I was hesitating whether I should write about this (besides my personal combination of busy/lazy) for a couple of days, because the Arctic is such an amazing place that it's easy to get carried away. When you see something for the first time, it's tempting to go: "Oh my Gawd, that haz got to be the first time!" That happens to me a lot, especially during winter. It's only logical as we are seeing a lot of things for the first time, or for the first time since a very long time. But there still remains a very fine line between 'unique' and 'unusual, but not unique'. A line that can sometimes be difficult to tread.
For instance last year at the start of February I wrote about the spectacular lack of ice in the Kara and Barentsz Seas, notably around Novaya Zemlya. I had a hunch that this was pretty much unprecedented during the satellite era and said as much in a guest post for Climate Progress. I was mildly criticized for it by the NSIDC's Walt Meier via Climate Central (and I will never forgive him for it ;-) ). Now the hunch turned out to be reasonably correct - although there had been a similar retreat of ice at a later date in 2011, caused by wind patterns - but I didn't invest the time to make sure it was.
This year things are calm in the Kara and Barentsz Seas. At the surface that is, with not even a breeze towards the coast to show how strong or weak the ice is. But as usual, when it's calm on one side of the Arctic, something is going on on the other side. Some commenters have been keeping a sharp eye on this, and I think it now merits a blog post of its own, if only because of the possible implications this event might have for the ice pack once the melting season gets underway. And it's big time spectacular.
Last week, on February 22nd commenter A-Team - who has really been animating the blog lately, figuratively and literally speaking - made the animation you see on top of the post, showing massive cracking in the Beaufort Sea. In the following days fellow commenter Jim Hunt picked up on that and wrote a blog post on his Econnexus blog called Arctic Sea Ice is Cracking Under the Strain with a spectacular image of the ice pack in the Beaufort Sea on February 27th.
Meanwhile over on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum commenter BornFromTheVoid remarked that a similar thing occured last year in April. A-Team was quick to turn that event into an animation (that I had to edit a bit to cut down on size):
According to A-Team: "If taken as a simplistic predictor of the 2013 melt season, we are 51 days ahead of last season."
Chris Reynolds weighed in: "I've done some digging around regards this long fracture/lead in Beaufort. Nothing as big has occurred since 1999 in QuikScat or Ascat, the weather doesn't seem that abnormal, so I think it's probably mainly due to abnormally thin sea ice." Also see his blog post with further analysis.
That's the story so far. What we have here, definitely isn't a failure to communicate. I take my hat and wig off to all the commenters and bloggers who pulled this info together, as much in real-time as the satellites will allow.
This event is caused by two things. First of all there's a very big high-pressure system that is causing the Beaufort Gyre to start making its usual clockwise turn. It popped up about 10 days ago and has been pretty stable since then:
According to the ECMWF weather forecast model this high is going to remain pretty intense in the coming week at the least, with sea level pressures of up to 1055 hPa, so we can expect further cracking and transport of ice (some of it multi-year ice) towards Bering Strait. Which brings me to the second reason behind this event, already mentioned by Chris Reynolds: the ice is weak, it's thin. How do we know it's thin? Because of last year.
Last year I thought that the ice in the Beaufort Sea had thickened up a bit because of low temperatures throughout most of winter (while all the action was in the Kara-Barentsz region) and that it would probably withstand the onslaught of sun and wind better than the Atlantic sector of the Arctic. To my surprise, and that of Walt Meier among others, the ice in the Beaufort Sea was decimated at great speed.
The fact that the ice lets itself be pulled so willingly into the Beaufort Gyre so early in the year, with the start of the melting season still some 4 weeks off, is a sure sign that it's thin. This, of course, is a very bad prelude to the melting season, even if there are a couple of weeks left for the ice to thicken. Those huge cracks will freeze over, but the ice will be very brittle and the first to go, probably creating open spaces between multi-year ice floes where the Sun will shine and quickly heat things up. Unless the cloud cavalry comes to the rescue. Like A-team says: "Beginning of the end, end of the beginning, or just a bad hair day for the ice pack -- we'll have to wait and see."
The one good thing about that big high pressure system is that it makes for clear skies, which means very cold conditions at the surface. As blogger Diablobanquisa reported earlier today: -51ºC today at Eureka, Ellesmere island (link). Maybe the ice in the central Arctic and Canadian Archipelago can thicken up some more. It is also pushing ice towards the Atlantic where up till now there has been a lot of open water. This could very well cause another relatively late and high sea ice maximum, which will no doubt be used as disinformation in some quarters.
This image shows how the core of the multi-year ice, just north of the Canadian Archipelago, which should be the thickest sea ice in the Arctic, is not cracking just yet (image again courtesy of A-Team):
Discuss this event here or over at the Forum. I need a drink...
I am far from a global warming denier. You can look at my other posts.
I believe in following the facts though. Nobody on this forum predicted we would have record volume gain this winter. This is an unexpected fact.
Hardly unexpected, it was virtually inevitable following a record minimum! Failure to do so would have severe implications for this summer.
Phil.
Posted by: me.yahoo.com/a/nSjChi4X3vr8X3DRw93GkY1.cerja.8nvWk- | March 12, 2013 at 19:24
Phil,
I agree with you, when record lows of any kind are registered, gains will follow, pretty logical when it comes to the Arctic, at least for the near future!
Posted by: Espen Olsen | March 12, 2013 at 19:37
Kevin- 2012 was lower.
