From the Nature abhors a vacuum department comes this note from RealScience showing that Arctic sea ice has made a stunning rebound since the record low recorded in the late summer of 2012.
With a few weeks of growth still to occur, the Arctic has blown away the previous record for ice gain this winter. This is only the third winter in history when more than 10 million km² of new ice has formed.
Source data: arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/timeseries.anom.1979-2008
Of course, this is only a record for the satellite era data back to about 1980, and just like the much ballyhooed record low of 2012, we have no hard data to tell us if this has happened before or not.
Here’s the current Cryosphere Today plot, note the steep rebound right after the summer minimum, something also noted in Sea Ice News Volume 3 Number 14 – Arctic refreeze fastest ever:
![seaice.recent.arctic[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/seaice-recent-arctic1.png?quality=75)
Source: Cryosphere Today – Arctic Climate Research at the University of IllinoisThe Arctic ocean is well filled with ice right now:
![cryo_latest[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/cryo_latest1.jpg?quality=83)
Source: Cryosphere Today – Arctic Climate Research at the University of Illinois
In other news, the Antarctic seems to be continuing on its slow and steady rise, and is now approaching 450 days of uninterrupted above normal ice area according to this data: arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/timeseries.south.anom.1979-2008…which shows the last time the Antarctic sea ice was below normal was 2011.8932 or 11/22/2011.
![seaice.recent.antarctic[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/seaice-recent-antarctic1.png?quality=75)
This continued growth of ice in the Arctic Antarctic make the arguments for ice mass loss in Antarctica rather hard to believe, something also backed up by ICESAT data.
As always, you can see all the sea ice data at the WUWT Sea Ice Reference Page.
Perhaps the ice is flowing from Antarctica into the Southern Ocean 😛
Please; this is merely an attempt to be clever with statistics. If we keep seeing record gains since the summer minimum, why do we keep seeing lower minimums and lower yearly averages?
The hotter it is, the more ice we get. Don’t be a denier of basic physics. It’s like reverse condensation, like a refrigerator makes it hot in the room, a counter-intuitive thing certainly that is beyond the intellect of dumb deniers.
“If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000…This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.” -Kenneth E.F. Watt, Earth Day 1970
“Telltale signs are everywhere (regarding the coming of the next Ice Age) from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F.” -Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia U in Time Mag, 1974. http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,944914,00.html
yep, no surprises there. The “catastrophic accelerating melting” ended in 2007 !
http://oi49.tinypic.com/xudsy.jpg
@Mark Benson
Isn’t “record” ice melt, temperatures, etc etc just an attempt at being clever with statistics anyway, especially when you consider all this “unprecedented” stuff has happened before
Eric Simpson – What did Fran and Ollie say?
Don’t get too excited. It just means there will be more first-year ice to melt next year.
The weather pattern in the US over the next few weeks will make many folks think they live in the arctic 😉
Also notable is snow cover. Earth may be moving into a different mode, something unseen during recorded history. One frightening second order effect is drought. Here in CA, with the true nature of negative PDO (and maybe some even longer term modulation in force) is really setting in. Our failure to invest in water storage and delivery infrastructure over the past 40 years is really going to be a hard lesson.
An excellent choice of metaphors Anthony. I understood it to mean “the mind wants to know”.
Presumably the record rate of ice growth is a consequence of global warming and is therefore something we should worry about, just like we are supposed to do when the ice is melting.
I know it’s new growth and unlikely to survive too well in the summer, but the rapid growth is encouraging (for the debate) as it shows the artic is feeling this cold as well.
Isn’t a bigger than normal recovery just spin on a lower than normal minimum?
Phobos says:
Please; this is merely an attempt to be clever with statistics. If we keep seeing record gains since the summer minimum, why do we keep seeing lower minimums and lower yearly averages?
No. It’s counter propaganda. If alarmists expect us all to wet ourselves everytime there’s an ice minumum in September, we should also be looking at the speed of recovery.
The annual ice minumum jamboree is like saying OMG it was dark last night a midnight, if the “trend” continues it will soon be dark 24 hours per day!
As my plot above showed, if you use ALL the data rather than just one day per year you start to get some understanding of what is happening.
http://oi49.tinypic.com/xudsy.jpg
And, yes, there is less ice now than 30 years ago, that means a lot of it is thin ice, so there will be a larger loss AND gain cycle each year.
It is blattently obvious from my plot that there is a strong cycle of 5.4 years.
There is also a strong linkage with Atlantic SST , which we know to have a strong 60 year cycle.
http://oi46.tinypic.com/r7uets.jpg
The “statistical trick” is the alarmist hugh and cry every year whilst ignore the clear signals seem by looking at the whole year and not just one day.
