The Akademik Shokalskiy and the Xue Long have broken free of heavy ice and are making progress towards open water. http://t.co/nmpRTRhZfX
— AMSA News (@AMSA_News) January 7, 2014
It seems my forecast worked out well. From RT news:
A Russian-built ship stranded in the Antarctic ice has started moving away from the ice fields after a change of wind cleared its path. A Chinese icebreaker, which was caught herself on the way to rescue the vessel, has already reached clear waters.
…
Luckily, as the weather changed the danger threatening the trapped vessels decreased.
“The situation is favorable now. First, the wind changed direction from an Easterly to a North-Westerly, which changed the direction of ice drift. A large crack formed in the ice, and the ship is now navigating it,” Yury Volgov, director of the Far-Eastern Hydrometeorology Research Institute, which owns the Academician Shokalsky, told media.
The ship may escape the clutches of the ice field quite soon, ship captain Igor Kiselyov said.
“We are sailing at low speed, changing courses. We’ve traveled 20 miles so far. It’s difficult so far, with dense fog and visibility no further than 500 meters. But the ice is thinner and broken here, so we’re moving,” he said.
WUWT readers may recall that when U.S. TV meteorologists, including yours truly, were asked to assist in weather forecasting for the stranded vessel, I made a prediction on December 31st:
“In a couple of minutes John Coleman was back on the phone to me, he wanted my assessment of the maps. I had looked at what was happening and saw what I thought might be an opening in 7-8 days based on the forecast graphics from WeatherBell, where the winds would shift to offshore in the area where Akademik Shokalskiy was stuck.”
Here is the story of that forecast:
The Chinese ship Xue Long, which was caught in the ice pack herself on the way to rescue the Russian vessel, has already reached clear waters. From AMSA:
==============================================================
8:00am, Wednesday 8 January 2014
Both Antarctic vessels making progress through ice
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s (AMSA) Rescue Coordination Centre (RCC Australia) was informed early this morning that both the Akademik Shokalskiy and the Xue Long have managed to break free from heavy ice in Commonwealth Bay, Antarctica.
At about 730pm AEDT on Tuesday RCC Australia received a message from the Captain of the Akademik Shokalskiy stating that about three hours earlier cracks had started to open in the ice around the trapped vessel.
A short time later the Akademik Shokalskiy began to make slow movements in an attempt to break free from surrounding ice. The Captain reported that at approximately 8pm AEDT they had managed to successfully clear the area containing the heaviest ice and had begun making slow progress north through lighter ice conditions.
Shortly after midnight RCC Australia was advised by the Captain of the Xue Long that, at about 9pm AEDT, it too had managed to break free of the heavy ice and is now making slow progress through lighter ice conditions.
RCC Australia has advised the Captains of both vessels to attempt to reach open waters and advise the RCC once clear of the ice field. The Xue Long has advised RCC Australia it does not require any further assistance at this time. The Akademik Shokalskiy continues to move through the ice field and RCC Australia is awaiting confirmation that it does not require any further assistance.
The United States Coast Guard ice breaker Polar Star will continue to head towards the area until it is clear that both vessels are free of the ice field and no longer in danger.
Media Enquiries: 1300 624 633
Source: http://www.amsa.gov.au/media
From http://www.fleetmon.com/maritimenews/2014/2945/research-vessel-shokalskiy-may-become-antarctic-fl/
January 3, 2014: “World media made such a fuss over the story one could think it was a Titanik tragedy turned into success. It was clear…that the passengers were in no real danger. They’ve been taken from Shokalskiy simply because they were…a nuisance…and eating away food supplies…required for the crew…. Passengers were mostly scientists, or so they say, who were trying to get yet more proofs of devastating global warming effects. Well, if getting trapped in ice is a result of global warming, they definitely found what they’ve been after. The public didn’t miss the irony of it…” –Mikhail Voytenko
Hey Kevin (you twit) –
Anthony’s prediction was for a specific result on a specific timeline. And he was correct.
