Oh, what a difference a year makes in Greenland melting

ARCTIC SUMMER SNOWSTORM

By Joseph D’Aleo CCM

Remember a year ago when few days of July ‘warmth’ with strong blocking over Greenland had the media abuzz over some melting?

Last July a brief spell of temperatures in the mid 30s had caused some surface slush formation on top of the 1 to 1.5 mile thick Greenland ice. The NASA sensors merely color-coded the phase of the water – ice (white), mixed water and ice (rose) and none (land grey). Rose meant some surface liquid. For Greenland, business as usual, because 150 years ago, there were no satellites to record the event.

It quickly refroze in a few days even before the flurry of news stories hyping it stopped.

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The July 2012 melt event was a couple of short blips above freezing.

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You can see the ice at the summit was very much still in evidence.

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Well, a year later, we have an interesting opposite scenario with a deep arctic low bringing snow to the arctic and Greenland in late July.

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What about the arctic ice?

According to the DMI plot it is running higher than 2012 and 2007. WE still have more than a month to go and storms and winds can compact the ice and push it out of the arctic so no promises can be made.  The oceans play a role in temperatures in the US and arctic and explain the recent demise and suggest the ice will recover in the not too distant future.

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Arctic Sea ice extent 30% or greater (DMI)

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Related:

Remember that ‘unprecedented’ Greenland ice sheet surface melt that was allegedly caused by global warming? Never mind

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johnmarshall
July 26, 2013 2:55 am

Planetary ice levels are cyclic but the cycle length varies. AGWers cannot understand that. CO2 has no input into climate/temperature apart from helping to remove the heat like water vapour, though that is mainly through latent heat increasing heat transfer to the upper troposphere where it can radiate to space.

July 26, 2013 3:34 am

I’m not surprised that the “Mother Nature Network” should take the image from Camera Two at the Pole and not Camera One. Compare the two:
Camera Two
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/NPEO2013/WEBCAM2/ARCHIVE/npeo_cam2_20130726072121.jpg
Camera One
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/NPEO2013/WEBCAM1/ARCHIVE/npeo_cam1_20130726081158.jpg
Both pictures are taken at the same time from the same place. If you only show one you don’t get the whole picture.
I’ve been watching the pictures from the pole for years, and I’ve seen a wonderful variety of views. This is one of the largest melt-water pools I’ve seen, however I’ve seen deeper pools that seemed to even penetrate the ice, as the camera drifted down towards Fram Strait. That is actually ordinary, during summer thaws, which are also ordinary and yearly.
As soon as the melt finds a weakness in the ice, all the melt-water drains from the surface. Sometimes, as it does so, it makes a rather beautiful spider web of channels to the point of drainage, (seen in pictures from airplanes, and not from the North Pole Camera.) It is actually unusual for the ice to be so thick the water doesn’t drain off the surface.

Village Idiot
July 26, 2013 4:04 am

Cho_cacao July 26, 2013 at 12:44 am:
“why show only the one that shows this year’s extent to be the farthest from the previous records?”
Probably the same reason that graphs with only temp observations vs IPCC model runs are shown, and Lindzen (and others) predictions are swept under the carpet:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/contary-to-contrarians-ipcc-temp-projections-accurate.html
(classed on this website as unreliable)
Just as William Astley’s prediction above (July 25, 2013 at 4:37 pm) will also crash and burn

michael hart
July 26, 2013 5:30 am

What about the arctic ice?
According to the DMI plot it is running higher than 2012 and 2007. WE still have more than a month to go and storms and winds can compact the ice and push it out of the arctic so no promises can be made.

I think a word of caution is also advisable on use of language. I neither need nor want any “promises” about Arctic sea-ice.* While the political use of the Arctic ice is obviously widespread by IPCC alarmists, they have yet to show me any good reason for why I should care.
*If I want to see lots of ice in the Arctic ocean, I know what time of the year to visit!

