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2011 Arctic Sea Ice Thread

Sea ice volume is clearly more important an issue than extent or area. The difficulty with sea ice volume from a public perception point of view is that it's based a lot on modelling, which makes it easier for people who want to dismiss it to dismiss it - and to raise doubts in others. Area/extent is more observational, and you can do nifty animations that show it in an easy to understand manner.

The problems of AGW will not get addressed unless there is the political will to do so. Right now, at least in the US, the political will is in the opposite direction. While the public actually believes in AGW, they care more about the price of gasoline and jobs. So Obama signs laws about gas pipelines, and the media gives positive coverage of Exxon signing arctic oil deals.

"Records" make for more press coverage. More press means more people thinking about it. Throw in Irene and bush fires etc etc and maybe, just maybe, enough people will start to think there's a connection (even though, strictly speaking from a science point of view, there may not be).

AGW needs a political solution. A political solution will not occur without the public calling for it, and right now that means the american public (any suggestions on how to work with the chinese and indian public??), and I'd much prefer they got hot enough to decide to jump out of the pot rather than slowly boil to death.
 
I agree in some points but this is just a forum hidden in the deep Internet, and the "horse race" spirit I criticized makes of it something unlikely to be quoted around and linked to, so again, what's the point of doing so?

The problem here is forums @ randi.org being too much a refugee for quacks -not only about climate- that promote agendas intentionally -or vocationally in a "spill of the self" fashion-. Being consistent, methodically rational and well informed may be the answer.

There's a reason for such many an astray soul flourishing here: the place is perceived by them as an ideal culture media. Beware of promoting that.
 
aleCcowaN said:
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And I'm talking about something indisputable in everybody's eyes: they'll grow old, and most importantly, they know it.
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Maybe because I ran with a "bad crowd" in my youth (jazz and rock musicians, porn industry people) but I knew a lot of people whose intention was to "live fast, die young, and leave a pretty corpse."

Some did just that (plus or minus on the "pretty" part) which was substantially helped along by the HIV crisis, but most of them got old just like the rest of us.
 
Then, back on the sea ice, I suggest to ignore the extent data and graphics for a few days. Today's plot from NSIDC shows a value a bit below 4.3 million square kilometres, value that none of the other sources confirm, including NSIDC's (but we have seen before that graphic replotted ex-post many times)

Also, a good representation of what has happened (and will continue to happen during the next days) can be seen at DMI/COI. By pressing "i løkke" you can see an animation of sea ice concentration from the last 30 days and watch how the disorganized ice one month ago has become solid in high latitudes while the ice fringes continue to melt, specially north of the East Siberian Sea, Chukchi Sea, Alaska and Canadian Northwest.
 
aleCcowaN said:
Then, back on the sea ice, I suggest to ignore the extent data and graphics for a few days. Today's plot from NSIDC shows a value a bit below 4.3 million square kilometres, value that none of the other sources confirm, including NSIDC's (but we have seen before that graphic replotted ex-post many times)

Also, a good representation of what has happened (and will continue to happen during the next days) can be seen at DMI/COI. By pressing "i løkke" you can see an animation of sea ice concentration from the last 30 days and watch how the disorganized ice one month ago has become solid in high latitudes while the ice fringes continue to melt, specially north of the East Siberian Sea, Chukchi Sea, Alaska and Canadian Northwest.
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English version of that link here.
 
BenBurch said:
Well, it is a running average and also a real time number that has to be corrected when issues with sensors are discovered.
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Sure, but they're having such glitches -or their consequences- right now. MASIE's front page had this morning an announcement in red about some major power outage last 4th and them making revisions on a processing that is still delayed.
 
aleCcowaN said:
Sure, but they're having such glitches -or their consequences- right now. MASIE's front page had this morning an announcement in red about some major power outage last 4th and them making revisions on a processing that is still delayed.
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That's science.

Most of us have the luxury of vetting our data before publication.

It takes some cojones to present it in real time.
 
BenBurch said:
It takes some cojones to present it in real time.
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I will continue to think that the policewoman around the corner has better ones, or a child living in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sorry if I'm not impressed.

Public did demand data. Now they demand better data. CRU now delays the data to avoid mistakes and debates (CRUTEM3v for July was online September 4th)

But to be fair, it's not easy to integrate all the information that is flowing and the new sources that join every month and coordinate error margins to show a consistent historical dataset. Most of all, coordinating rough resolutions.
 
