According to the ice breakup log, the latest the ice has ever gone out was May 20th, 1964 at 11:41 AM Alaska Standard Time. As of this writing there is about 28 hours to go to break that record.
Geophysicist Martin Jeffries at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks said in 2009,
The Nenana Ice Classic is a pretty good proxy for climate change in the 20th century.
If that’s true, it looks like we are headed to colder times. Here is the current live view which updates every 30 seconds.
Refresh to see the latest.
I’ve been watching over the past 12 hours and the tripod has drifted downstream slightly, rope slack changes gave the impression that the tripod had changed position, but that’s an artifact of wind, and there appear to be leads in the ice opening nearby, though it is hard to tell if they go through the ice or if it is simply water on the surface.
Here is what the image looked like on 5-15-13 (thanks to Willis):
They need a weather station there to go with the live image. Many people want to know what the temperature and wind conditions are like.
[UPDATE] I trust Anthony won’t mind my adding a blink comparator between the 16th at two in the afternoon, and the 19th at ten in the morning. Click on the image to see the comparison.
From my inspection, I’d say the tripod hasn’t moved … it looks like it’s tipped a bit, but I think that’s just the different sun angles, because the black-painted sections don’t seem to be moving.
It’s the most exciting slow-motion event I know of …
w.
perhaps further proof – if any be needed – that climate change IS happening, in that we’re heading into the next, overdue, ice age?
Ice outs since the start of 2009:
Perhaps what was true in the 20th century isn’t holding up in the 21st. 🙂
Last year’s ice out was the 4th earliest. If Jeffries was right, then either we’re in deep trouble or that the standard deviation is so high it will take centuries to determine a good sample from the proxy. Maybe it will work out on a per millennium basis.
Yet another part of the Globe that doesn’t cooperate with the theory of what the “Coal Trains of Death” will do.
The wools they’ve tried to pull over our eyes is getting thin.
http://www.wunderground.com/webcams/Adam12/1/show.html can be used to show time lapse of the tripod from the 1st of may
Think its going to go soon
Hoser: “And what does the record breakup really mean? Using time from equinox sounds great, but there is a problem. It assumes the time of day when the breakup occurs is purely random. It isn’t.”
I’m not interested in declaring a record or whatever, I’m interested in looking at it as a climate proxy. It a good point tough.
The question was how to account for leap years. Maybe just using the day of equinox could solve that, however that is unnecessarily introducing an error of +/-12h.
I think this is worse than the effect or more break ups near noon since there is still a fair proportion at all hours.
.. and maybe it does not matter a damn in relation to the crudity of the proxy.
All you people fussing about time do not seem to have noticed that the bets are placed in Alaska Standard Time NOT Alaska Daylight Time. So the time of the ‘ice-out’ will not be the time shown on the Borealis webcam but one hour earlier.
See:
http://www.nenanaakiceclassic.com/2013%20Side%20A.pdf
Furthermore, people are betting on the calendar date and time of ice break-up, NOT the time since the vernal equinox or any other bizarre time concept. Leap seconds anyone?
Don’t think it’s going to make it through the day. Looks like it could go at any minute.
If the breakup doesn’t come before midnight tonight, there’s about a 70% chance the record will be broken.
My table:
6 to 9 am……….3 occurrences
9 am to noon…21
noon to 3 pm…23
3 pm to 6 pm…21
6 pm to 9 pm…15
9 pm to midnight…8
midnight to 3 am…3
3 am to 6 am…..1
Here’s a nice article about this year’s spring cold,
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130517/cold-hard-facts-new-century-frigid-alaska says in part:
The state’s overall temperature dipped 2.4 degrees during the first decade of the new century, a notable shift from the previous 100 years, which had generally trended warmer, according to a study published last summer by the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The authors suggested that growing winter ice in the Bering Sea — the result of cooler surface temperatures — led to lower temperatures across nearly all of Alaska. Meanwhile, thinning ice in the Arctic Ocean led to warming in one slice of the state: the North Slope atop Alaska.