“Phobos says:
February 12, 2013 at 11:31 am
Please; this is merely an attempt to be clever with statistics.”
No just the inconvenient fact that, for some of the year at least, the Artic Sea Ice remains stubbornly high.
The sign of a well regulated system?
I see what you are doing, but why bother. Stooping to their low standards is easy but meaningless. Maximum and minimum have meaning, averages are just folk doing sums.
Phobos says:
February 12, 2013 at 11:31 am
“Please; this is merely an attempt to be clever with statistics. If we keep seeing record gains since the summer minimum, why do we keep seeing lower minimums and lower yearly averages?”
So record (of the last 30 years) lower minimums and record lower yearly averages are YOUR facts, but record gains are merely an attempt to be clever with statistics?? If you know the answer please tell us the WHY?
I am not a scientist, nor did I stay in a Holiday Inn last night, but Manhattan Island was under a few thousand feet of ice about 20K years ago. One could presume it melted because the earth has warmed, and has been warming almost continually for the last 20K years, not just the last 200 years.
But since you apparently know better, so please enlighten us.
Thanks and have a sparkling day…
I have to say that there is nothing very surprising in this.
Given that the temperature at the North Pole is around 40 below, it follows that large areas around there will have temperatures well below zero in mid winter. Ergo, the ice will reform in most places.
Perhaps the issues which will become more important in time are the areas with thickness greater than 1m, 1.5m and 2m??
Has anyone started looking at that yet, or is the data still too young for any meaningful analysis to be made?
Maybe this needs to be classified as one of the many small shifts at the margin of cooling climate from turning points and declines in ocean cycles and solar grand minimum. There are bound to be a lot of subtle shifts in this turn.
I have to join the “not impressed” crowd. You would expect a record rise following a record drop. Didn’t the previous record rise in 2008 follow a previous record low? Drop a ball farther and it will bounce higher. Ice melts and and ice forms. It’s warmer now, it was cooler then. It might get cooler again, or not — give it time. Here is my prediction – if the minimum ice level later this year returns to more “average” levels, we will see a corresponding drop in the recovery come next spring!
The thing to remember about Arctic sea ice loss is that – contrary to every generalization in the CAGW alarmist “doctrine” – reducing Arctic sea ice extents, at the time of their minimum extents in Mid-September near the equinox, means MORE heat loss from the Arctic waters! (That is, you can calculate more heat loss from the Arctic waters above 80 north latitude by radiation, evaporation, conduction and convection heat transfer when the sea ice is removed from those latitudes, than you gain from the increased solar heat that is absorbed into the newly exposed but “darker” Arctic waters.
Thus, LOSING 2 million square kilometers of sea ice in mid-September from the Arctic COOLS the Arctic, and – as Judith Curry reports – INCREASES the probability of increased land-side snow and ice accumulation in the next months!
On the other hand, down south at the edge of the Antarctic sea extents of 15.5 million sq kilometers – in a latitude band of 62 south to 63 south – INCREASING Antarctic sea ice extents DOES reflect more solar energy than the open water formerly exposed to the sunlight, and thus ALSO COOLS the southern seas around Antarctica!
This is because at 62 to 63 south latitudes, the sun is much higher in the sky at the equinox and so spreads out less than in the Arctic at the same day-of-year, has much less attenuation in the atmosphere during every hour-of-the-day as penetrates that less distance, and the water it hits has a much smaller albedo at those higher solar incidence angles.
Um, will the BBC report this remarkable rebound? Ha ha ha…..
Having said that, low sea ice in summer, big sea ice in the Arctic in Winter – so what – that’s winter in the NH.
Anecdotally speaking, here at 52′ N in dear old Blighty – winters are getting colder and man made emissions are nowt to do with it – its a cyclical thing and we are on the down slope, in the Alps the snow cover – is coming again and some Russian observers are talking about a real return to winters cold…..
http://notrickszone.com/2013/02/10/new-peer-reviewed-study-shows-climate-trend-reversal-in-swiss-alps-now-cooling-since-2000/
Why do alarmists persist in trying to have it both ways? If ice melts, it’s due to CAGW. If ice grows, it’s due to CAGW. Is it supposed to be one or the other, or maybe both at once, or does it takes turns? What triggers that? Again and again, they sound like they don’t know, but persist in being certain it’s CAGW.
Just when DO these guys question the meme? Oh, of course, they don’t – because if they did, they’d instantly stop being alarmists. Maybe they are too terrified of that possibility to dare question anything. Poor sods.
Phobos says:
take a look at global sea ice and you will see we are at either near normal or at record high levels I mean if you people are going to speak of this on a global level then look at it as a global level and don’t leave out the things that could ruin your propaganda.
Hmmm…Did Mann tweet anybody to confirm this is record? Guess not.