The daily mean temp 80 -90 degrees North has remained below climatological normal for more than 120 days, and has now dropped below freezing
Normally, we don’t see this sort of drop until early to mid September. I’m surprised to see this sharp drop today:
See this magnified view:
Bear in mind that this is weather, and that the average temperature for the area could easily go above freezing again. That said, it has been an unusual year for temperature in the Arctic. The closest year to what we have seen so far in 2013 appears to be 2010, which had an early drop below freezing. The high Arctic in year 2013 though, has never gotten above climatological normal, and that’s unusual.
I have created an animation for all years from 1958-2013, with a 1 second interval between frames and a 4 second pause on 2013:
Source: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/meanTarchive/
WUWT reader Steve Oak writes:
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For some inexplicable reason I follow the Daily Mean Temperatures North of 80 degree North. This started a few years ago when I was looking for information relating to the global temperature that was unadulterated so that I may form my own opinion as to the veracity of global warming claims and found this data set . While not “unadulterated” this looks to be fairly legitimate. I welcome further analysis.
The Danish Meteorological Institute, Center for Ocean and Ice produces a chart plotting the daily mean temp as a function of the day of the year against the average of daily mean temp as a function of the day of the year for the period form 1958 to 2002.
For the last 120 days or so the daily mean has remained below the 1958 to 2002 average. It has also now dropped below freezing.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
While it cannot be assured that the daily mean will remain below freezing, the trend to this point and that there are so few remaining days before the average drops below freezing gives credence to that possibility.
Here is an explanation of the data set from the DMI, COI.
Calculation of the Arctic Mean Temperature
The daily mean temperature of the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel is estimated from the average of the 00z and 12z analysis for all model grid points inside that area. The ERA40 reanalysis data set from ECMWF, has been applied to calculate daily mean temperatures for the period from 1958 to 2002, from 2002 to 2006 data from the global NWP model T511 is used and from 2006 to 2010 T799 data are used and from 2010 to present the T1279 model data are used.
The ERA40 reanalysis data, has been applied to calculation of daily climate values that are plotted along with the daily analysis values in all plots. The data used to determine climate values is the full ERA40 data set, from 1958 to 2002.
More information can be found at:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/documentation/arctic_mean_temp_data_explanation_newest.pdf.
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Whether or not this early temperature drop translates into an early increased Arctic ice extent or melting remains highly uncertain, as there is a polar storm weather event in progress that may break up sea ice as happened last year: NASA on Arctic sea ice record low – storm ‘wreaked havoc on the Arctic sea ice cover’
See this current animation of dewpoint temperature from Dr. Ryan Maue of WeatherBell. It shows moisture bands from the polar low rotating around the north pole.
(NOTE: you may have to click the image below to get it to animate on some browsers)
Keep up to date on the WUWT Sea Ice Page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
No, you seem to be missing the point. Those temperatures are quite normal to see in that area at this time of year, though they are higher than the long term AVERAGE temperature for the date. But in this particular case, the average doesn’t mean much because these locations have temperatures that vary wildly either side of the average fairly regularly.
There’s nothing unusual going on and daylight is fading quickly there (losing more than 1 hour of daylight per week). I agree that it is warm there, but I don’t see anything particularly unusual going on.
From Master of Space and Thyme on August 8, 2013 at 9:43 pm:
But the “usual” you referenced is the 20th century average, start to end. Temperatures went up during that period, although “global warming” hasn’t happened this century.
So at the top of the hill, you’re telling me to “face reality”, the heights will now be “anonymously high” relative to the average height between the base and the top of the hill.
What else can they be? We’re at the top!
You know, if first you FAIL, and your follow-up is to FAIL HARDER, that usually is not considered an improvement.
crosspatch says:
August 8, 2013 at 9:43 pm
“Oh, and forecasts are for temperatures there to be back down in the 60′s by the weekend.”
Bull!, the two links I posted for weather stations along the coast have temperatures forecast to be above 80F this weekend. Regardless, even if the temperature were in the 60’s, that is a far cry from the minus 20 degrees you talked about in an earlier post.
“This summer has been the coldest ever. This cooling is unprecedented”
neil says:
August 8, 2013 at 6:25 pm
I this you new science fantasy novel?
