Arctic Sea Ice

As Sea Ice Declines, Winter Shifts in N. Alaska

As winter sets in, the Arctic Ocean freezes up. But because waters near the continental land masses warm up so much during the melting season (see for instance this image from August 11th 2012), they have to give off a lot of heat before they're cold enough to freeze. The waters warm up so much, of course, because of the rapid retreat of Arctic sea ice during the warming season.

This warm air from Arctic waters has temperatures shooting up on the adjoining shores (see for instance air temps during the first half of this month on Vize Island in the Kara Sea), sometimes up to 10-20 ºC more than the long-term average, and also causes more rain and snow to fall. This is a regular feature now, a sure sign that the Arctic climate is changing as we speak. And for a large part because of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Andrew Freedman from the Climate Central blog just published an article describing the situation on the Alaskan shore of the Beaufort Sea that was anomalously warm for a large part of the melting season:

As Sea Ice Declines, Winter Shifts in Northern Alaska

The consequences of the record loss of Arctic sea ice this past summer are becoming clear to the 4,000 or so residents of Barrow, Alaska, who have seen a much milder and snowier-than-average start to their typically long and bitterly cold winter season.

As is typical for this time of year, much of Alaska has already been plunged into winter conditions, with temperatures below 0°F in some locations. Yet Barrow, which from its perch on Alaska’s North Slope is the country’s northernmost town, has had a downright balmy start to the Alaskan winter. (Well, balmy for Barrow, at least.) 

According to the National Weather Service, Barrow has seen “almost continuous above-normal temperatures” since September “due to a lack of sea ice” formation until last week. Along with the above-average temperatures has come above-average snowfall. Snowfall since July 1 has been more than a foot above average, the Weather Service said, with 31.4 inches of snow having fallen through Nov. 17.

Read the rest of the article here.

Arctic methane: Why the sea ice matters

Here's a video from the Arctic News blog, which is run by the people from AMEG (Arctic Methane Emergency Group). I'm not a big fan of geo-engineering, especially if it supports the continuation of business-as-usual, but as this video has some good speakers that dare speak of worst-case scenarios, and it is not an ad for geo-engineering (that will be part 2, I surmise), I think it's worth a watch:

I'm not sure how imminent a methane clathrate collapse is, but I'm not ruling anything out. As long as methane concentrations. global as well as Arctic, are not shooting up dramatically we're in the 'safe' zone (were it not for CO2, of course).

Don't forget, if you want to have regular updates on the situation with regards to methane, you can go to Apocalypse4You's website and the ESRL Data Visualization page for Barrow (or any other sites you want).

Let's make this a sort of open thread where everyone can discuss solutions if they so wish. I haven't changed my opinion that the neoclassical economic concept that drives our economies, societies and cultures needs to be replaced as soon as possible. Maybe the brainwashing of economy students needs to stop first for that to happen.

Edit: In light of my last remark, Gareth Wyn Jones asked me to link to his article called Overshooting Limits (download document by clicking this link). I read it this summer and it gets to the core of the matter very nicely. Explaining the Galbraithian Dilemma was an eye opener for me.

Climate Dialogue, a new depolarizing initiative

Following the Climategate non-scandal some Dutch politicians deemed it necessary for skeptics to have a more prominent say in matters, regardless of merit or reputation. Out of this evolved an initiative called Climate Dialogue.

As the editors of Climate Dialogue write in this guest blog post on Bart Verheggen's Ourchangingclimate blog:

ClimateDialogue.org offers a platform for discussions between invited climate scientists on important climate topics that have been subject to scientific and public debate. The goal of the platform is to explore the full range of views currently held by scientists by inviting experts with different views on the topic of discussion. We encourage the invited scientists to formulate their own personal scientific views; they are not asked to act as representatives for any particular group in the climate debate.

Obviously, there are many excellent blogs that facilitate discussions between climate experts, but as the climate debate is highly polarized and politicized, blog discussions between experts with opposing views are rare.

The first subject being discussed is Arctic sea ice. Participants are Drs. Walt Meier, Judith Curry and Ron Lindsay, who all wrote a short guest post to describe their views on the current situation in the Arctic. They are not saying anything staggering, and this probably has to do with Arctic sea ice being such a clear sign on the wall. The sign itself is of course pretty staggering once you think it through.

I tried to convey this in my comment on the three guest posts:

PIOMAS November 2012

Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center:

After last month's minimum the 2012 trend line isn't quite hugging the 2011 trend line as much as the latter hugged the 2010 trend line, keeping a polite distance. It's still 1069 and 1537 km3 below 2011 and 2010 respectively. Hopefully the trend line starts pulling up a bit.

Here is Wipneus' version with the calculated "expected" 2012 values (dotted lines), based on the same date values of 1979-2011 and an exponential trend.
A caveat from Wipneus: "Note that the statistical error bars are quite large."

Bilateral freezing

It happened a while back, but it's one of those interesting details that make what's happening in the Arctic so unique. In August we saw something that hasn't been recorded before (not on that scale, that is): the detachment of large parts of the ice pack. In October the opposite happened.

In the East Siberian and Laptev Seas freezing started on the coasts before the ice pack had expanded far enough to reach them first. For a couple of days, the freezing on both sides caused a large pool of open water surrounded by ice on all sides:

In a way the detachment had something to do with this event, as a lot of ice floes that had been part of the little ice pack were still bobbing around (just not enough to show up on the Uni Bremen sea ice concentration maps), making freezing easier near the coast. But of course, the main reason for this to happen is the fact that the edge of the ice pack was so far North. I think bilateral freezing on this scale is a first.

So the East Siberian and Laptev Seas froze over relatively quickly, the Beaufort Sea was behind on schedule (causing a nice new record anomaly dip), but is now filling up nicely, Baffin Bay and the Kara/Barentsz Sea are late, late, late (as can be seen on the regional graphs page of the ASI Graphs website). I will soon start to compare those regions, but in the meantime I have extended the concentration maps on the aforementioned ASI Graphs website with November, so you can compare to previous years yourself.

CT SIA finally above -2 million km2 anomaly mark

After three full months the Cryosphere Today sea ice area anomaly trend line has finally left the zone below the 2 million square kilometre mark:
As usual, Jim Pettit is serving the current statistical hors d'oeuvres:

• CT SIA area increased by 203k km2 yesterday; that was the fifth double century increase this year, equalling the number of such days seen last year (three of which occurred in the first week of November).
• Area now stands at 6.19 million km2. That's more than 300k km2 less than last year on the same day, and nearly 50k less than 2007.
• Area has increased by 3.955 million km2 in the 47 days since the minimum was reached.
• SIA is the lowest ever seen on day .8301. 2012 has had the lowest daily area 139 times, or 45.4% of the year.
• The SIA daily average for October was 4.3076575 million km2, barely edging out 2007's 4.3089695 km2.
• The negative SIA anomaly fell below two million km2 yesterday, the first time it's done so since August 1. The anomaly had been greater than two million for 90 consecutive days, including the top three, and 12 of the top 20, largest negative anomalies on the record.

Here's the CT SIA graph: