Measurements from ESA’s CryoSat satellite show that the volume of Arctic sea ice has significantly increased this past autumn.
The volume of ice measured this autumn is about 50% higher compared to last year. In October 2013, CryoSat measured about 9000 cubic km of sea ice – a notable increase compared to 6000 cubic km in October 2012.
See animation:
Over the last few decades, satellites have shown a downward trend in the area of Arctic Ocean covered by ice. However, the actual volume of sea ice has proven difficult to determine because it moves around and so its thickness can change.
CryoSat was designed to measure sea-ice thickness across the entire Arctic Ocean, and has allowed scientists, for the first time, to monitor the overall change in volume accurately.
About 90% of the increase is due to growth of multiyear ice – which survives through more than one summer without melting – with only 10% growth of first year ice. Thick, multiyear ice indicates healthy Arctic sea-ice cover.
This year’s multiyear ice is now on average about 20%, or around 30 cm, thicker than last year.
“One of the things we’d noticed in our data was that the volume of ice year-to-year was not varying anything like as much as the ice extent – at least in 2010, 2011 and 2012,” said Rachel Tilling from the UK’s Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, who led the study.
“We didn’t expect the greater ice extent left at the end of this summer’s melt to be reflected in the volume. But it has been, and the reason is related to the amount of multiyear ice in the Arctic.”
While this increase in ice volume is welcome news, it does not indicate a reversal in the long-term trend.
“It’s estimated that there was around 20 000 cubic kilometres of Arctic sea ice each October in the early 1980s, and so today’s minimum still ranks among the lowest of the past 30 years,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd from University College London, a co-author of the study.
The findings from a team of UK researchers at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling were presented last week at the American Geophysical Union’s autumn meeting in San Francisco, California.
“We are very pleased that we were able to present these results in time for the conference despite some technical problems we had with the satellite in October, which are now completely solved,” said Tommaso Parrinello, ESA’s CryoSat Mission Manager.
In October, CryoSat’s difficulties with its power system threatened the continuous supply of data, but normal operations resumed just over a week later.
With the seasonal freeze-up now underway, CryoSat will continue its routine measurement of sea ice. Over the coming months, the data will reveal just how much this summer’s increase has affected winter ice volumes.
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Source: European Space Agency
http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/CryoSat/Arctic_sea_ice_up_from_record_low
For more data, see the WUWT Sea ice Reference page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/sea-ice-page/
h/t to WUWT reader Larry Kirk
It must be awful being a climate change scientist. Not only are you telling everyone you are second rate, but then some professor comes along and tells you he could have estimated your results, so you have been wasting your time.
Caleb, polar vortex still clearly shifted. Over the Arctic arrives the warm air and cold air over the North America.
http://oi62.tinypic.com/2cfp1du.jpg
Despite the increase in volume the Arctic ‘death spiral’ in volume continues. LOL. Holy date pick Batman!
I feel sorry for old Joe. He is fighting an uphill battle as extent and volume are up this past autumn by 50% on 2012. This simply was not supposed to happen. Darker sea ice absorbs more heat and thus death spiral down the line. It really was as simple as that.
Interesting weather report on the BBC last night showing two deep lows side by side covering the whole North Atlantic. They showed very strong winds from Newfoundland to the Bay of Biscay. If this wind diverts any of the Gulf Stream surface waters look for a sharp increase in Arctic ice around Svalbard.
I’m sure this will be the subject of a separate article soon, but I see the RSS anomaly for January has been released, at 0.262 deg C. Depending on the slant you wish to give it, this will no doubt be seen as either “significantly colder than January 2013” or “the second warmest month of the last 12”
The negative trend in this dataset still begins in September 1996 – just!
The average sea ice thickness was certainly up this year. Volume and extent up close to 50%.
But this is really the best data that CryoSat2 can get. You get some monthly averages in October or February only because the data is just so variable. Every individual cell is completely different in each different orbit. Tides, waves, snow, wind, ice pack dynamics. I don’t think it was worth how much funding was used. For awhile, the operators were even trying to re-purpose the satellite for a new mission.
http://www.esa.int says: “While this increase in ice volume is welcome news, it does not indicate a reversal in the long-term trend. ”
Of course, neither does it indicate a _continuation_ in the long-term trend because it’s just one year. Neither were the previous three years enough to indicate the long-term trend.
