The Antarctic Sea Ice Extent on Sept 13 2014 may have set a new all time record (at least for the satellite era, we don’t have data prior to that).
Southern Hemisphere Sea Ice Extent With Anomaly
Sunshine hours writes: Antarctic Sea Ice Extent Sept 13 2014 – 1,121,000 sq km above the 1981-2010 mean. Data for Day 255. Data here.
Breaking the record set in 2013 by 48,000 sq km.
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HOLD ON A MINUTE !!!!!
Have not CO2 levels over the last 40 years been on a steady upswing??
But wait; we have been told by the AGW folks that higher CO2 MUST cause higher temperatures.
So how can the Antarctic ice extent have grown in recent years?
Geez, let me see.
I know; the AGW DENIERS have PHOTOSHOPPED the satellite images and have produced a hoax image.
Of course, there can not be any other explanation.
Whew!!! For a brief moment there I almost smashed my hockey stick against by car’s windshield while wearing my Mann U t-shirt.
If neither air nor sea temperatures around Antarctica are warming, how can ice volume loss – if a reality – be linked in any way to warming? It might just be compressing down.
Yeah, but if it weren’t for global warming, the southern cap would be to the equator by now. It’s WORSE than we thought.
Thanks, Sunshine, even though I don’t personally like ice.
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2/extent_s_running_mean_amsr2_regular.png
http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr2/extent_s_running_mean_amsr2_previous.png
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
support your point. Lets see what happens.
Actually, the last graph I showed doesn’t support Sunshine’s point; it shows more extent for the end of September 2013.
But http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/s_plot_hires.png
shows August as a clear record. Congratulations for the Ice Team!
[Snip. You continue to use different screen names. You have been warned. Sockpuppetry is not allowed here. Use one screen name only. ~mod.]
Becky Mo.,
Your link is by a writer who then links to… her own article — as her authority!
Sorry, that fails the credibility test. It is nothing but an opinion, perpetrating the global warming scare.
The fact is that global warming has stopped, and not just recently. Global warming stopped many years ago, therefore all those who predicted that global warming would continue [and even accelerate] were wrong. Do you understand? They were WRONG. All of them.
Question: why should we place any faith in people who were flat wrong? I would rather put my trust in the group that was right all along: scientific skeptics. They never bought into the ‘carbon’ scare, and it turns out they were right. They are the ones you should listen to — not the climate alarmist crowd, who turned out to be completely wrong in all their wild-eyed predictions.
But suit yourself. If runaway global warming is your religion, there is not much anyone can do to convince you otherwise.
According to the Sea Level Research Group, University of Colorado, the mean rate of global sea level rise is 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr. [Includes a “global mean glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA)” correction of 0.3 mm/yr. The GIA uncertainty is at least 50 percent.]
See http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
“… Sea Level Research Group, University of Colorado, the mean rate of global sea level rise is 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr …”
—
It’s quite terrifying when you put it in such brutal terms like that. Basically if we stand on the HAT high water mark for about forty years we’d run a real risk of getting splashed on the lower ankle? But the most devastating thing of all would be perpetual prune toe … the humanity.
Becky, I might take satellite sea level seriously when they explain why it mostly happening in one spot.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/content/map-sea-level-trends
Here’s the same thing but with the accompanying error map which no longer appears on their website:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070111043347/http://sealevel.colorado.edu/maps.php
Just curious Becky, are you the same Becky that authored that piece?
And as a comment, I notice that same article claims that “97 percent of scientists who agree that humans are causing global warming”.
That is a complete fabrication. No study/survey/poll has ever suggested that this is true. They all manipulate the data to select for “climate scientists” The Zimmerman/Doran study sent a survey to more that 10000 earth scientists, got more than 3000 responses, and had to reduce that number to 75 out 77 “climate scientists” to get their magic 97%. Conflating 75 out 77 “climate scientists” into “97 percent of scientists” seems a bit, shall we say, untruthful?