Keith
July 26, 2013 5:48 am

Amusing how UN negotiators actually though that the ice cap itself melted in a handful of days. Shows the calibre of discerning, inquiring minds that are telling the world to repent of their carbon sins…
Interesting how the NRL are forecasting this system to wrench the sea ice around the Canadian archipelago.Will it refreeze, or persist like the area the other side of the Pole that was pulled around by a storm towards the end of May?
Expect a big drop in extent/area in a few days, but we’ll see whether that presages a continued drop or a levelling-off.

Keith
July 26, 2013 5:56 am

Slightly off-topic, but has anyone else noticed how CT’s Antarctic chart of two-year Antarctic sea ice area vs anomaly assumes a negative anomaly? The ‘trend’ area has its value tagged above the graph marker, while the ‘current’ area’s value is tagged below the graph marker. As a result, it hasn’t been possible to read the current value properly all year
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png

beng
July 26, 2013 6:24 am

Maybe that polar storm explains the current cold air over the NE US. Low this morning almost got into the 40s (50F) here in the mid-Appalachians. Bit of a shock…

July 26, 2013 7:05 am

Keith says:
July 26, 2013 at 5:56 am
Slightly off-topic, but has anyone else noticed how CT’s Antarctic chart of two-year Antarctic sea ice area vs anomaly assumes a negative anomaly? The ‘trend’ area has its value tagged above the graph marker, while the ‘current’ area’s value is tagged below the graph marker. As a result, it hasn’t been possible to read the current value properly all year

You could always go to the datafile at:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/timeseries.south.anom.1979-2008

July 26, 2013 7:49 am

“In just one week in July last year, the ice and snow virtually disappeared from the surface of Greenland’s barren interior.” Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/greenland-melting
§.-)

mpainter
July 26, 2013 8:46 am

Steven Mosher says:
July 25, 2013 at 3:45 pm
‘The oceans play a role in temperatures in the US and arctic and explain the recent demise and suggest the ice will recover in the not too distant future.”
jeez I dont know which is worse, CAGW guys talking about death spiral or this?
At least the death spiral guys put some numbers on their guess.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Please allow me to tell you which is worse. The CAGW is worse, as clearly alarmist. The other merely proffers the possibility of cooling (look closely, see the word “suggest”?)

Jpatrick
July 26, 2013 9:05 am

The fate of the World War II squadron, which ditched in Greenland in 1942 says a thing or two about the Greenland ice coverage. When one P-38 was recovered 50 years later, it was beneath 262 feet of ice.
I wonder how deep the rest of the squadron is now.

u.k.(us)
July 26, 2013 9:05 am

fred houpt says:
July 26, 2013 at 2:31 am
===
Give us a bit of narrative, then maybe we’ll watch your movie 🙂