It’s likely that ice volume was considerably more when ice extent/area was considerably more but since we never measured it that does not indicate much about the trend either.
What the last four years measurements do tell is that it is not ‘run away melting” no “tipping point” has been reached and it’s not “accelerating” .
It’s worth comparing to trends in ice extent, now we have a handle on ice volume.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/on-identifying-inter-decadal-variation-in-nh-sea-ice/
Now since the Arctic is apparently the “canary in the coal mine” perhaps we should be on guard against a dramatic cooling in the rest of NH climate. ….
Sigh – more half-baked conclusions over something that just plain doesn’t matter.
So what if there’s more or less ice in the Arctic? It doesn’t matter. The only ice that matters is Antarctic and Greenland. And contrary to fake reports over the years, they’re not going anywhere. As everyone here knows, the Antarctic ice is growing, not shrinking, and that’s the most massive chunk of ice on the planet. It would take thousands of years of the most dramatic temperature rise recorded to even start making any serious global impact on sea levels.
As anyone with even a smattering of knowledge about the climate on Earth should know, Arctic ice has grown and shrunk within recorded history, and we will never have anything other than anecdotal evidence for what it has been before 2010. But we do know just from the phrase “Northwest Passage” that it has been severely reduced in the past, and we can have little doubt that it will increase and decrease again in the future.
But even so, SO WHAT? Arctic ice is not important in any way, and no conclusions can be drawn from it. It gets pushed around by winds and can pile up against land, or pushed far enough South to melt. Since it’s floating it can’t significantly affect sea level. In fact, low Arctic ice ought to be Good News for climate alarmists, since it indicates that the automatic cooling mechanism is alive and well, effectively transporting heat from the equator to the pole, melting a bit on its way to radiating heat to space during the long Arctic night. Less ice means more effective removal of heat. More ice means there’s less heat to remove.
Alarmists have one thing partially right: the Arctic is something to watch. But they’re watching the wrong thing for the wrong reason. Melting ice does not, never did, and never will indicate that the planet is somehow in danger, and likewise increasing ice is meaningless.
One day more people will realize this fact.
Until then, Arctic ice cover and volume are interesting, but meaningless in the big picture.
Irritating that all findings are framed in the dominant meme of dangerous climate change. Climate Zombies have worked hard in science and the media to create an orthodoxy which only the bravest dare challenge. Pathetic and all to human.
THe obvious hypothesis is that arctic sea ice volume oscillates with periodicities in the multidecadal, the multi centennial and the millennial.
No doubt 20 years of data using CryoSat will be able to test the first of these periodicities, the null hypothesis for which should be that the 1980s saw a local maximum and the period 2007 – 2010 saw a local minimum. A return to 15 – 18,000+ by 2020 would be the testable hypothesis to falsify…….
Surely, this is good news, is it not?
Alan the Brit says:
Surely, this is good news, is it not?
Good news for whom?
Anyone with any objectivity got the message several years ago , Those who are still in denial about the real extent of change that can be tagged as AGW will be crying into his handkerchief and asking himself how they can even hope to ” help save the planet” if the planet won’t help them.
It’s a travesty. Now they’ll have to wait until all that missing heat pops back out of the deep oceanic abyss to starts melting the ice again.
Jimbo says (in explanation of CAGW supporters): “Darker sea ice absorbs more heat and thus death spiral down the line. It really was as simple as that.”
Yes, and that type of simplistic thinking is an absolute hallmark of the CAGW creed. “CO2 absorbs infrared, therefore the Earth will heat up. H2O absorbs infrared, therefore the Earth will warm up. Open ocean is darker than ice, therefore the Earth will warm up.” I have never met a CAGW enthusiast who had even a remote idea of the complexity and feedback of Earth’s climate system.
