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2011 Arctic Sea Ice Thread

macdoc said:
Hmm interesting graph - oddly seems to match up with ENSO events which does stand to reason given it's positioning.
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given that it is only looking at the western perry channel and only comparing a singlet weekly coverage over the timespan of comparison,...and still seems to display an overall decline over time, within that larger apparent pattern,...yes, interesting indeed.
 
One has to think a hotter Pacific surface ends up butting into the Arctic via the Kura Shivo flo - and this entrance is action central.
It's why I think we will have a sudden collapse of ice cover once the flow throw becomes more established.....lot of heat pumped up there.

Wonder what the effect will be on the west coast that depends on that heat for tempering the climate.
 
macdoc said:
Hmm interesting graph - oddly seems to match up with ENSO events which does stand to reason given it's positioning.
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One of the reasons for me to ask about what was expected in a Niña-to-Niño change. Today's sea ice extent -and previous trend- look like following 2010 trend instead of 2007's, but I have a certain expectation about it following the last one in the Western Hemisphere, though I expect some 4.55 million sq.km. to be the minimum. Look at these northern anomalies for April and May -only the Arctic-

GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom04_2011_2011_1951_1980.gif


GHCN_GISS_HR2SST_1200km_Anom05_2011_2011_1951_1980.gif


macdoc said:
One has to think a hotter Pacific surface ends up butting into the Arctic via the Kura Shivo flo - and this entrance is action central.
It's why I think we will have a sudden collapse of ice cover once the flow throw becomes more established.....lot of heat pumped up there.

Wonder what the effect will be on the west coast that depends on that heat for tempering the climate.
Click to expand...
I don't think Kuroshio is having a major effect but certainly Alaska current is building up some heat -I don't know if that means Alaska stream and Oyashio are becoming weaker-. We were having south of Alaska some warmed waters along with high pressures (this was the average for last 1-26 june)

compday1582271229117995.gif
 
New NSIDC news up; http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2011/070611.html

Sea ice enters critical period of melt season

Arctic sea ice extent for June 2011 was the second lowest in the satellite data record since 1979, continuing the trend of declining summer ice cover. Average ice extent fell below that for June 2007, which had the lowest minimum ice extent at the end of summer. However, ice extent this year was greater than in June 2010. The sea ice has entered a critical period of the melt season: weather over the next few weeks will determine whether the Arctic sea ice cover will again approach record lows.

<SNIP>
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aleCcowaN said:
Don't worry, maybe we are in front of a mini-version of "1998 was the hottest year in record .... now it's cooling..."
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"We only use 10% of our brains, you know", that one will never go away :). My response, of course, is always "Speak for yourself".

I think denial will lock itself into that golden decade of 1998-2008 for good now and refuse to come out. The little team involved (Soon's "A-Team") are almost universally in the late-mature demographic, a time of life when the past can become more clear than the present. The days of their triumphs, such as Spencer saving the Free World from Big Gumment. http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/06/261843/roy-spencer-job-minimize-the-role-of-government/

(To quote Marlborough, "Ah, that was a man!". And he had been.)

People new to the subject will hear their stories for the first time (not the thousandth, like so many others) and some will run to fora such as this to announce the news. Some will learn to be more circumspect in future. Some will make accusations of bullying and eventually leave unimproved. And some will hang around frantically defending their special knowledge, which is fine by me since it gives me someone to bully.
 
macdoc said:
One has to think a hotter Pacific surface ends up butting into the Arctic via the Kura Shivo flo - and this entrance is action central.
Click to expand...

The Straits are a serious bottleneck, more so than the Labrador Sea. The only significant opening in the Arctic Ocean is in the North-East Atlantic, with ice moving out to warmer latitudes and warm water flowing in. Palaeoclimatology shows that region to be pretty unstable. I think that's where the action will be.
 
Remember; extent is important because decrease in extent, especially early in the melt season, is a positive feedback as water absorbs more heat than ice does.

But volume is how much is left.

Both are in severely negative territory. If the weather breaks bad, we could wind up with very, very little ice in September.

We might even seen stretches of the Arctic Ocean surface waters rise well above 0 C, which will hamper the winter freeze and which may have some unpredictable weather effects.
 
