I'm still lamenting the fact that the Naval Research Laboratory has pulled the plug from the PIPS 2.0 website. Sure, they were having trouble with their ice thickness maps, but I had hoped they would leave the ice displacement maps in place until the end of this melting season. It was a tremendous help last year in determining whether the fun was over or not. They have new maps out on their ACNFS website, but somehow it's not giving me the same reliable info as the previous, much simpler version. And the AARI ice drift map is only updated on Thursdays for the entire week, which makes it less reliable as the days go by.
Luckily, Arctic.io has been tinkering to find a solution after Robert Grumbine linked to a data set in one of the comment sections here (can't remember which one). He converted the numbers to a map with vectors that can be laid over his Arctic Mosaic map. He made another overlay that consists of the DMI SST map we know from the Daily Graphs page. Together it looks something like this:
As it says in Arctic.io's post:
The drift forecast model visualized here as an overlay on the Arctic mosaic implements this drift law. The model is rather simple, nevertheless the results are pretty good. It provides a forecast of 16 days, shown on the map are the 72 hours forecast vectors.
The National Weather Service's National Centers For Environmental Prediction's Environmental Modeling Center runs this model for decades and it is used by the Anchorage Weather Service Forecast Office and the National Ice Center (NIC).
The relevant science and math of the drift model is explained in this paper: Virtual Floe Ice Drift Forecast Model Intercomparison. I’d like to thank R. Grumbine for his help clearing out some roadblocks during the course of this project.
Read the rest of this post here.
This could come in very handy in those last two weeks of the melting season. Thanks, Arctic.io!
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Update: Arctic.io has told me that you can press the buttons 1 to 6 to get different forecasts for difference days (1 for 1d, 2 for 2d, etc...). Pressing 0 even gets you an animation.
This is a great service your doing Neven, I wish i could find something this good on antarctica.
I've been convinced for years that conditions were building to turn the 'gulf stream' around the top of greenland. This would turn the arctic from an arid frozen desert into a more temperate zone shifting the cold 'dump' point for the northern hemisphere, creating radical shifts in every N.H.climate. With the extraordinary floods and high temperatures in the states this year I assumed a massive build up of heat in the gulf of mexico which would penetrate the arctic late in the season. Local weather in the arctic has delayed the melt between N.E. Greenland and Svalbard now I see myself clutching at straws to see a late season melt throughout this area, but everything looks ripe at the moment for such an event [IMO]. Any thoughts?
I can't access http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
never had a problem before, makes me think something big is happening.
regards johnm
Posted by: D | September 06, 2011 at 10:27
Hi John,
NSIDC goes offline a lot. I wouldn't worry about that. They will probably come online today or tomorrow and have a new summary for August.
As Chris Biscan points out here there's a big low forming west of Scandinavia that is probably going to push the ice southwards towards Fram again.
Posted by: Neven | September 06, 2011 at 11:47
Arctic.io has told me that you can press the buttons 1 to 6 to get different forecasts for difference days (1 for 1d, 2 for 2d, etc...). Pressing 0 even gets you an animation.
Posted by: Neven | September 06, 2011 at 23:12