I sometimes think that one reason why the Global Warming meme has been so popular is that it gives the ordinary person, the average Joe who never really excelled at science or math, the wonderful and exciting illusion of understanding Deep Science. For most people, the simple and plausible are as close to the truth as they will ever get, and CAGW alarmism is both simple and plausible. Of course, both the simplicity and the plausibility quickly disappear when one looks into the details. In the meantime, Arctic ice increases, Antarctic ice increases, temperatures drop, and the model makers cannot understand why. “Tis but a scratch!” they say.
CodeTech, I agree in part with what you are saying about the floating ice – and the ice extent increase, for that matter, in Antarctica. However, I also know that when all the ice in my Rum and Coke melts, my drink gets warmer, so I don’t agree with the comment that it doesn’t matter or is meaningless in the big picture.
I reckon we need to send Chris Turney to investigate….
Is it only me that is finding the relentless negativity and carping a little wearing here?
Surely the important point is simply that, prior to this new Cryosat-2 satellite data, we wouldn’t have known that there had been a 50% increase in Arctic sea ice volume in the year from October 2012 to October 2013!
But now we do!
This is a huge win for science. Hooray!! It has been money so well spent.
And yes it does go spectacularly against some of the prevailing orthodoxy (for this as-yet insignificantly short period of time). So celebrate that too if that is your (at this stage rather unscientific) inclination.
But at least celebrate it.
Personally I think it is a brilliant scientific advance that we can now measure Arctic sea ice volume with certainty, and wonder what else we are now able to measure with hitherto unknowable certainty elsewhere on the ice-covered areas of the planet, and what new conclusions may eventually be drawn from these measurements.
But it looks like I am the only optimist in the room down here at this time of night.
Perhaps when the US wakes up and digs itself out of the snow, someone there will have something positive to add..
Tom O:
Your post at February 5, 2014 at 5:13 am says
But sea ice is increasing. Indeed, when Arctic ice was decreasing the growth in Antarctic ice was so rapid that total polar ice was increasing. The suggestion (prediction?) from warmunists was that Arctic sea ice would all ‘melt’ and NOT that ALL sea ice would ‘melt’.
So, please explain what you think to be the relevance of “when all the ice in my Rum and Coke melts, my drink gets warmer”?
Richard
Larry Kirk says:
February 5, 2014 at 12:57 am
“To my way of thinking this is the first and only reliable Arctic sea ice VOLUME data we have ever had [and] any previous sea ice AREA […] is irrelevant by comparison.”
The satellite is short lived but is designed to allow evaluation of ground based measurements to determine their accuracy.
Alan the Brit says: @ur momisugly February 5, 2014 at 4:46 am
Surely, this is good news, is it not?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Depends on if you like it cold or warm. Me? I prefer warm which is why I moved from New England to North Carolina but so far it has been a cold wet and miserable winter. Last summer was nice though. I thought I was back in New England it was so mild.
I wonder where it leaves the current fuss about Arctic ice and the jet stream.
Any thoughts?
But.. but.. but… Keystone!!!
(that’s not meant to be a rational statement, it’s just the only level of argument that the enviro-fanatics have left)
markstoval says: February 5, 2014 at 1:39 am
“Anyone here care to educate me on that?”
The hypothesis is that less ice on the Arctic Sea leads to more solar energy absorption by that area of the ocean previously covered by ice. Not sure how much energy an extra million +/- square kilometers represents in terms of joules with the sun’s rays hitting at such oblique angles, though. Perhaps someone else could educate us both on how significant it really is.
It’s interesting to note that NH sea-ice area only increased by about 10% from the 2012 minimum to the 2013 max last March.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/on-identifying-inter-decadal-variation-in-nh-sea-ice/
That makes the Oct 12 – Oct 13 recovery of 50% astounding.
Increasing multi year sea ice is all about the wind. The wind piles first year sea ice up so thick that it does not all met in the summer. To be surprised that it has increased shows a lack of understanding of the whole process.Area, extent, and volume are all affected by the wind. Without the wind, things would be quite different at the poles. The formation of first year sea ice is very dependent on the wind. What should be focused on is the gain/loss of energy from the surface down to 2000 meters of the polar sea waters not just the thin layer of sea ice/ice.
It appears that the snow and ice that has left the Arctic has moved to my backyard. The puppy with very little hair is unimpressed!