William Astley
July 26, 2013 11:27 am

In reply to:
Ole Heinrich says:
July 26, 2013 at 7:49 am
“In just one week in July last year, the ice and snow virtually disappeared from the surface of Greenland’s barren interior.” Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/greenland-melting §.-)
William:
Somewhat fitting it appears we are going to experience the cooling phase of a Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle and then it appears we are going to experience what causes a Heinrich event, named after the marine geologist Hartmut Heinrich. Observations rather than climate war discussions and climategate type papers will validate or invalidate the following assertions. If and when there are more observations to confirm and support the below assertions I can and will provide a more complete explanation.
There are cycles of warming and cooling captured in the paleo record. The regions of the planet that warmed in the last 70 years are the same regions that warmed in the past during the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. Roughly every 8000 years to 10,000 years the D-O warming cycle is followed by a Heinrich event.
It is known that solar magnetic cycle changes and geomagnetic field changes (relatively abrupt geomagnetic field orientation changes of 10 to 15 degrees which are called archeomagnetic jerks) both correlate with the D-O cycles. Solar magnetic cycle changes and geomagnetic excursions also correlate with the Heinrich events. The last Heinrich event was the Younger Dryas abrupt cooling event that occurred 12,800 years ago.
The solar magnetic cycle changes warm and cool the planet, by modulating the amount of low level clouds (also modulates the optical properties of low level clouds) and high level cirrus clouds. The solar magnetic cycle modulation of cloud cover explains why there is regional warming as opposed to global warming in the past and in the last 70 years and explains the phenomenon that is called the ‘polar see-saw’. The polar see-saw is the fact that when the Greenland Ice sheet warms the Antarctic ice sheet cools slightly (high latitude regions of the Southern hemisphere warm not cool so the term polar see-saw is confusing as it implies the polar regional temperatures change in opposition rather than only the temperature of the two major ice sheets.) The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet see-saw is due to the albedo of the Antarctic ice sheet being slightly greater than low clouds and the fact that the Antarctic ice sheet is isolated by the polar vortex from the surrounding ocean. So a decrease in low level cloud cover over the Antarctic ice sheet causes slight cooling on the Antarctic ice sheet. The following is a link to a paper by Svensmark that explains the see-saw.
Comment:
The above and below is a Coles notes abbreviation and does not address all nuisances in the observations for example the physical reason why planetary cover did track GCR starting in 1998, same reason why the North polar drift velocity increased by a factor of 5 starting roughly 1998 and so on. Everything has a physical explanation.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0612145v1
The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic rays
Borehole temperatures in the ice sheets spanning the past 6000 years show Antarctica repeatedly warming when Greenland cooled, and vice versa (Fig. 1) [13, 14]. North-south oscillations of greater amplitude associated with Dansgaard-Oeschger events are evident in oxygenisotope data from the Wurm-Wisconsin glaciation[15]. The phenomenon has been called the polar see-saw[15, 16], but that implies a north-south symmetry that is absent. Greenland is better coupled to global temperatures than Antarctica is, and the fulcrum of the temperature swings is near the Antarctic Circle. A more apt term for the effect is the Antarctic climate anomaly.
In the last decade or so geomagnetic specialists discovered that the geomagnetic field has changed cyclically and abruptly. As there is no physical explanation as to how internal core changes can cause cyclic changes to the geomagnetic field (the changes are extraordinarily rapid) it took roughly a decade for researchers to confirm that the changes are real and have happened cyclically. … …..There is a physical explanation for everything that has and will happen. Based on the current model of what causes the solar magnetic cycle, solar magnetic cycle changes cannot cause geomagnetic field changes of the type observed. As there is now unequivocal observation evidence that the geomagnetic field changes have occurred and based on the geomagnetic field model it is also physically impossible for the current geomagnetic model to explain what has happened cyclically in the past, one of the two models (geomagnetic field model or the solar model) is incorrect.