Your strawman (no timeline, no result) was like Gavin arguing a prediction of sunrise.
Get a life. The Antarctic continues to grow ice (that would be frozen sea water) faster that melt losses. Warmists lose.
Mario Lento and Negrum have already said it but you have to wonder why a poster like Kevin attempts to belittle the forecast provided by Anthony W.
The illustrious Kevin decided to omit any reference to Anthony’s critical and accurate time resolution. Instead Kevin decided to make an inane and stupid comment; we are now waiting for him to predict the likelihood of sunrise tomorrow. Or the fate of the Earth when a local red giant expands to full size.
Kevin no doubt is a troll but at least he serves a function; if you want to find disingenuity and feeble intellect look no further than a Warmist parrot.
I frequently ask alarmists: You produce 100-year climate forecasts, but where is a reliable 100-hour weather forecast? And then Anthony produces a reliable 200-hour weather forecast. Congratulations!
Please don’t do that to me again.
See what happens when you follow the science? Accurate predictions! What a concept. Kudos to Mr Watts & Weatherbell.
The pseudo scientists, friends, and family had to leave the Akedemic Disaster – the bar was depleted.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salarydepends on his not understandeing it….Upton Sinclair
Paul Coppin says:
January 7, 2014 at 2:18 pm
All of which demonstrates the “distress” was a panic, not a real emergency. All they needed to do was sit tight for a bit, which they were reluctant to do.
———————————-
Simple reason for transferring the climate tourists – the Russian ship reported on the shipping industry website that the 52 tourists were eating them out of food. The ship only had limited supplies left x 74 people – food not a problem x 22 crew.
“All of which demonstrates the “distress” was a panic, not a real emergency.”
1. They ran out of peanut butter and banana milk shakes. For climate scientists, that counts as a real emergency.
2. They were running out of booze. On a Russian ship, that counts as a real emergency.
2. The crew seem to have been thoroughly fed up with the antics of the passengers. That counts as real distress.
“Also announced from the Aurora Australis by an intrepid embedded journalist:… He also thanks his rescuers.”
I’m glad somebody did.
You may notice that this morning someone took the time to give you credit in the comments at the RT site. You are welcome.
REPLY: Thanks, with thousands a day here, I seldom read comments elsewhere, so didn’t notice. – Anthony
kevin says:
January 7, 2014 at 3:28 pm
Well yes. It is inarguably true that a ship stuck in sea ice will not stay there forever. But you have apparently neglected to mention that becoming unstuck is only one of the possible outcomes; being crushed and sunk is the other. Leaving the crew with the ship was a gamble, albeit an apparently well-informed and very reasonable one. But the expected outcome was by no means assured — polar exploration is littered with corpses who all took well-informed and very reasonable gambles.
You might enjoy my modest attempt at a musical parody about this whole saga:
Ride, Doctor, ride, upon your frozen ship
Party hard with the tourists you brought on your trip
Ride, Doctor, ride, upon your frozen ship
Pray that someone will save you from your planning slip
http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.5747
Feel free to repost as desired.
kevin says:
January 7, 2014 at 3:28 pm
“It seems my forecast worked out well.”
With all due respect, forecasting that a ship stuck in ice will become unstuck is not a difficult forecast to make. It’d be like forecasting that all of this cold weather in America right now will eventually end.
————————————————————————
I’m not sure how difficult his forecast was although, I don’t recall him using the word “eventually”. He did just nail it to the day. I bet he could’ve kept them from getting stuck in the first place…if they’d asked him for a forecast in-route to the Antarctic.
Maybe next time they’ll ask him, before they get stuck.
cn
Too bad the Fools weren’t still aboard the AS. Then you could have really rubbed it in: “Climatologists Saved From Own Folly by Meteorologist-Forecast Natural Wind Shift“.
I hope the AS’ captain comes out spitting marlin spikes at Turkey.
FIFY
How much bullshit?