Andres,
There is nary a mention of tectonic plate movement, or magma flows, or any other possible causes like changing ocean currents or winds. It must be global warming doing this! But wait a minute…
…there is a clear disconnect here. It is just about impossible to fake the Antarctic ice extent, or sea ice area. And ice depth measurements are constantly being done on the Antarctic continent; too many international organizations track those metrics. Those have been growing very rapidly year over year. Also, global sea levels are not accelerating — certainly something that would have been measured, if Antarctic ice volume had actually declined by ≈one-third, as claimed by GRACE.
There is a clear disconnect between GRACE, which has been “adjusted” [just like the ARGO buoy array, when ARGO showed deep ocean cooling], and ice area and extent. That disconnect must be resolved.
In the mean time, I will place my trust in empirical observations, which show rapid Antarctic ice gain. No one who claims that Antarctic ice volume has declined by one third has convincingly explained how ice area and extent can be rapidly increasing at the same time, or why the one-third loss of ice from the continent’s land mass has not caused accelerating sea level rise. A couple of latin proverbs come to mind:
Cui bono, and Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. When someone’s job depends on seeing a situation only one way, that’s the way he will see it. He might even “adjust” things… in the interest of job security.
Agreed.
All that ice has taken the seawater away from our local tropical beach, Cable Beach in Broome, Western Australia, and left the living mud reef exposed to the elements:
No ice for thousands of kilometers, thank goodness, except in my drinks.
More stranded marine life out of water here: http://pindanpost.com/2014/09/11/sensational-flora-and-fauna-of-cable-beach-pt3/
Got my heat on in the house here in Wisconsin and just got done with a mountain bike ride and my fingers are numb….hard time typing.
Come to think of it, since they’ve installed windmills around here it’s been getting colder and the Antarctic sea ice is increasing….
There must be a grant I can get to prove this theory? Maybe I will do a plot kind of like a hockey stick showing Antarctic ice increase vs wind mill installations.
The following paper gives a description of how the GRACE data is used to compute sea-level rise (SLR) for the Antarctic. The author Thomas Jacob was at the University of Colorado Institute for Environmental Studies, and has worked closely with other GRACE research teams
Basically, from 2003 to 2010 the paper shows (Table 1) that the Antarctic ice ‘thickness’ decreased by 165 gT (giga-tonnes) (plus or minus 72 gT), where one metric tonne is the mass of a cubic meter of water, so a giga-tonne would be the mass of a cubic kilometer of water. (So gT and km^3 units are interchangeable).
Now, for comparisons, there are approximately 25.6 million gT of Anarctic ice and 1.3 billion gT of water in all the oceans. So, assuming that _all_ of the ‘missing’ ice thickness melted directly into the ocean, the resulting annual increase in SLR would be about 0.4mm, or between 0.25mm and 0.65mm using the error uncertainty.
But it’s not clear to me that the ice thickness decreased because of melting, in view of the temps below freezing. Perhaps some of sublimated directly into the air, or perhaps it was somehow redistributed such that it makes up part of the increased ice extent, which would tend to mitigate the SLR risk.
In any case you can look the GRACE data yourself at JPL website, which can be found here: http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/data
The satellite was launched in 2002, so the site has data from 2002 to present (Aug 2014). The scientific mission of the satellite is very interesting and challenging. GRACE deduces changes in the thickness of water and glaciers and ice caps (GIC) from changes in the gravitational field above. More water/ice increases pull of gravity and thinner water/ice reduces it. But changing air mass (due to pressure changes) also affect the readings, so that has been adjusted out using available weather data. Other sources of noise have also been filtered, with the intent of creating ‘solutions’ which reflect only the disturbances caused by the ice fields.
That’s not a simple algorithm, so JPL has two other labs (GFZ and CSR) producing solution algorithms in addition to their own (JPL)
http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/data/solutioncomparison/
Here’s where it gets very interesting. There’s a _lot_ of uncertainty in solutions, so the three solutions don’t agree in general, so which one is right? (Answer: whichever solution best fits your pet theory.)