RACookPE1978 says:
August 8, 2013 at 8:38 pm
1. I still don’t “get it”. Been looking at this DMI plot for many years, and still cannot figure out if they are plotting only a multi-day “model” (or forecast) of what they “think”: is going on at the “average” latitude of 80 north, or if they have several independent thermometers/weather stations at various locations near 80 north latitude that they “average” together to get their day-by-day changing plot.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh yeah, if only it were that simple 😉
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/documentation/arctic_mean_temp_data_explanation_newest.pdf
It is a lot more comprehensive than just a bunch of weather stations, but they do make it clear that the model is biased toward the most northerly temps.
As for the complaints by the Space and Thyme guy, yeah, so what? It is a big planet, there are ALWAYS sections that are above average and there are ALWAYS sections that are below average. If there weren’t, then there wouldn’t be a need to calculate an average in the first place. Not to mention that the very link you provided shows large swaths of eastern north america and chunks of west coast of US that are below average. Do you know what that means?
Glad you asked. Nothing.
It’s supposed to be summer here in the Prairies… and we had to turn the furnace on in the house last night.
Please can someone send some Global Warming our way?
Rural North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada dipped to 2.7 degrees C overnight on August 7, 2013. It’s the middle of summer!! A cold spring and a cold summer has made the grain farmers in the area very worried over this year’s harvest. In southern Alberta it has been a very cold spring and summer. Today’s high was 15 degrees C (59 Degrees F). In the Canadian prairies we are very concerned over the lack of global warming. Who can we complain to about this?
what did I tell you?
I found that from around the start of the new millennium, earth has started to cool globally. My own data set on maxima shows this very clearly. However, even without my own results (in case you do not trust them or me): the four major data sets measuring the average global air- and sea temperatures, also show that we have started cooling down for the past 11 years (this is the equivalent average time of one full solar cycle). Clearly you can see that the trend is negative from 2002:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987/to:2014/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2014/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2013/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2014/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1987/to:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:1987/to:2002/trend
From the above simple compilation of linear trends in these 4 major global data sets, you can see that before 2000 we were still warming and that after 2000 we started cooling….Obviously , a natural consequence of global cooling is that at the higher latitudes it will become both cooler and drier.
As the people in Alaska have noted,
http://www.adn.com/2012/07/13/2541345/its-the-coldest-july-on-record.html
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130520/97-year-old-nenana-ice-classic-sets-record-latest-breakup-river-1
the cold weather in 2012 was so bad there that they did not get much of any harvests. 2013 we had a record for the delay of the breaking of the ice of the Nenana river. And it seems NOBODY is telling the farmers there that it is not going to get any better.I think most of you guys have no idea what is coming in the next 2 to 3 decades.
So, we find that indeed the climate is changing, but it is not our fault….
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/#comment-365
OK. We have had a few summers of blocking highs in the northern hemisphere. One question that comes to mind is if this one is one of those?
There can be only so much time, so many years, until CAGW resumes it’s runaway self…..
Or, you know, maybe it doesn’t…..
In which case we face the latest grand solar minima at a half-precession old (and change) extreme interglacial.
The thing is, if you really want to be scared, things could be “hot” for a couple of centuries more. Oddly enough, that is actually the worst case scenario. The anthropogenic alternative might be the next ~90 centuries or so long glacial.
It will, in fact, be one or the other. CO2 either is or it isn’t the “manual setting” on gaia’s thermostat. I’m old enough so that it probably does not matter much which way “you” decide to turn the CO2 knob.
In the event that CO2 does determine climate, you get the next glacial. Or extend this interglacial somewhere beyond the onset of it.
Either way “you” only have so many (about 4,500 twenty-year long) hominid generations to avoid the next glacial.
In light of what is most likely to happen, as with not, it may not matter all that much with respect to the Precautionary Principle.
I, you, me, we, circumvent the next glacial, or we do not. It really is just that simple.
davidmhoffer says:
“As for the complaints by the Space and Thyme guy, yeah, so what?”
Who was complaining? I was commenting about the fact that most of the Arctic south of 80 degrees is quite a bit above freezing in spite of the cyclone that has been spinning around for the last three days. My comments were strictly about current weather conditions in the Arctic and had nothing to do with climate change.
