Arctic Sea Ice

Cryosphere Today sea ice area: maximum reached

I finally feel confident enough to call the maximum for the Cryosphere Today sea ice area data set*:

graph comes from the Pogoda i Klimat blog

More than two weeks have passed since I wrote the following:

ECMWF is showing a big high taking over the Barents/Kara regions 5 from days from now, with a big low doing its thing in the Bering/Okhotsk region. If this forecast comes about I think we will have our CT SIA maximum around March 5th.

It came about, but didn't last, and so I decided to hold on to my horses:

2012 Novaya Zemlya Animation

I was planning to start making animations in May, but the sea ice has other plans. A little over a month ago I wrote a blog post about the spectacular and ominous situation in the Barentsz and Kara Seas. A combination of weather conditions and warm SSTs made the sea ice retreat so much that I ventured to say it looked unprecedented in the satellite record (without thoroughly checking, I admit). When the winds turned, the western Kara Sea, the part between Novaya Zemlya and the Siberian coast, finally froze over.

This situation has lasted about a week. The winds have turned again and sea ice is retreating so fast (see LANCE-MODIS satellite image on the top right) that I feel compelled to make an animation. But first let's look at images from the Uni Bremen sea ice concentration map archive to see what the situation in previous years was like:

Astute readers will have noticed that this is what the region looked like on April 15th, a little over a month from now.  There's a question mark for 2012, because as of yet we don't know how things will look by then. I'll fill in this blank in April.

Here's the animation for the last couple of days:

Hot spring

Yes, I know it isn't really hot where the red is. It's just anomalously not cold in much of the Arctic, according to the NOAA/ESRL Physical Sciences Division:
Though it isn't the first time, it looks pretty spectacular. On the DMI temperature map we see how atmospheric patterns pull in warmer air from the Atlantic all the way to Alaska:

PIOMAS March 2012

The Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center has been updated:

Slightly lower than last year...

Wipneus has produced a new graph for which he calculated the "expected" 2012 values, based on the same date values of 1979-2011 and an exponential trend. A caveat from Wipneus: "Note that the (not indicated) statistical error bars are quite large."To top it off, here's the PSC graph with the anomaly from the downward trend:

Arctic pollution

A while back my daughter was busy with a project concerning the Inuit people, and to give her an idea of what living in the high North looked like, we watched Robert J. Flaherty's epic 1922 documentary Nanook of the North. I was doubly interested because I had been reading about how the Inuit diet (high in animal fats) made cancer and coronary diseases practically non-existent until modern processed foods were introduced.

As unhealthy as processed foods may be, reverting to the traditional diet would probably be suicide. It has been known for quite a while that dioxins and other toxic substances from all over the world are accumulating in the Arctic food web, but now it appears that the decline in Arctic sea ice is causing a direct increase in another toxic substance: mercury.

Last week a paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical research by Son V. V. Nghiem et al., called Field and satellite observations of the formation and distribution of Arctic atmospheric bromine above a rejuvenated sea ice cover. From the press release:

Remotely operated aircraft measure Arctic soot

Hat-tip to Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

 

Small, new, remotely-operated, unmanned aircraft are being flown in the Arctic to measure black soot. The soot is produced by burning diesel fuel, agricultural fires, forest fires, and wood-burning stoves. It is transported by winds to the Arctic, where it darkens the surface of snow and ice, enhancing melting and solar warming. See http://saga.pmel.noaa.gov/ and http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/edd/manta.html

Small research paper database

I have tried to postpone this as much as possible, but studying the Arctic and its sea ice forces you sooner or later to start reading actual research papers. So far I had been saving PDFs in a folder, but I figured it'd be much better to incorporate them somewhere in the Arctic Sea Ice blog. And so I have started a subsection to collect and discuss Arctic-related research papers that pertain to different categories (see image on the right).

You reach the category page by clicking 'papers' in the navigation bar. Clicking on one of the categories takes you to a list of research papers in that particular category. You can add comments to the category page and suggest research papers you think fit in well. Clicking on the discussion page of a research paper takes you to a page with all the info on the paper (author, journal, date of publication), the abstract, and excerpts I think are interesting. You can add comments to the discussion page if you'd like to discuss the research paper.

So far I have only included two research papers as an example (in the Atmospheric Patterns and Oceanic Patterns sections). I will try and add one research paper per week on average, mostly seminal papers or papers that are cutting edge and groundbreaking. It should make a nice collection after a year or so and I hope it will turn out to be useful (because it's a lot of work). Let me know if I'm doing something illegal before suing me!

A first clue

However unpredictable it is, we still like to gather as much information as we can about the coming melting season. Obviously it's important to get an idea of what happened to the Arctic sea ice during the last freezing season. We've just witnessed the spectacular retreat of ice and late freezing in the Barentsz and Kara Seas and know that the Arctic Oscillation was mostly positive this winter, which ought to have caused increased export of sea ice through Fram Strait.

This has now been confirmed through a new NASA study by Josefino Comiso (published in the Journal of Climate):

still image captured by Arcticicelost80 from the video in the NASA news release

The NASA study shows much more, of course, about the long-term decline in MYI, but to be honest I'm primarily interested in what it can tell us about the coming melting season, as everyone here knows about long-term declines. The graph above shows the amount of multi-year ice (MYI) on January 31st since 1980. This year's MYI cover on that date is just a tad higher than that of 2008, which was extremely low due to the preceding record melting season of 2007. I'm expecting James Maslanik's yearly ice age percentage graph to come out soon (probably the next NSIDC monthly summary) and Arctic.io has promised to make a video of ASCAT radar images of the Arctic sea ice pack during winter (like he did last year). That will give us a more detailed look with regards to MYI.

March 2012 Open Thread

This will be the last open thread of the freezing season. Use it wisely.

     image found here