The data itself is just a set of the final adjusted-computed “equivalent water thickness” anomalies (in cm units) for half-degree grid cells over the world. The anomalies are measured from the average thicknesses measured between 2004-2009.
The datasets are broken down into land-grids and ocean-grids. There is a curious disclaimer on the land-grids:
http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/data/gracemonthlymassgridsland/
(The ‘paper by Jacob’ referenced here is the same one I linked to above)
So my take on this study is that while the GRACE mission is certainly valuable and provides very useful data for research, there is still a lot of noise and uncertainty in the data collected so far. And the estimated 0.4mm annual SLR (giving the “fully melted” interpretation full benefit of doubt) doesn’t seem to be cause for great alarm, IMHO.
Correction, text in 2nd para above should read:
…. Antarctic ice ‘thickness’ decreased by 165 gT (giga-tonnes) (plus or minus 72 gT) per year ….
CryoSat (Launched on April 8, 2010. Measuring the thickness of polar sea ice and monitoring changes in the ice sheets that blanket Greenland and Antarctica. The satellite flies in a low Earth, polar, non-Sun-synchronous orbit at a mean altitude of 717 km, reaching latitudes of 88° north and south, to maximise its coverage of the poles.
The main data product is the ‘Level-2’ product, sometimes called the Geophysical Data Record. This contains the surface elevation along the ground track together with all auxiliary data needed to fully exploit these measurements.
Satellite records show a constant downward trend in the area covered by Arctic sea ice during all seasons, in particular in summer, with the minimum recorded occurring in the autumn of 2012. In October 2013, however, CryoSat measured about 9,000 cubic km of sea ice – a notable increase compared to 6,000 cubic km in October 2012). See http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/CryoSat/Arctic_sea_ice_up_from_record_low/
From http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/CryoSat
Actually, the above quote is from http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/CryoSat/Sea_ice
With an animated graphic showing the 2010 to 2013 progression (October).
According to Nansen data it looks like Arctic has hit min on 11 Sept.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_ext.png
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_area.png
Will take a few more day to be sure.
I recently said 9th +/- one day. Looks like I missed the bull’s eye.
sea ice is obviously weather/AO/ENSO related, eg here-
http://www.meto.umd.edu/~kostya/Pdf/Seaice.30yrs.GRL.pdf
they show that late 60s to 77 is a sharp drop in antarctic sea ice extent and then a recovery up until now.
graph that against co2…hehe
sea ice extent has been abused by alarmists because the arctic is responding the way they think it should. the antarctic on the other hand is an enigma that they scramble to answer with crap like grace. it seems history is ignored for the much more uncertain 3 year slabs of modelled data.
Has anyone seen the Koch Brothers or the lunchroom ice maker?
Climate scientists need to send a technician up to the satellite pronto to perform needed, ahem, adjustments. Barring that, maybe they could filter the rogue data to ensure that only the finest data, worthy of the name climate science, are used to produce official records.
Call me unimpressed. Now don’t get your knickers in a twist. I am equally unimpressed with low ice records. What keeps my mind occupied is whether or not I get to make red tomato sauce or green tomato salsa this fall. It looks like green tomato salsa. I was hoping for red tomato sauce. Just sayin.
I think you will find that after ‘adjustments ‘ that the antarctic is still losing ice in a dramatic fashion ,
So you disagree with the GRACE experts and think the loss is _greater_ than 165 gigatonnes per year (compared to the total of ~25 million gigatonnes already on the ground in the Antarctic)? Where do you find support for that?
But these experts seem to be assuming that any “missing” ice must have all melted directly into the ocean. So it appears the SLR estimates could be further adjusted downward , not up, to allow for sublimation and redistribution of ice as additional likely explanations for the thinning?
Do you not agree?