The solution to the puzzle is the solar model is incorrect. I make the assertion with confidence as there is an astonishing set of mature structured anomalies in astrophysics concerning the anomalous evolution and structure of spiral galaxies, the anomalous evolution and structure of quasars and their connection with spiral galaxy evolution and structure, the anomalous increase in expansion rate of galaxies, the anomalous rotational profile of spiral galaxies, the anomalous hot intergalactic gas, the anomalous clustering of quasars, and so on that are explained by the stellar model change (related to what physically happens when very large objects collapse, quasars are just a more massive example of the phenomena). In addition to structured astronomical anomalies there is the anomalous structure and orientation of the magnetic field of Uranus and Neptune that is explained by the change to the solar model. (i.e. The significant solar magnetic change affects the other planets in the solar system.) The anomalies and observations fit together as pieces in a physical puzzle. To use an analogue to a crime scene investigation the observations point to what caused the events. There is a single correct explanation. Sets of structure anomalies indicate that one or more fundamental theories are incorrect. It is impossible and irrational to try to manipulate incorrect theories or add new mechanisms to attempt to save an incorrect theory or model to explain what has happened. There are sociological and practical reasons why people working in specialty fields do not even imply something could be fundamentally incorrect with base theories and mechanisms. It becomes truly inconceivable to those working in field that a fundamental theory is incorrect, hence the anomalies are either ignored or a work around is attempted. The trick or methodology to solving the problem is to look at the observations and anomalies from separate specialties as a set and look for a solution that eliminates the anomalies (provides a physical explanation for what has happened.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event
Dansgaard–Oeschger event
Dansgaard–Oeschger events (often abbreviated D–O events) are rapid climate fluctuations that occurred 25 times during the last glacial period. Some scientists (see below) claim that the events occur quasi-periodically with a recurrence time being a multiple of 1,470 years, but this is debated. The comparable climate cyclicity during the Holocene is referred to as Bond events.
In the Northern Hemisphere, they take the form of rapid warming episodes, typically in a matter of decades, each followed by gradual cooling over a longer period. For example, about 11,500 years ago, averaged annual temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet warmed by around 8 °C over 40 years, in three steps of five years (see,[2] Stewart, chapter 13), where a 5 °C change over 30–40 years is more common. … ….Heinrich events only occur in the cold spells immediately preceding D-O warmings, leading some to suggest that D-O cycles may cause the events, or at least constrain their timing.[3]
The course of a D-O event sees a rapid warming of temperature, followed by a cool period lasting a few hundred years.[4] This cold period sees an expansion of the polar front, with ice floating further south across the North Atlantic ocean.[4]
http://pages-dataportal.unibe.ch/products/specialissues/QSR2000/leuschner.pdf
One of the most important recent “findings in environmental research has been the discovery of high-frequency climate oscillations with 1000-, 1450-, and 3000-year cyclicities in Greenland ice cores, the so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles (Johnsen et al., 1992; Dansgaard et al., 1993; Grootes et al., 1993). Associated with these cycles are `Heinrich Events, i.e. events of sudden iceberg discharge into the North Atlantic (Heinrich, 1988; Bond et al., 1993).
Is the geodynamo process intrinsically unstable?
http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/416/
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=24476
Glacial Records Depict Ice Age Climate in Synch Worldwide
“Because the Earth is oriented in space in such a way that the hemispheres are out of phase in terms of the amount of solar radiation they receive, it is surprising to find that the climate in the Southern Hemisphere cooled off repeatedly during a period when it received its largest dose of solar radiation,” says Singer. “Moreover, this rapid synchronization of atmospheric temperature between the polar hemispheres appears to have occurred during both of the last major ice ages that gripped the Earth.”
http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/home/files/Courtillot07EPSL.pdf
Are there connections between the Earth’s magnetic field and climate?
What Caused Recent Acceleration of the North Magnetic Pole Drift?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010EO510001/pdf
The north magnetic pole (NMP) is the point at the Earth’s surface where the geomagnetic field is directed vertically downward. It drifts in time as a result of core convection, which sustains the Earth’s main magnetic field through the geodynamo process. During the 1990s the NMP drift speed suddenly increased from 15 kilometers per year at the start of the decade to 55 kilometers per year by the decade’s end. This acceleration was all the more surprising given that the NMP drift speed had remained less than 15 kilometers per year over the previous 150 years of observation. Why did NMP drift accelerate in the 1990s? Answering this question may require revising a long-held assumption about processes in the core at the origin of fluctuations in the intensity and direction of the Earth’s magnetic field on decadal to secular time scales, and hints at the existence of a hidden plume rising within the core under the Arctic.