The Straits are a serious bottleneck, more so than the Labrador Sea. The only significant opening in the Arctic Ocean is in the North-East Atlantic, with ice moving out to warmer latitudes and warm water flowing in. Palaeoclimatology shows that region to be pretty unstable. I think that's where the action will be.
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But the flow is from west to east - and while the strait bottlenecks to a degree the warm water flows under and flushes the ice out the other end of the funnel.

I think once the volume of that current increases that will have an even more dramatic impact than the change in albedo in warming the Arctic Ocean and surrounds.
 
It just struck me that if we remain at this level of anomaly in ice volume through September, we hit zero.

So, unless something comes along to reduce melting to less than historically average rates, this is the year of zero ice.
 
BenBurch said:
It just struck me that if we remain at this level of anomaly in ice volume through September, we hit zero.
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It clearly won't. Zero for September is the line at the bottom, that one at -13,500 cubic kilometers. Anyway, the plotting is not going much upwards this season. I suppose it'll hit -9,000 by September, similar to last year's. If it hits -10,500, well, where are the lifeboats?

Here is last real volume (updated daily) from PIOMAS:

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordp...olume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2_CY.png

Edited by jhunter1163: 
Removed hotlink.


For June, the difference between the blue triangle and the black circle is the anomaly.
 
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BenBurch said:
attachment.php
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The plot for March has 34 values; also September's does. It looks like September 2011 is there, or there is a mix of 34-value series for 1978-2011 and 1977-2010? Isn't it supposed to start in 1979?

By the way, June 30th volume was 12,261 cubic km.

Sea Ice Volume North of 49°N for June 30th (Source: PIOMAS)

Year Volume Delta
1998 22226
1999 21974 -252
2000 21042 -932
2001 21074 0 28
2002 20670 -404
2003 20070 -600
2004 19915 -155
2005 18564 -1351
2006 17929 -635
2007 15593 -2336
2008 17442 1849
2009 16642 -800
2010 12876 -3766
2011 12261 -615
Some really wild speculations:

Sea ice volume loss in 2007 from June 30th to September 19th and 21st: 9135 km3Sea ice volume loss in 2010 from June 30th to September 15th: 8448 km3
minimum sea ice volume for this year ("heuristic" - :DFrench for rule of thumb- forecast): 3126 to 3813 km3 (less than what I expected, as I said, some 4500 and it would surprise -and alarm- me a lot if less than 3000)
 
Interesting ... my city is now using up some 3 megatons a (cold) week of natural gas and electricity (hydro + nuclear) ... wait a minute! using megatons to measure slow energy fluxes -no matter how massive- is like using impulse and time instead of force. To avoid any suspicion of term choice intended to exploit psychological connexions, we should keep megatons to deal with sudden bursts or energy, like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and USA-et-al nuclear weapons aimed to my home city, because in order to un-dramatize it we can say that melting 1000 cubic kilometres of ice is about 35 minutes in terms of the energy that the earth is getting from the sun -no wonder then that many thousands cubic kilometres of sea ice are melted every Spring and Summer near the North pole-. I'm sure that the effects of having two million square kilometres of sea ice less at any given date in term of changing albedo would be similar, or lesser, maybe in an order of magnitude, wouldn't it? That is the question. Does white Arctic import energy imbalances elsewhere? o it has the potential to export them abroad? I'm sure it does, but not within the year, not in the surface.
 
BenBurch said:
Some rough calculations;

Each tick mark on that PIOMAS chart is 1000 km3.

Roughly 3 * 10 ^ 20 joules are required to melt that.

Which is the energy equivalent of something like 70,000 megaton bombs.
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Good to know, but what was the old pre-industrial measure so that we can comapre? How much of that is just the normal annual cyclke?
 
Mikemcc said:
Good to know, but what was the old pre-industrial measure so that we can comapre? How much of that is just the normal annual cyclke?
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We know thickness, hence volume has been declining since we have been measuring it, which began with the nuclear submarine era. Those records have been de-classified.

We know something about pre-industrial volume by looking at near-shore features.

And we know that in the last century the amount of OLD ice, which is thicker than young ice, has declined markedly, and we know this from polar expeditions which found enough old ice to melt into somewhat brackish drinking water.

Weathered sea ice loses salt and when it is 4-5 years old, it is at a level you can drink it, and there is almost no ice like that now; If you were to try to walk to the North Pole (it would have to be in winter, because there are too many leads now to allow you to make it in Summer,) you would have to bring all your water with, or carry desalination gear.
 
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