It must be really cold up in the arctic. On Tuesday I was shocked to see about a dozen Pink Footed Geese overfly my home in the northwest of England. They are almost two months early. They arrived from Iceland early last year too (six weeks early) but I have never seen them arrive at the beginning of August. This year’s brood must barely have had time to mature and prepare for the flight because the birds were late leaving in the spring. Although a dozen geese does not a migration make the others can’t be far behind.
I watch what nature is telling us. Last year the geese got it right. The winter was cold and long. I’m doubling my efforts to make sure I have plenty of logs and coal for my wood burner because the UK government and their greenie advisors are doing their best to make warming our homes unaffordable especially if they succeed in their insane plans to use diesel generators to back up wind power. I’ve just had a massive increase in the cost of gas and electricity slapped on me already despite the fact I live in a small, energy efficient bungalow. Thank god I downsized when I did because the cost of energy to run my previous home must be horrendous.
Meanwhile, I live a handful of miles from Cuadrilla’s test fracking rig at Preece Hall in Lancashire. All that cheap energy lying in the ground beneath my feet and the greenie warmists doing their level best to ensure it stays there. I hope the anti-energy luddites freeze to their placards because, if the early goose migration indicates yet another harsh winter, they’ll deserve it.
I suppose they can always go sit in their cars to keep themselves warm though (!). You know, those same cars that run on feeeelthy Exxon product ripped from Gaia’s bossom from which evil Big Oil makes the planet roasting profits necessary to run d****r sites like WUWT and pay for Lord M’s caviar sandwiches… /sarc
That storms can “cause havoc” with Arctic sea ice is just proof that the ice has thinned and is vulnerable:
“Historically, stormy summers tended to end up with more ice than summers characterized by high pressure and few storms. As the ice cover has thinned, stormy conditions may actually help to remove more ice.” Nursery logic.
“As just discussed, summers characterized by stormy conditions tend to end up with more sea ice than summers characterized by high pressure. However, the effects of an individual strong storm can be complex. It appears that the August 2012 storm was attended by a modest acceleration in the pace of summer ice loss. While the middle of July 2013 also saw a storm over the central Arctic Ocean with a central pressure of 977 hPa, this year’s event has not led to a strong ice loss.”
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2013/08/a-month-of-two-halves-and-no-hole/
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011JD015847/abstract
So if it’s colder than normal in the Arctic but it’s still Winter here in the Southern hemisphere, does that explain the extra Antarctic ice and wouldn’t that mean the globe is cooling! 😉
The only way to kill a global warmist is to freeze it.
B-b-but guys, we found a dead polar bear! It’s because the ice is a11g0n3!!!
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/06/starved-polar-bear-record-sea-ice-melt
I don’t know what you’ll be doing, but now I’m going to collect some firewood and buy some fuel oil before the winter…
SMS says:
August 8, 2013 at 6:12 pm
As I watch the screens flash by it occurred to me that I wasn’t able to pick out any series of signals that would indicate to me CAGW. And aren’t the higher latitudes suppose to be the canary in the climate warming hype?
No no … it is the adjustments to the temperatures that are the canary in the coalmine of CAGW hype.
RoHa says:
August 8, 2013 at 9:56 pm
I’m certain that’s a sign of runaway Global Warming, and it means we are doomed, doomed, DOOMED!
………………………………………………………….
It’s even far far worse than that………
The warmists have ignored the in your face observational evidence and the peer reviewed papers that support the assertion that the majority of the warming in the last 50 years and the last 150 years was due to solar magnetic cycle changes (50% to 80%). The warmists have spent the last 20 years telling anyone who will listen that the peer reviewed papers that disprove the extreme AGW hypothesis were written by and read by nethanderal, flat earth, bad guys. …. ….Ignoring scientific data and peer reviewed papers that disprove a hypothesis does not change reality, does not change the physical world. The planet it appears is starting to cool due to the solar magnetic cycle change. It appears the sun is moving towards a Maunder like minimum and will be spotless by 2015. To push the extreme AGW hypothesis the warmists have set up sites which conveniently provide almost real time sea ice date for both poles. How will the warmists response to significant, unequivocal cooling?
