Race to Fram Strait 5

Artful Dodger has sent me another batch of IJIS sea ice concentration images. I've made an extra effort and added dates to the frames:

UPDATE: Lodger posts another animation - of the Western Arctic and its mini-ice pack in the East Siberian Sea - in the comment section of the last update. As it is equally interesting I figured I'd add it here:

Comments

[Hottopicnz]

Don't know if anyone else has spotted it (and apologies if its old news), but the Petermann/Lockerby ice island has lost its head (MODIS), and a good sized chunk is rapidly drifting down Nares Strait.

[JackTaylor]

Olga Strait is the name of the opening between Svalbard and Franz Josef Land if ever doing geography search, not named on a lot of maps.

[Neven]

Gareth, people like FrankD are on the job and Patrick Lockerby has written an update.

Thanks, Jack. Olga Strait, what a lovely name.

[Artful Dodger]

Hi Neven. I have posted the new IJIS Sea Ice Concentration animation for Sep 01-13.

[r w Langford]

The fat lady is shaking the stage. Have a look at the floes on the north coast of Ellesmere Island. http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r03c03.2010257.terra.250m Pretty loose floes to come apart like that. No freeze up yet in this image. Big winds could make quite a finale to this years show.

[Kevin McKinney]

And the prelim for 9/14 is. . . 4,982,969 km2!

The seesaw is back, apparently.

[Artful Dodger]

Hi Neven. The new IJIS Western Arctic animation is up for Sep 1-14. Could you please replace the one above to this new one? Thanks!

[Neven]

Done, Lodger. Thanks!

That ice pack in the East Siberian Sea looks to be on the move, eh?

[Artful Dodger]

Yes, highly mobile ice. MODIS shows HUGE new fracturing throughout the entire pack, from Greenland to Northern Russia. Man, 2011 is gonna make the '90's look like the '60's ;^)

Also, I hear from a little bird that NSIDC may announce the Annual Minimum SIE today...

Joe Romm has a new post on Climate Progress: "Exclusive: Scientists track sharp drop in oldest, thickest Arctic sea ice".

[Neven]

I've updated the animations to September 15th. In the first image we see the freeze-up, in the second we see the compaction.

[Artful Dodger]

Many Commenter are speculating about exactly what is the compaction potential in the main Ice Pack this Fall. Jon T has suggested an easy way to estimate one such, which is based on our CAPIE ratio.

So, let's compare: On Sep 15, 2010 CAPIE was 64.93%. On Sep 15, 2008 CAPIE was 65.00%. Clearly, now that ultra-thin grease-ice is inflating SIA values, this technique doesn't point to much potential loss in SIE, even though 2010 reached it's lowest CAPIE value of 60.28% on Sep 03, 2010 (just 2 weeks ago).

Important side note: The years 2007-09 reached min. CAPIE on Aug 19, 13, and 16, respectively. So by this measure, we could say 2010's melt season was extended by about 18 days!

Back to speculation: if CAPIE is no longer useful, perhaps we can use Sea Ice Volume to estimate Fall compaction potential. Given that winds will compact Sea Ice until the point where the thickness of the floe creates sufficient mechanical resistance to further compaction. So if we use the average depth of Ice from other years, along with mid-Sep PIOMAS volume estimates, we could calculate how small the SIE would have to get to have the same thickness / resistance to compaction. This would potentially also be a good estimate for the fraction of multi-year Sea Ice when the melt starts again in Spring (all the extra area would be first year, salty ice).

Sound interesting? I await the PIOMAS numbers.

[me.yahoo.com/a/nSjChi4X3vr8X3DRw93GkY1.cerja.8nvWk-]

Last night's value confirmed with a small revision to 4,890,938.