For some reason or other the webpage from the University of Bremen showing daily updated AMSR-E sea ice maps was down most of last week. I even had to remove their ice concentration map from my collection of Arctic sea ice graphs and maps because it slowed down the loading of the page considerably. The maps showed up intermittently, but never stayed up for long.
It looks like the problem is solved, whatever it was. Their archive - which was completely inaccessible as well - is up too, so here's a short animation showing last week's changes in ice concentration according to Uni Bremen:
When focusing on the western area of the Beaufort Sea it feels like watching a blinker. :-)
Cryosphere today is back and on the 9th now.
Posted by: dorlomin | July 15, 2010 at 17:27
Thanks for the information, dorlomin! It's on the 10th now, as is the 30-day animation.
I would really love to know if it was a coincidence that both CT and Uni Bremen (both use the ASMR-E sensor) were down. I've emailed CT but didn't get an answer - I'm not complaining, they're busy enough - although the warning that they had server issues followed quickly afterwards.
Posted by: Neven | July 15, 2010 at 17:36
Ice breaking up north of Bathurst Island, in the strait across to Ellef Ringnes Island.
Posted by: Nick Barnes | July 15, 2010 at 23:28
The ice sure looked bad on the 10th in the CT map--Bremen, too, though the details may differ slightly.
The degree to which sea ice area & extent numbers really don't tell the whole tale has been brought home forcefully to me this season.
Posted by: Kevin McKinney | July 15, 2010 at 23:40
Graphic I found on my travels......
http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/sst/ophi/color_anomaly_NPS_ophi0.png
Posted by: dorlomin | July 16, 2010 at 00:04
Is it just me or do these animation not always make sense?
Yellow blotches of supposedly thinner coverage are forming and then disappearing without a reasonable progressive pattern.
It seems like the movement of clouds must be altering the colors somehow.
Posted by: Andrew Xnn | July 16, 2010 at 00:51
I agree, Andrew. This has been going on for weeks now. First I thought it was caused by melt ponds, but now we have ice concentration maps going offline (I don't know if there's a correlation) . It looks extremely erratic, to the point that I wonder what the use of those colours is if they show up one day and disappear the next.
Posted by: Neven | July 16, 2010 at 01:17
I was playing with date in the URL in the MODIS Mosaic, to compare 2010 to 2009, and it really brings home the poor condition of the ice in the central pack.
2010
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?mosaic=Arctic.2010196.terra.4km
2009
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?mosaic=Arctic.2009196.terra.4km
I'm interested in 2008 and 2007 also, but this data does not appear to be online. Does anybody know if they have an archive, that can be accessed?
Posted by: Lord Soth | July 16, 2010 at 12:49
I think they have an archive (I sometimes see MODIS images from 2007 etc in scientific reports), but it isn't accessible. Otherwise someone would have pointed it out already. Too bad, eh?
Posted by: Neven | July 16, 2010 at 14:17
They finally have Cryosphere fully functional with the image for the 15th.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png
It almost looks like the arctic pack is being split into two. One mass concentration on the Canadian side and one on the Russian. Very strange weather indeed.
Posted by: Lord Soth | July 16, 2010 at 16:25
Lord Soth: the mosaic is a new thing at MODIS. Try here instead:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/2010197/
Even there these are still "realtime" images, i.e. prior to some sorts of processing. I believe that processed images are also available.
Posted by: Nick Barnes | July 16, 2010 at 17:08
The realtime images can be useful to "steal a march" on the mosaic. For instance, here is Viscount Melville Sound today (not yet visible on the mosaic):
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?T101970335
Posted by: Nick Barnes | July 16, 2010 at 17:10
Andrew and Neven: I think I disagree, at least with respect to the 30 day concentration image animation at Cryosphere Today. Firstly, I think I generally does show a pretty high degree of continuity from day to day, i.e. large areas of low concentration generally shift, grow, decline and change shape rather than popping up out of nowhere or entirely vanishing. However, inasmuch as they do appear and vanish suddenly, isn't that what we'd expect from a somewhat fragmented mass of floating ice? The wind blows one way, large solid masses of ice shift and the fragmented ice in one area spreads out, the wind shifts, large solid masses shift and push those fragments back together while releasing other fragmented ice a long way away to spread out.
Of course, we shouldn't have to rely on my intuition or faith that CT/University of Bremen wouldn't prominently feature a largely meaningless image on their web sites. At least to the extent cloud cover permits, it should be possible to look at MODIS imagery and determine whether the low concentration areas in the CT animation consistently coincide with visibly low concentration ice or not, shouldn't it?
Posted by: Jon Torrance | July 16, 2010 at 18:09
Jon: you are correct, I would say. It's like a wave, or the 'hole theory' of transistors. As particles move one way, open water appears to move the other way.
I posted two SST images in a comment to my own blog which seem to show the same effect:
http://www.science20.com/chatter_box/arctic_ice_july_2010_update_2
Neven: the mosaic images don't go back far, but the near-realtime images go back to July 2002. You can access them via the 'calender' page.
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/?calendar
hth ;-)
Posted by: logicman | July 16, 2010 at 19:05
I think I disagree, at least with respect to the 30 day concentration image animation at Cryosphere Today.
I agree that the 30-day animation at CT looks much better than the animation I made of Uni Bremen above. I don't mean to disparage the ice concentration maps, and if I do it is my Dunning-Kruger playing up.
Nick or Patrick, I remember vaguely seeing those real-time images and dismissing them as not suitable for comparative animations. Do you have any idea if there are any 'flat' processed images available from previous years?
Posted by: Neven | July 16, 2010 at 20:50
Nothing specifically to do with this post but I only just noticed that the chief scientist for NASA's ICESCAPE mission is blogging from the Arctic at http://science.dodlive.mil/tag/icescape/ so perhaps others hadn't found that yet and would be interested.
Posted by: Jon Torrance | July 16, 2010 at 21:23