Arctic Sea Ice

IceBridge, ICEX 2011, Catlin Arctic Survey

Hat-tip to Peter Sinclair

1) From the NASAexplorer channel on YouTube: "NASA scientists have just begun the most recent leg of the Operation IceBridge Mission, an unprecedented six-year mission to study the Earth's polar regions, not through the lens of a satellite, but from onboard an airplane. In fact, IceBridge is the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown."

Dr. Tom Wagner, cryospheric scientist with NASA and excellent communicator, has the details:

Lieutenant Commander John Woods, a professor in the Oceanography Department at the United States Naval Academy, and his student, Eric Brugler, blogged about their experiences on the NASA Earth Observatory blog.

2) And where Operation IceBridge has just started, Ice Excercise 2011 (ICEX 2011) has just ended. ICEX is held every two to three years by the Navy's Arctic Submarine Laboratory (ASL) based in San Diego. Since November two US Navy submarines, USS Connecticut and USS New Hampshire, have been excercising in the Arctic Ocean, while at the same time an ice camp was set up in conjunction with a team from the Applied Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington (APL/UW), that was initially situated about 160 nautical miles north of Prudhoe Bay (map). Besides the military excercises, research has been done into ice mechanics (measuring sea ice thickness and snow depth), upper ocean structure (studying the salinity and temperature of the upper 1,000 meters of the water column), underwater & high latitude communications, and ice burnthrough technology (sounds exciting). 

Here's a video of the USS Connecticut surfacing during ICEX 2011 (hat-tip Lodger):

SIE 2011 update 3: end of March

During the melting season I'm regularly writing updates on the current sea ice extent (SIE) as reported by IJIS (a joint effort of the International Arctic Research Center and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and compare it to the sea ice extents in the period 2005-2010. NSIDC has a good explanation of what sea ice extent is in their FAQ. I also look at other things like sea ice area, concentration, volume, temperature and weather forecasts, anything that can be of particular interest. Check out the Arctic sea ice graph webpage for daily updated graphs, maps and live webcam images.

April 1st 2011

The month of maximums, March, is behind us. There has been some very careful speculation on whether we would see a triple top, in other words an even later maximum than last year. I don't believe we will, but what we definitely are seeing resembles last year in that atmospheric patterns have slowed down the start of the melting season, making extent and area numbers hover around the same figures ever since the last update. More on that at the end of this update.

Edit: In the comments Lodger linked to a cool animation from NASA, covering the ice growth from September 16th 2010 till March 16th 2011:

 

Due to the stalling decrease of SIE numbers the trend line for this year on the IJIS graph has stopped following the pack of low extent years (2005, 2006 and 2007) and is moving towards the pack of high extent years (2008, 2009 and 2010):

The current difference between 2011 and the other years is as follows:

• 2005: +210K(-13,332)
• 2006: +497K (-11,704)
• 2007: +294K (-9,894)
• 2008: -370K (-10,761)
• 2009: -212K (-10,746)
• 2010: -654K (+13,402)

Between brackets is the average daily extent rate for the month of March. The daily average for March 2011 has finished at +2,964 km2, which is considerably higher than most other years, except of course for the highly anomalous 2010. March ended at a total of 13,753,438 km2 which is still 135K below the maximum reached 3 weeks earlier. If the current weather patterns persist there is a very small chance that we see a new SIE maximum, but I sincerely doubt it as the window for melting is starting to open up and SST and insolation start doing their work.