We read it again. If you cannot make forecast for 10 seconds… for 10 days,… for 10 weeks,… how can you possibly make forecast for 100 years? Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha….
Eve Antony Watts will be able to confess that such arguments ar quite dubious and quite often silly. They simply hide ( Cfr. Haid the declain, do immoral tricks…) what is supposed to be made forecasts about.
This is severely obvious by a lot of principles including Schrödingers uncertainty principle, that making forecasts on short term and of small things in detail may be rather dubious, tricky, and even impossible, but in the long run and on the large scale, forecasts of the same matter may become more and more safe and certain, simply by natural law and how things are, and in a most obvious way.
And we can exel in examples.
Further, it is most often a question also about what we want to find out and / or know, and for what purpose. And to what degree of accuracy or certainty.
Being unaware of theese things or cofusing theese things in an acive way is quite often both silly and immoral.
As for that ship, Mr Watts is a meteorologist. Here where I live at 60 deg North, certain things are very regular and simple. Christmas or rather St.Thomas 21 dec (formerly by the Julian calender it was Lucia) in light or sunshine minimum. Then end of February comes minimum temperature, and in Mars, Minimum precipitation.
On the other side of the year it goes a bit faster, try and explain why.
St.Hans is maximum light, July is the warmest month, and beginning of August is maximum rain, this being the normal climate in the so called West-European Monsune or Antipassat belt. With rather large deviations to it from year to year and rather unpredictable; that phaenomena we call “Weather”.
Antony Watts will be able to explain this to you, provided that he is a qualified meteorologist.
Thus, forecasting that it is not yet minimum summer ice in the Antarctic is severely easy. That it is also weather in the Antarctic waters , can be predicted with absolute certainty or “beyond any reasonable doubt”.
The strange thing here is that I have to discuss this for you.
ABC now saying that the ships got free because of thawing ice. Article does not mention wind shifts at all. Typical.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-08/ships-freed-from-antarctic-ice/5189760?section=tas
kevin said January 7, 2014 at 3:28 pm;
In the card-game of Blackjack or 21, rudimentary probability will tell us the likelihood that various card-combinations (‘hands’) will be dealt. We can casually ‘predict’ that eventually various hands will appear, with a graded series of likelihoods.
A weather forecast, though, is the equivalent of knowing what the likelihood is of changing an existing card-hand into a better (or worse!) one, with the unknown card in the upcoming deal. This is done by knowing what cards are still in the deck, and how they can affect & interact with the cards in the current hand.
It’s a matter of playing the game ‘at a whole different level’. Yeah, we know that an “arctic outbreak” or so-called “polar vortex” will end (duh) … but Mr. Watts can assess the unseen cards in the weather deck, and anticipate a specific ‘hand’ or series of hands, or modifications of hands, as the meteorological cards come off the top of the deck, over the coming days and parts of days.
It’s a darn good trick, and even though he won’t break the weather-Casino bank every time he plays, you can safely “forecast” that the house-managers and dealers will break out in a sweat, each time they see him come in the door. 😉
Dr. Steve
That is very typical of very poor understanding of basic reality and physics.
I did google that ship, it is originally Finnish and ice class A (They may have very tough ice in the Baltic sea) and it has got 2 decks and a bar and library and sauna for cruise passengers. It has been bought by the russians and made several tours through the northeast passage. Having tourists on board seems normal to that ship design and it may be a way to keep that ship afloat and paid for, for its ocean reseach purposes. Thus not to be bullied. That sort of behavious may rather make a fool of yourself, betraying that you rather are a political dilettant and a dialectic materialist on election campaighn..
But what one should have grasped rather automatically just by thinking of the situation, is the Drama of the Antarctic ocean, the roaring fourties and the fierceful fifties. And those very huge and fameous icebergs.
What was it? 3-4-5-6 meters of ice? Does tat “thaw” in a few days under fog and snowstorms? Conditions under which even a very large and strong chineese icebreaker runs tight?