July 26, 2013 9:35 pm

TomRude says:
July 25, 2013 at 10:48 pm
Anthony you have to see that one!!!
The day the North Pole turned into a Lake or how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ignoramus Andy Macdonald is propaganding the usual seasonal surface melt and ponds over the sea ice as if the North Pole was open water…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2013/07/north-pole-turned-into-lake-from-global-warming-3.html
________
Hi Tom
The article that talks about the lake on top of the world is a bit on the alarmist side. Is there evidence that this is the usual seasonal surface melt? Where can I go to find more information on this? I looked at the two links that show the melt water and the solid frost, but it doesn’t show where the image was taken and it doesn’t give any kind of date. I even looked at the 2013 Buoy Drift Map, but I don’t understand that either. Does the black line wandering all over mean that the whole place is a slush pond?

July 27, 2013 5:47 am

RE: taobabe says:
July 26, 2013 at 9:35 pm
“…I even looked at the 2013 Buoy Drift Map, but I don’t understand that either. Does the black line wandering all over mean that the whole place is a slush pond?”
Scroll down the right side of this page (or up) until you find Anthony’s wonderful “Sea Ice Page.” Click it, and then scrowl down that page until you get to the Naval Research Laboratory “Ice Speed and Drift Map.” http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/hycomARC/navo/arcticicespddrfnowcast.gif
Animate the map, either for the past 30 days or the past year. It gives you an amazing view of how mobile the ice is. Even when it is very solid in the depth of winter, it is moving about. Rather than seeing it as a “slush pond” think of it as a sort of continental drift. Big plates of ice are moving about, sometimes splitting and forming “leads,” which can expose open water even when it is forty below zero, and sometimes crushing the plates together, forming the mini-mountain-ranges called “pressure ridges,” even when temperatures are above freezing.
In the warmest time of year, (now,) there can indeed be parts of the Arctic Sea where vast areas are floating icebergs, (and a sort of “slush pond,”) and other maps on Anthony’s “Sea Ice Page” show you where such areas are, describing them as 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% and 0% “Ice concentration.” However these areas can contain some big bergs, and when the winds are right, an area that is relatively “ice free” can have bergs moving in and crunching together. Areas with 20% concentration can become areas of 80% concentration.
The commentor “Phil” has has alerted me, from time to time, to people voyaging up there in the summer, and it is very interesting to reference their blogs, and to see how wary they are of wind-pushed masses of ice. They don’t want to get trapped and crunched. Also last year an exploratory oil rig shut down for the season due to a large area of ice approaching, even though the map showed 0% ice in that area.
In conclusion, the ice up there is not a stable surface. It is always on the go.

July 27, 2013 6:25 am

This is slightly off topic, but demonstrates the reach of Watts Up With That, and also people’s interest in Arctic sea ice.
I have my own obscure, back-water blog where I can pontificate, rave and bloviate to my heart’s content. If I get more than ten to twenty views a day, it often seems due to the fact I used some word such as “flesh” in my title, and attracted strangers via search engines. In fact I played with this idea with an April Fool’s joke last spring: http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/mayan-calender-predicts-100000-dolphins-defeat-egyptian-militant-terrorist-ufos-with-erupting-volcano/
However when I commented on the arctic sea ice above, (July 25, 2013 at 3:39 pm,) and left a link to pictures on my site, an amazing flood of visitors from all over the world can to my site. WordPress allows me to see what route they took, and nearly all came via Watts Up With That. I could see no influence from Facebook or Twitter, and as far as I can tell they all came from this particular post. I’m talking 146 views on Thursday, 221 yesterday, and 26 so far this morning. This shattered all records for my site.
I can only suppose the lesson is that, if you are the sort of person who craves attention, you can skip wearing a lampshade and tap dancing on tables at parties. Just hang out here and talk about icebergs.

July 27, 2013 7:05 am

Referring back to Joseph D’Aleo’s original points, I think the the most annoying aspect of the media’s coverage of the brief thaw over Greenland is the false impression they generated.
If I spend a day at the beach without sunscreen, and say “I wound up 90% burned,” people know I am only talking about my skin. If I was talking about my entirety, I’d be cremated and wouldn’t be talking.
In the same way, the 90% of Greenland that thawed was only the outermost of outermost skin. If it had been the entirety, a tsunami would have effected the entire Atlantic. However the way the media covered it created the false impression they were talking about all the ice on Greenland.
I’m not sure whether this demonstrated the media was devious, or whether it demonstrated that they are such bozos and bimbos that they actually believed 90% of the ice in Greenland melted in two days.

chris y
July 27, 2013 7:40 am

Caleb says-
“I’m not sure whether this demonstrated the media was devious, or whether it demonstrated that they are such bozos and bimbos that they actually believed 90% of the ice in Greenland melted in two days.”
The answer is yes.