Those interested in forecast for the region may take a look to all the models and values in http://www.meteociel.fr/modeles/ecmwf.php

For those who can't find their way, just click the links on the left that are below the orange labels and select the Northern Hemisphere (cartes N-hémi). The Arctic pressures are now low and are predicted to be even lower for the next 10 days in all the models I checked.

These are the 2m temperature for 24hs, 96hs and 168hs, from the Australian model BoM ACCESS. You can see -for the date of this post- the temperature forecast on the banquise to be down to -20°C or even less. This figure also shows -to date- the temperatures steeply falling these last few days above 80° latitude (you may compare it with 2007 or 2010).
 
Bremen has announced a new record low extent -

Arctic sea ice extent small as never before

Alerting message from the Arctic: The extent the the Arctic sea ice has reached on Sep. 8 with 4.240 million km2 a new historic minimum (Figure 1). Physicists of the University of Bremen now confirm the apprehension existing since July 2011 that the ice melt in the Arctic could further proceed and even exceed the previous historic minimum of 2007. It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences. Directly, the livehood of small animals, algae, fishes and mammals like polar bears and seals is more and more reduced.
 
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a_unique_person said:
You need to read some more websites and hear about the death threats to climate scientists.
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I got those, including via phone 3 a.m. , mainly regarding local politics. Still not impressed. Here, we don't live life as if people like Anders Behring Breivik couldn't exist. There are risks just for the fact of being alive.
 
icerat said:
Bremen has announced a new record low extent -

Arctic sea ice extent small as never before

Alerting message from the Arctic: The extent the the Arctic sea ice has reached on Sep. 8 with 4.240 million km2 a new historic minimum (Figure 1).


<unnecessary remarks and off-topics, snipped>
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Interesting how figures 2-right and 3 show sea ice in Hudson Bay for September 8th that the Canadian Ice Service has deemed non-existent on September 5th, as MASIE -multi source- has too.

In sort of a third-party-fulfilled prophecy ("instruments yadda yadda") the images and values obtained algorithmically from a 25km-resolution satellital source show ice where a flying-over pilot sees none, and vice-versa, but that German university didn't learn it, and they preferred to make a scoop and announce a record broken before the rest, no matter even their own error margins. It looks like the chopped horse heads they use to find in their beds every morning didn't get them intimidated and restrained from announcing their half-cooked conclusions :rolleyes:. We'd say here "¡Hay que ser pelotudos!", with pelotas meaning the same as cojones in Puerto Rican, but pelotudo not having a flattering meaning.

With similar instrumentation, JAXA gives a +290,000 km2 over previous record extent to the date of IUP's announcement, but what they'd know, as they just made and operate the satellites that measures this and subtle variables like Antarctic ice flow. Shame that in the future, when they announce a broken record, they'll have to overcome these boy-cried-wolf precedents.
 
I think we may have seen the low for the year on NSIDC's extent.

By NSIDC, this is the second-worst year for Arctic ice extent in the history of the satellite record, and likely the second-worst in recorded history based on historic ice proxies.

Bremen's extent numbers (which come from a different data set with different methodologies) exceeded 2007 a few days ago.

By all other measures, total ice area and total ice volume, this is the worst year ever for Arctic sea ice.

We saw all this melting in the near-complete absence of the sort of weather that bunched up the pack ice and made 2007 a record year.

We also saw some significant anomalies; The Canadian archipelago, where historically the oldest and thickest ice would reside, was nearly ice-free this year, and the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route have been clear for weeks, and shipping has been making the Northern Sea Route passage.

We begin this winter's freeze with the lowest quantity of ice in tens of thousands of years.

Unless this is a very favorable winter for freezing, and signs point towards the opposite, we will start next year with very, very little multi-year ice, and the vest extent of the ice will be one meter thick at the start of next year's melt.

The result is that next year at this time it will be remarkable if we do not have a contender for records in all three measures.
 
I think the sea ice extent will be going down again a little bit in about a week, but not sure the minimum will be then or it was last 8th or 9th with about 4.3 or 4.45 million square kilometres (once all the sources are checked). Certainly, minimum ice volume was reached some days ago (I expect some sad 3,900 cubic kilometres)

I propose to start "2012 sea ice thread" during next October because 50% of it is ice that Winter can't create, and the next season can be "that kind of year". We are also going from Niña to Niño, so it'll probably be an interesting year 'icewise'.

It is important to remember that not much time ago 'they' said something about a 50% of climate models and simulations predicting ice free Arctic one day in Summer by 2050, and most of the simulation predicting ice-free or near ice-free Arctic by 2100. 5 or 10 years later and with Arctic ice on a spiral fall we can't say yet that all the bets are off but anyway there's much to reflect about what is happening.
 
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