x 10^-4. But the slope for 16 years and 0 months from December 1996 is +1.3 x 10^-4. So since the magnitude of the negative slope since January 1997 is 3 times than the magnitude of the positive slope since December 1996, I believe I can say that since a quarter of the way through December 1996, in other words from December 8, 1996 to December 7, 2012, the slope is 0. This is 16 years. Therefore RSS is 192/204 or 94% of the way to Santer’s 17 years.
Melted? …. or compressed? A process similar to the obduction process in tectonics would result in vast compression / stacking
Richard M says:
December 27, 2012 at 11:05 am
Steven Mosher says: …
Richard…unfortunately, Steve now flies into WUWT threads with random comments that are hard to decipher (and poorly worded). You probably won’t receive any response. One of my resolutions for 2013 is not respond to his (and other similar) comments – it does no good when the conversation is one-sided…
Martin Van Etten says Dec. 27, 8:30 AM
is this a paradox, a contradiction or just stupidity (by Monckton)
=============================
You are what is known as a drive-by spitballer. If you have an argument, you should present it. But your type never gets past spit-balls.
Steven Mosher
Do you think Arctic sea Ice variability is natural or man made?
Sea Ice forms when temperatures fall below the freezing point of water, is this physical property man made? Stop beaten around the bush and explain how the arctic sea Ice increases every winter and decreases every summer, the variability is Natural, because it follows a seasonal cycle. the abnormalities that you are suggesting and that are caused by “warming” are not unusual at all, even this year (2012) the Arctic sea Ice and Antarctic sea Ice have both been at one point above normal.
After a period of heightened solar activity (where the planet’s energy comes from) You would expect all that solar energy to build up and be released, regardless of what the composition of our atmosphere is.
During the global cooling scare of the 1960s-1970s, generally more severe storms and severe weather were predicted to occur from cooling. (Examples include the 1976 National Geographic article: http://tinyurl.com/cxo4d3l ). Likewise, for instance, http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2012/sep/11sep2012a4.html notes data from a study finding more storminess occurred in the North Atlantic during the Little Ice Age than during the Medieval Warm Period. There was a greater polar-equator temperature difference during the cold LIA (for the tropics never change temperature as much as more northern latitudes), driving north-south convection.
Anyway, weather fluctuations, like the arctic storm, are particularly why it is important to see the annual average of arctic ice extent rather than just letting a single month be cherry-picked. As an annual average, seen in http://www.webcitation.org/6AKKakUIo (which was up on the U.K. government site before deletion from its original host), the last couple years had an average arctic ice extent far more similar to the mid-1990s than one would guess from common misleading reports. Such is particularly striking in combination with how http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif illustrates that the arctic was not warmer in the mid-1990s than in the late 1930s. Figures 2 and 3 in http://nwpi.krc.karelia.ru/e/climas/Ice/Ice_no_sat/XX_Arctic.htm fit with the preceding, by showing how arctic ice extent in the 1990s was not very exceptional at all compared to the years near 1940.
The history of arctic ice and temperature trends seen in the preceding is not surprising compared to the history of average temperature over the whole Northern Hemisphere, before later revisionist adjustments to the data, as shown in the http://tinyurl.com/cxo4d3l article of the global cooling scare period.
Such also fits with the utter lack of CO2 versus temperature correlation from 200 to 11000 years ago seen in http://tinyurl.com/3d4mrbt , explained in http://tinyurl.com/7esh3f6 , as well as the big picture seen in http://s10.postimage.org/l9gokvp09/composite.jpg and supported by http://s13.postimage.org/ka0rmuwgn/gcrclouds.gif (click to enlarge).
@ur momisugly mpainter @ur momisugly James at 48 @ur momisugly Werner Brozek
sceptics complain that there is no discussion about their ideas,
discussion sometimes start with questions;
I asked how come there is arctic melt, while there is no warming (according to Monckton and others);
that could be an interesting discussion, since there is no compression because volume is also down;
thats all mpainter;
your type: a little bit more friendlyness could benefit us all;
Why does a pan of water continue to boil for a few minutes after you shut off the stove?
Larry
Martin Van Etten;
Clean up your act and you will get more consideration. If you have point to make, then make it. Inferring stupidity (your word, not mine) to someone because you do not understand is a spit-ball.
Your comment is there for all to see. Do not pretend that you were nice.
Concerning your question, it was answered for you at 2:53 PM this thread by yours truly, and you have not thanked me.
Martin van Etten says: December 27, 2012 at 6:11 pm
I asked how come there is arctic melt, while there is no warming
I wrote an article on the subject here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/16/the-economist-provides-readers-with-erroneous-information-about-arctic-sea-ice/
Let me know if you have any additional questions.
Not much decline in the Antarctic sea ice is there.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png