Animation 12: year to year

I figured it would be interesting to look and compare the current sea ice concentration map with previous years:

If those areas with lower concentrations go...

Comments

[Finn]

If You look at the Bremen concentration map, so it seems that NW Passage is open. On the satellite pictures there are clouds over the Banks Island, so You cannot be totally sure. Maybe the norvegian sailors took a wrong direction."Go West, young man, go west"

[Phil263]

It is interesting to compare 2010 with 2008 at this date. The two years are about the same in SIE ( around 6.3 million k) while 2008 is slightly further down in SIA ( 3.968 for 2008, 4.096 for 2010). However the contrast in ice concentration is very sharp. While 2008 has a pretty uniform colour apart from a big chunk North of the Beaufort, in 2010 , the concentration seems to be much looser overall except for the area above Greenland. The area that was eventually lost in 2008 was much larger than what shows as a yellow green bit on your animation. An indication that the weather conditions could have been crucial to the ultimate minimum rather than the state of the ice at this stage of the season.

[Andrew Xnn]

Looks like the NWP is clearer now than it was in any previous year.

[Ron Broberg]

Anyone know why the Canadian Ice Service stopped mapping the Parry Channel?

Ice Products
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/app/WsvPrdCanQry.cfm?CanID=11081&Lang=eng

Parry Channel
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/prods/WIS37SD/20091024180000_WIS37SD_0004641647.gif

And the DMI SST maps shows ice temps in parts of the Parry Channel.

The clouds in modis are killing me!

[Lord Soth]

It's not that they stop mapping the Parry Channel. They haven't started yet for this year.

The Canadian Ice Service has a fix time that they start mapping certain areas for ice; which reflect when they will become to interest to navigation. This interval is now hopelessly out of date; with current conditions in the Arctic.

This year when they started to map Hudson Bay on a daily basis; most of the ice was already gone.

You will have to rely on the regional weekly ice maps; which are usally out Wednesday of every week.

[Andrew Xnn]

Found an interesting paper on the Summer Arctic Dipole Anomaly.
It is not a new phenomena and over the long term it is in a positive mode about 13% of the time. It can be more or less prominent, with the 1980's a period when the Anomaly was particularly positive. So, there has been no long term trend towards a more positive anomaly.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/a0355712t1827h0n/fulltext.pdf

With sea ice being so more fluid and broken up, the positive mode is able to export much more ice than in the past. Anyhow, while this paper links the anomaly to rainfall patterns in China, it also presents a fairly comprehensive review of the anomalies behavior over the last 45 years.

[siili]

The weather in the coming 2-3 days looks like it's shaping up for the ultimate test of Nevens floataway hypotesis with a very deep low forming over Novaja Zemlja, with the possibility of a high over Greenland giving a hand in blowing away the biggest iceisland ever or probably at least disrupt it further from it's already bad state. Todays early microwave images show the low concentration areas spreading.

The same models are forseeing southerly winds and increasing surface temperatures over the Beaufort, so if area and extent don't dip now they probably never will. But i have been a bad forecaster before, so probably something completely different happens.

[fredt34]

A group of French explorers had decided to "go camping" on some ice in Eastern Groenland Coast, and drift on it - but the ice turned out to be impossible - here is their latest report (translated through Google): http://translate.google.fr/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fblog-de-glace.org%2Findex.php%3Fpost%2F2010%2F06%2F11%2FLes-Robinsons-des-Glaces-sont-sur-place&sl=fr&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8

[Lord Soth]

Looks like about two thirds of the last remaining large chunk of sea ice (fast ice) is breaking away from North East Greenland.

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r02c03.2010226.aqua.500m

This is the same area on the same date last year:

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r02c03.2009226.aqua.500m

and this is the same area from last year around mid September

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r02c03.2009256.aqua.500m

We are already ahead of last year. The northern 1/3 of this land fast ice is covered by clouds, but I image it will break up in the next few weeks also.

I'm not sure if that section of land fast ice in North East Greenland has ever cleared before.