Those trends are continuing, according to follow-up papers released by Wendler, Blake Moore and Kevin Galloway.
As for 2013, things started out warm. But the chill returned with a vengeance.
April was “much too cold” by 6.9 degrees, and it felt especially brittle in Fairbanks where Wendler lives. The Golden Heart City saw its third-coldest April in more than 100 years. “It was quite unique in that sense and I strongly disliked it, personally,” said Wendler, in his thick German accent.
Overall, the first four months of 2013 were .65 degrees chillier than normal, nippiness that seems to have redoubled its efforts this month, throwing off seasonal rituals across the state.
Because the nearby Yukon River is frozen, efforts to collect driftwood are on hold, he said. That wood is swept off banks as the rising river cracks free of ice and rages past the village each spring, providing a free supply of firewood for many homes.
Also on hold is gardening the school usually does this time of year, because the ground is too frosty. “We have well over a ton of banana peels, apple cores, and onion skins in our compost pile. It’s frozen solid,” he said.
In Nome near the Bering Strait — where Friday’s temperature hovered around 20 — winter king crabbers were coming off a spectacular fishing season, said Jim Menard, area manager.
That’s in part because in this commercial fishery, snowmachines are used instead of boats.
But there’s a downside to the cold. Last year, excessive sea ice in Norton Sound led to the cancellation of the herring sac roe fishery, the first time sea ice had called the season since 1992. The ice isn’t as densely frozen this time, but there’s still plenty of it, said Scott Kent, assistant area management biologist in Nome.
Meanwhile, the Unalakleet and Shaktoolik rivers in Norton Sound are still frozen with very little overflow, allowing safe travel and belated trout fishing through the ice.
“There’s no trouble navigating the Unalakleet with snowmachines at this time, which is unheard of,” he said. “It’s just crazy.”
And across the entire Bering Sea, the ice is slowly growing at a time when it should be breaking up, said Kathleen Cole, lead ice forecaster in Alaska for the National Weather Service.
“We’re actually making ice rather than having it dissipate,” she said.
But once the weather warms back up, sea ice in the Bering should vanish more quickly than it did last year because it’s not as dense. She’s predicting an ice-free Bering Sea starting July 1.
“All I want is 60-degree days,” said Cole, from her office in Anchorage. “I really, really want 60 degrees.”
If the tripod lasts past May 20th, the Nenana Classic will be renamed the Neener-neener Classic, in honor of the chagrined AGW brigade.
Here’s another view of the four footed tripod, I think looking upstream in a photo that is likely from a different year.
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130516/will-years-nenana-ice-classic-set-record-latest-ice-out-ever
In Arctic Sea news, the Kara Sea was particularly cold this past winter and has very thick ice. There could be a record late melt there, in August maybe.
Here is the latest excuse…
“Climate slowdown means extreme rates of warming ‘not as likely'”
Quote”: “Since 1998, there has been an unexplained “standstill” in the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Writing in Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this will reduce predicted warming in the coming decades.”
That’s right, the ‘predicted’ warming is so ‘unexplained’, some areas are freezing. But…but… No buts…they got it wrong and now they are trying to fudge the response to the bad news. What is described in this thread isn’t reduced warming as the Warminista would have us believe, it’s extreme, and anomalous, (relatively) cold weather.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22567023
“Last year’s ice out was the 4th earliest. If Jeffries was right, then either we’re in deep trouble or that the standard deviation is so high it will take centuries to determine a good sample from the proxy. Maybe it will work out on a per millennium basis.”
Last year had record Arctic melt too and there is a strong tendency for annual alternation in many climate indices.
Arctic melting season has been getting steadily shorter since 1990 but it’s a bumpy ride:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=210
The more of these untampered time series we have to cross check things the better.
” The Nenana Ice Classic is a pretty good proxy for climate change in the 20th century. ”
He did not say it was a thermometer.
http://www.ucprc.ucdavis.edu/
http://www.ucprc.ucdavis.edu/hvsdb/ins-peak.php?section=501RF&ins=Thermo
http://heatisland.lbl.gov/news/berkeley-lab-researchers-showcase-cool-pavement-technologies
Alaska, the canary in the coal mine is now the canary in the refrigerator. As Anthony pointed out temps have been trending down since 2000 with some cold weather records broken recently.