Elementary ideas of ice and water, of Nature I would say, should rather not be absent, even if you are a journalist at the ABC.
I use the very ugly word “Dia- lectic materialism!” whenever I stuck on that kind of obviously industyrialized, quite arrogant and vulgar religious illusions.
kevin says:
January 7, 2014 at 3:28 pm
Oh, don’t be a troll. Anthony didn’t forecast “the ship will become unstuck,” he forecast “I had looked at what was happening and saw what I thought might be an opening in 7-8 days based on the forecast graphics from WeatherBell, where the winds would shift to offshore in the area where Akademik Shokalskiy was stuck.”
You can go back and find the date of the forecast. Let’s see you do better. You might be able to point out that “offshore” is probably not “north-westerly” but I’d recommend you come up with a good case.
Also moved by the muse!
(Mod – apologies if there are words here that trigger autospam – I don’t post often enough to be familiar)
THE HUNTING OF THE SPARK (of heat)
With humble apologies to Lewis Carroll
Brave Chris Turney often paced on the deck,
Or would make hockey sticks in the bow:
And had often (Chris said) saved the whole ship from wreck,
Though none of the sailors knew how.
The group was complete, with kids and a wife,
Plus some warmingist scientists all experts –
Each a drip under pressure – all headed for strife
(These are better described as just “spurts”!)
Of course no contingent so brave and undaunted
Could venture too far without Press.
So the Guardian sent and so proudly then flaunted
Reporters to add to the mess.
“We’ll show those deniers!” bold Chris Turney cried
As he landed his party on ice;
“We know without doubt that the ice has all fried
So the beaches will all be quite nice.”
“We’ll show those deniers!” he’s now said it twice
That alone should encourage the crew.
“We’ll show those deniers!” he’s now said it thrice:
What he tells you three times must be true.
The poor Russian crew shook their heads in dismay;
Their care-filled advice all ignored.
“The ice? You are wrong. It’s not melted away!
Your theories are totally flawed!”
Ignoring this wisdom and pressing on blindly
The Turney contingent went boldly
Into the ice field that proved not to be kindly
And an ending that beckoned them coldly.
At deniers Chris Turney continued to jeer
As lots of “selfies” with penguins they took.
But it soon became clear that no heat would appear.
AGW was not looking good.
They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a beach or a palm tree. Those asses
Tried so hard to find things in the air or the ground.
But no sign of those greenhouse gasses.
In the midst of the search – trying hard not to play,
In the midst of their laughter and glee,
Climate Change had softly just vanished away—
For CC was “just normal”, you see.
And then the thick ice that was lurking around
Surrounded the vessel and trapped it.
There was just no way out. An escape must be found.
We can’t sail through this ice so compacted!
Saviours from Australia and China came fast
And a Yank ship – a real show stopper.
But the ice was so tough – the world looked on aghast
As the group came so close to a cropper!
But luck doesn’t mean that you need half a clue
As this ship of fools demonstrates clearly.
The bad weather eased – out the warmingists flew
Leaving ship and the crew to pay dearly.
There are lessons that thinkers can gain from this tale
Lessons we ignore at our peril.
Use the scientific method. It’s hearty and hale.
All other approaches are feral!
Just remember, “It’s warm!” was the sound in their ears,
And they tried to believe they were hot.
But it wasn’t too long before laughter and jeers:
And the ominous words “No it’s not!”
@Ric Werme
Here is a map showing wind data and the “offshore” winds today. The small green circle marks the approximate position of the ‘Akademik Shokalskiy’ when it was trapped up until this morning.
Where in the world doesn’t the weather change if you wait long enough? 🙂
I thought that it was a complete waste of resources to “rescue” those not in danger. The worst that they were likely to experience was dry rations for a fortnight (if the master of the vessel could keep his crew seeing the funny side and keep coming up with scary rumours to “leak” to the passengers).
Perhaps it’s just me who’d likes to see the warmists marinate in their own stupidity.
at 10:01 pm
beautiful