Open Thread

“MikeB says:
March 22, 2014 at 4:09 am”
No. I said MEASURED. Estimates and averages are not measures! Please try again!

Jordan says:
March 21, 2014 at 1:21 pm
“While on the topic of the Arctic, does anybody have a reason for the positive sea temperature anomaly around Svalbard? It has been there all year.”
This year there has been no polar vortex, just low pressure regions wandering all over the place, randomly moving pockets of cold air southward. By chance, they missed Svalbard. Next year may be different.

Regarding the open water northeast of Svalbard this winter:
You do not need undersea volcanoes to explain it. I’ve been watching the movement of the ice all winter, as a hobby, and it has been unusual. What would be more usual is for the Transpolar Drift to bring ice across the Pole and down into Fram Strait, which tends to eventually bring ice against the northeast coast of Svalbard. Also the polar easterlies scoot ice along the ice-edge boundary in Barents Sea against the northwest and west coast of Svalbard. Although these two motions did happen this winter, they were also interrupted by shifting winds that moved ice away from Svalbard.
The most interesting motions defied the Transpolar Flow, and pushed ice towards Canada, building the amounts of ice in the Beaufort Gyre. While that does increase ice in that part of the Arctic Ocean, it robs the area around Svalbard of its usual quota of imported ice.
Most of the ice pressing towards Svalbard this winter did not come from the Transpolar Drift, but from the Barents Sea, robbing that area of ice and resulting in a lot more open water. I’m surprised Alarmists aren’t making a bigger deal about that open water, for it is at “unprecedented” levels. (IE since 1979, and ignoring historical reports from the pre-satellite era.) This shows in the cryosphere graph: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.6.html
The openness of Barents Sea is largely due to the weather pattern that exported cold down over North America and imported milder air up over Europe. Not only did this mean there were times there was no cold air available to form ice in Barents Sea, it also meant that when the ice did form it was exposed to strong winds that moved it out. There were several good surges of ice right by Svalbard, resulting in increases of ice in Fram Strait even as there were decreases in Barents Sea. Briefly the extents were even above normal in the Greenland Sea south of Fram Strait: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/recent365.anom.region.5.html
This differs from the situation in 2007, when a lot of the ice that flushed south through Fram Strait came across the Pole on the Transpolar Drift, reducing the amounts of ice as far away as Bering Strait. This time the flush comes from a smaller area, largely Barents Sea.
I’ve been watching the situation for years now, and one huge misconception I originally had was that the ice up there is static. FAIL. It is amazingly mobile. The “North Pole Camera” only starts its life near the Pole. Usually it is south of Fram Strait in only six months, where the break-up of ice ends its life. The GPS from last years “North Pole Camera” wound up on the northeast coast of Iceland last January, having drifted over 1600 miles since the prior April.
While some of the ice piling up north of Canada is over five years old, most ice up by the Pole is so mobile it has a hard time seeing a second birthday.
My impression is that the ice up there is increasing on the Pacific side, and at a sort of “low tide” on the Atlantic side.

“MikeB says:
March 22, 2014 at 4:37 am”
Maybe, however can you please explain how a global average is measured.

RE: RichardLH says:
March 22, 2014 at 7:42 am
I agree and personally refer to that animation often. It really does give you a sense of how mobile the ice is, and how it pulses with the passage of each storm. (The other Navy maps on the “Sea Ice Page” can also be animated, and give you the same sort of feel for the flows of ice.)
What has been most interesting to watch is the slow growth of the thicker ice shown by yellow in the animation you link to. Yellow represents ice over ten feet thick, compared to ice around six feet thick by the Pole and ice only a couple feet thick around Svalbard. A couple of years ago the yellow ice had been reduced to a slender strip north of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago, but now yellow ice forms a far fatter backwards “L” shape and is entering waters north of Bering Strait that were ice-free two summers ago, after that notable gale. It will be much harder to get those waters ice-free this summer.
(There is probably space here for off-color jokes about Alarmists and the color “yellow,” especially “yellow snow,” but I am going to demonstrate good taste by stifling my sense of humor.)