I agree that the magic of climate ‘science’ means that no matter what change its ‘proof’ even if that change goes against all the claims made using the models to date. Life is so much easer when you can have heads you lose tails I win has your research approach.
Never fear – the BBC are right on the most important ‘Environment’ stories of the day – including a new robot that can load your dishwasher and the size of monkey’s brains.
Record Antarctic sea ice? Not so much.
And from the same source, the Arctic extent:
Arctic Sea Ice Extent Sep 13 2014 – -1,098,000 sq km below Normal
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/arctic-sea-ice-extent-sep-13-2014-1098000-sq-km-below-normal/
Why the small black areas along the coast of Antarctica for the last 3 weeks. They did not exist in the last 3 years maps at this time of year. They cannot reflect thin ice at the coast because it has to be thicker than ice out at the sea edge.
If the areas are being worked out from these graphs then they would not be showing some ice that should be being recorded. Does anyone have a programme to map the actual outer area and work out ifthe ice extent (without these black patches) is actually even greater than the last 3 years and is being artificially reduced.
Anthony, in the Arctic I believe that when clouds hide some of the outline falsely low records have been given in the past.
Does anyone know if these areas of reduced ice have been shown in past years (I have been wrong before) and secondly is the sea ice extent Antarctica derived from the data that makes up these graphs?
Recovered NIMBUS satellite pictures from September 1964 place the Antarctic sea ice extent at 19.7M km2 (about the same as today’s record of 19.5M km2 when that record is extrapolated across the whole month of September). These numbers are supposed to use the same methodology.
Paper from Walt Meier of (at the time) NSIDC, occassional commenter on WUWT.
http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/699/2013/tc-7-699-2013.pdf
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/07/Figure71-350×350.png
Thanks, Bill. #1 in reading list now.
Watched a an ABC24 news report today about a couple of warmer nutjobs speaking about getting ready to ship south on Aurora Australis next summer. They explained how the imaginary “hotter atmosphere” was making antarctic winds stronger via a mechanism which creates the naughty deception of record sea ice growth within the southern ocean. They also lamented how this imply awful heat was going to play havoc with getting through the pack ice again this Summer and how it may again delay or block transit and resupply. But rest assured, they’ve no doubt at all that Antarctica itself is “rapidly melting”. Which was a bit hard to grasp at first, but the ABC reporter dutifully assured us that this was completely true nonetheless, and should be most ardently believed by all right-thinking people.
Thanks, I had a laugh! 🙂
Odd how while Antarctic sea ice extent is reaching 35 year recorded high, taxpayer dime on it from National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) says in “facts” for public, “Sea ice near the Antarctic Peninsula, south of the tip of South America, has recently experienced a significant decline. The rest of Antarctica has experienced a small increase in Antarctic sea ice.”
http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/quickfacts/seaice.html
This propaganda sorts of minimizes the facts from the satellite data, and been two years now Southern hemisphere sea ice extent growing and above average, now at record. I tried to checked the webpage for date modified, but no time stamp, despite, other caching on web says that page was saved at least 58 times between Feb. 4, 2012 and July 19, 2014.
Lets all focus on the Arctic with a deep freeze on data record stopping a few years back.
Over very much longer haul (lets ignore solar cycle 24 gripping next decade – colder), Antarctic and southern hemisphere has reached/past max TSI from sun by changes in earth’s precession and obliquity, for next 10,000 years … reversing .. going into colder summers and warmer winters in south, opposite in Northern hemisphere. Perihelion during summer in south now or turning point past in middle ages, odd Antarctic should be melting now.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/insolation/
Does not matter, would not trust 100 years of temperature data for trend versus natural variation, noise statistically insignificant with cherry picking points for propagandists.
Too bad NSIDC will pretend or ignore Antarctic is not at/near record high sea ice for public.
What is the absolute maximum for the Satellite era?
It looks like it is being shattered.
The sea ice mean line is several times thicker than the latitude and longitude lines.