Alaska: Canary in the Coal Mine – PBS
Anthony, on Martin Jeffries’ quote, was it in 2009 or 2008? Anyway I found this from the Wall Street Journal and wonder what Martin Jeffries thinks today.
Greg Goodman says:
May 19, 2013 at 1:08 pm
How to account for leap years.
Well, first of all, do we need to? Don’t leap years already bring the standard calendar pretty close to the astronomical calendar? Since the breakup is always after Mar 1, there is no need to ‘account for’ the leap year. Leap years do the accounting for us to bring the date back into alignment with the solstices and equinoces.
My point was the calendar day and local time are most important.
There was a 400 year non-aberration in the leap year. Most centuries do not have a leap year on the last year of the century (year ending in 00). If we did nothing to fix the calendar, the Spring equinox would slowly drift later and later. To fix that problem, we do have a leap year on the last year of every fourth century. 2000 was a final century year with leap year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year
If we hadn’t experienced a leap year in 2000, you could argue the lack of a leap year in 2000 would throw off the records for our purpose; they would be off by a day versus pre-2000. However, there WAS a leap year, so there is no abrupt discontinuity in equinox dates.
http://www.holoscenes.com/special/seasons.html
Thus, no adjustments for leap year seem to be needed in this case. The calendar dates apparently are the best choice in an imperfect system.
Witchcraft! Three concrete blocks were turned into a car!
Jeff Norman says: May 19, 2013 at 9:47 am
Bravo!
as our quadropod is ‘not a thermometer’ the records cannot be massaged in any direction so it’s amongst the most secure records currently available …
Hoser, your ‘climate model’ says the odds are good that if the tripod makes it to evening ADST ( about another four hours from where and when I now am) odds are good we have a New record as established from vernal equinox time reference. And that most of us can get some sleep tonight rather than observing this ‘historic event’ more closely. What good fun.
The morels on my Wisconsin farm came out 2 weeks early last year (relative to the ‘normal’ family gathering to pick them second weekend in May) obviously due to global warming. This year they came out two weeks late (also due to global warming according to the Met explanation for UK’s miserable cold late spring, which according to Slingo wasn’t weather but ACC so obviously also why spring was cold, wet, and late in Wisconsin). / sarc. On average it was average, even though we got few mushrooms either year. Which proves only that weather isn’t climate, and that morel mushrooms are a good seasonal proxy so Mann won’t use it. Records of the Nenana Classic go back far enough to count as local, maybe regional climate. What good, serious fun.
Rtj1211, please send your astute observations to Mann with a note about Yamal’s undue influence. Perhaps he will post a retraction of his hockey stick.
Finished lunch and off to wash the tractor and do some harrowing. Hope that tripod is still there this evening. Almost as entertaining as a slow hockey game. Thanks for lightening up the day.
Juergen,
Martin Jeffries is a geographer, but not a geophysicists. On the website of the Geophysical Institute it is stated:
Dr. Jeffries is currently on leave from UAF and working at the Office of Naval Research, where he is a Program Officer and Arctic Science Advisor in the Ocean, Atmosphere and Space Research Division, Ocean Battlespace Sensing Department. Prior to going to ONR, Dr. Jeffries spent four years (2006-2010) at NSF, where he was the Program Director for the Arctic Observing Network in the Division of Arctic Sciences, Office of Polar Programs. His cryospheric processes research has taken him to both the Arctic and the Antarctic to investigate ice shelves, icebergs, sea ice and lake ice. With Kim Morris, Dr. Jeffries created the very successful Alaska Lake Ice and Snow Observatory Network (ALISON), an integrated research and education project in which K-12 teachers and students were his scientific partners in an investigation of lake ice growth, snow accumulation and conductive heat flux in Alaska.
This is almost as exciting as golf on the radio.