1) Turn off all sites that provide sea ice data and request that the sea ice data be hidden for national security reasons
2) Request weather channels to no longer report record cold weather to avoid panic
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/Sea_Ice_Extent_L.png
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/74103.pdf
The Sun-Climate Connection by John A. Eddy, National Solar Observatory
Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate during the Holocene
A more recent oceanographic study, based on reconstructions of the North Atlantic climate during the Holocene epoch, has found what may be the most compelling link between climate and the changing Sun: in this case an apparent regional climatic response to a series of prolonged episodes of suppressed solar activity, like the Maunder Minimum, each lasting from 50 to 150 years8. …. …..The paleoclimatic data, covering the full span of the present interglacial epoch, are a record of the concentration of identifiable mineral tracers in layered sediments on the sea floor of the northern North Atlantic Ocean. The tracers originate on the land and are carried out to sea in drift ice. Their presence in seafloor samples at different locations in the surrounding ocean reflects the southward expansion of cooler, ice-bearing water: thus serving as indicators of changing climatic conditions at high Northern latitudes. The study demonstrates that the sub-polar North Atlantic Ocean has experienced nine distinctive expansions of cooler water in the past 11,000 years, occurring roughly every 1000 to 2000 years, with a mean spacing of about 1350 years. …. …..Each of these cooling events coincides in time with strong, distinctive minima in solar activity, based on contemporaneous records of the production of 14C from tree-ring records and 10Be from deep-sea cores. For reasons cited above, these features, found in both 14C and 10Be records, are of likely solar origin, since the two records are subject to quite different non-solar internal sources of variability. The North Atlantic finding suggests that solar variability exerts a strong effect on climate on centennial to millennial time scales, perhaps through changes in ocean thermohaline circulation that in turn amplify the direct effects of smaller variations in solar irradiance. (William: TSI changes is not the mechanism that causes cooling. See Tinsley and Yu’s paper for an overview of the mechanisms.)
http://www.albany.edu/~yfq/papers/Yu_CR_CN_Cloud_Climate_JGR02.pdf
The solar wind affects the galactic cosmic ray flux, the precipitation of relativistic electrons, and the ionospheric potential distribution in the polar cap, and each of these modulates the ionosphere-earth current density. On the basis of the current density-cloud hypothesis the variations in the current density change the charge status of aerosols that affect the ice production rate and hence the cloud microphysics and climate [e.g., Tinsley and Dean, 1991; Tinsley, 2000]. The underlying mechanism is that charged aerosols are more effective than neutral aerosols as ice nuclei (i.e., electrofreezing) and that the enhanced collections of charged evaporation nuclei by supercooled droplets enhance the production of ice by contact ice nucleation (i.e., electroscavenging). Both electrofreezing and electroscavenging involve an increase in ice production with increasing current density [e.g, Tinsley and Dean, 1991; Tinsley, 2000]. The current density-cloud hypothesis appears to explain solar cycle effects on winter storm dynamics as well as the day to-day changes of Wilcox and Roberts Effects [e.g., Tinsley, 2000]. Kniveton and Todd [2001] found evidence of a statistically strong relationship between cosmic ray flux, precipitation and precipitation efficiency over ocean surfaces at midlatitudes to high latitudes, and they pointed out that their results are broadly consistent with the current density-cloud hypothesis.
I note that the horizontal line in blue is at 273.15K. This is a bit deceptive as the freezing point of sea water is -1.96°C or 271.19K. So although the line represents the freezing point of pure water it is not low enough to freeze sea water.
Not convinced Arctic will get back above freezing this year: http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp2.html
neil says: @ur momisugly August 8, 2013 at 6:25 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
????
I suggest you read this by an engineer:
The Earth’s Energy Balance: Simple Overview
More articles on Energy Balance: link
@Peter Foster
I often see it phrased as “the melt season”, and the ice and snow stops melting when the temperature is zero Celsius. The line is also provided by the climate scientists, not by WUWT.
P Gosselin says:
August 9, 2013 at 3:10 am
“Not convinced Arctic will get back above freezing this year”
I hope you understand that the temperatures at that link are in degrees celsius and it is showing most of the Arctic is not only above freezing, the temps are above normal. The Arctic starts at 66.3 degrees north, not 80 degrees.