July 27, 2013 10:47 am

taobabe says:
July 26, 2013 at 9:35 pm
” I even looked at the 2013 Buoy Drift Map, but I don’t understand that either. Does the black line wandering all over mean that the whole place is a slush pond?”
The reference Caleb gave above is good, but this vid shows more of a long term picture
.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co68_tod0dQ&feature=player_embedded#!

July 27, 2013 2:39 pm

RE: Dave Wendt says:
July 27, 2013 at 10:47 am
Thanks, Dave. I had forgotten about that video. It really does show a lot, and, while Revkin may have intended it to show how “old” ice was vanishing, by covering the period 1979 to 2009 he actually covers exactly half of a “sixty-year-cycle.” (If I can only manage to survive another thirty years, I’ll get to see the second half of the movie,) (providing the world stays in one piece and we still have satellites.) In any case, it is a totally cool video.
Watch how the warm PDO’s Pacific influx through the Bering Strait takes bites out of the white, “old” ice. In some ways more “old” ice melts due to that than warmth than due to being flushed out through the Fram Strait.
Another interesting thing is the ice moving away, at times, from the north coast of Greenland. I thought that coast was pretty much locked in. I haven’t heard of anyone making the passage over the top of Greenland. Perhaps that is all “new” ice, or ice discharged from glaciers doesn’t count as “old.” Anyone else know?
There are some pretty big bergs floating around, even in areas described as “ice free.” Last summer the blogger “Phil” and I were discussing whether they were formed by pressure ridges or by glaciers, and Phil supplied a link to a local Alaskan newspaper describing a big berg seen by local fishermen that had rocks in it. As I recall some scientists rushed off to look at it, but couldn’t locate it.
One of Joseph D’Aleo’s maps shows up to four inches of snow falling on the sea ice. I wonder what that does to the rate of ice melt?

July 28, 2013 12:27 pm

After all the fuss Alarmists made about “Lake North Pole,” (A large melt-water pool that appeared in front of North Pole Camera 2,) the entire pool drained down through a crack in the ice, and now the camera shows only ice. Oh well.
http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/lake-north-pole-vanishes/

July 29, 2013 5:48 am

RE Caleb says:
July 27, 2013 at 2:39 pm
“Another interesting thing is the ice moving away, at times, from the north coast of Greenland. I thought that coast was pretty much locked in. I haven’t heard of anyone making the passage over the top of Greenland. Perhaps that is all “new” ice, or ice discharged from glaciers doesn’t count as “old.” Anyone else know?”
According to Eigil Knuth “An outline of the archaelogy of Peary Land” http://arctic.synergiesprairies.ca/arctic/index.php/arctic/article/view/3897 Inuit where travelling north of Greenland for 250-350 years ago.
P22: “This umiak…..probably made a journey no white man has yet completed – the voyage round the north coast of Greenland”

July 29, 2013 4:47 pm

Caleb, thanks so much for the very interesting information about the arctic ice. I didn’t know that the Arctic glacier wasn’t a single solid surface. That animated map is amazing. Very illuminating. Thank you for your information.
Dave Wendt, I thought the video was very interesting. The ice looks as if it’s pulsing, like blood gushing from an open aorta, and the Earth is the heart beating in a very rhythmic fashion. Thanks so much for locating it for me.
Question: the video says that the ‘old ice’ goes away and is replace by ‘new ice’. Is this a normal situation? Why is it then possible for scientists to get long long ice cores to study the different layers from prehistoric times, if the old ice is constantly recycled in this pulsating pumping action?