For those keeping track, 16.4 in 2008 was the previous largest volume gain through March 1st. This years volume gain has been 16.7 through March 1st. As we all know, 2008 was the only year this decade with a volume recovery, finishing 600k km3 higher than 2007. Winter ice gain has a large effect on summer minimums.
As for why I think the cracks won't result in as much loss this year- When ice cracks during the winter this opens up water and results in even more ice. We clearly saw this February. We still have another month for ice to gain even further. Volume peaks in April.
It seems that the most likely mechanism for cracks resulting in melt would be increased ice transport. But these cracks are a long ways from the fram strait or eastern edge that ice mostly gets transported to. Also, ice transport by volume through the fram has been remarkably steady over the years.
It's possible that there will be record melt this summer to counterract the record ice gain, but I don't see any strong theoretical reason to count on it.
Posted by: Dave C | March 12, 2013 at 19:46
Where o where is the Goat's Head? Is this a section of MYI that is migrating near the Pole? Is this a term coined on this site?
Posted by: Supertuscan | March 12, 2013 at 19:47
Dave,
Read my previous note.
Posted by: Espen Olsen | March 12, 2013 at 20:01
Gentlemen, hold your comments. PIOMAS post will be up in a minute.
Posted by: Neven | March 12, 2013 at 20:02
One item of note: The SLP currently over Kamchatka is now anticipated to move over the CAB in the next three days - a true polar low - and exit near the Fram. It is bringing warmer air with it into the Arctic Basin.
http://polarmet.osu.edu/nwp/animation.php?model=arctic_wrf&run=00&var=plot001
While the ice will certainly thicken, the impacts of continued lows may weaken it for later melt. Time will tell.
Posted by: Apocalypse4Real | March 12, 2013 at 20:03
Baffin Bay, Greenland,
Heavy cracks are now seen along the the coast of Greenland:
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r03c02.2013071.terra
Posted by: Espen Olsen | March 12, 2013 at 21:56
Given the high temps in the Baffin Bay area all winter long, I'm expecting a fast melt and high SSTs there, possibly with similar consequences for the GIS.
Posted by: Neven | March 12, 2013 at 22:06
[She's taking the Prius into the dealer, nobody's home to monitor computer useage!!!]
Don't miss the Big Event arriving Sunday March 17th, according to the Navy ice speed and drift forecast!!! The overlay below shows the ice coming down hard and fast from the north on last relic ice refugia -- this will be a compression event, unlike the extensional tension on the Beaufort. Will the ice pile higher and deeper or just squeeze out to the sides like very cold toothpaste?
We actually don't have an exact handle on timing because of satellite swath assembly and separate processing and release delays for each map or image, plus hairline cracks not showing up immediately, so let's say the 18th or 19th to be safe.
I've got the Navy animations teased apart now by a circuitous procedure that isn't worth describing because it won't port to other platforms. The vector arrows are too thick really but being straight black, they can be selected and made transparent or translucent so that the imagery underneath is not obscured. Since the Navy uses color to contour up regions of high and low ice pack velocity, I decided to use a grayscale Ascat radar base so as not to have competing color schemes.
Arctic maps and imagery in polar stereographic projection can been done very accurately by taking the longest common distance on between two features visible on both, typically the south shore of Chaunskaya Bay across from Pevek, Siberia to the spit of land NW of the ruins of the Reykjanesviti lighthouse in Iceland.Note the North Pole is not on the intersections of diagonals so the rotation needs to be offset to center at coordinates (411,447). When an Ascat base layer is brought in, it will need a small offset (compare the coordinates of the tip of Banks Island).
To overlay Navy Hycom products on imagery, scale up and rotate by:
Ascat radar 122.30% 45º
Jaxa radar 109.61%
Arctic Composite IR 336.72%
Beaufort IR 910.72%
Map trivia? Yes and no, it depends on whether you want a StackBuilder cgi that puts it all out of sight, for everyone.
Posted by: A-Team | March 13, 2013 at 00:07
Supertuscan, the goat's head is a stable, easily recognizable block of older thicker ice that is being used to precisely track motions and rotation in the central Arctic over the last few years.
You can see two white pale horns a quarter inch above the north pole in the image above. In some configurations, it looks more like a pinwheel, or lately, a kangaroo.
This block of ice is peripheral to the main relic older ice, not strategically important. The name doesn't matter -- what matters as that it persists as a (not strictly) rigid block, rather than undergoing constant pizza dough deformations like the main near-coastal older ice.
I'm getting to the explanation. But first recall Joe Romm and his admonition to use extended metaphors for effective scientific explanation.
Rubber sheet motion and materials failure (fracturing) are very complex to describe. Rigid block are easy.
Thus the goat's head is the place to start for ice kinematics. Which is the place to start for ice dynamics. Which may be more important now to summer melt than in the past.
So it's all about the camel getting its nose under the tent. We ruminate here quite a bit on the future of Arctic sea ice. So the coming extended metaphor is strung on artiodactyls.
Posted by: A-Team | March 13, 2013 at 11:11
Here is the Big Crunch anticipated for 17 March 13, hopefully to show up in crack pattern by March 19.
Black arrows show Navy-predicted ice drift and speed; grayscale image is Ascat radar, orange is higher resolution Ellesmere 10.8µ infrared.
The outlined goat's head will be moving poleward but this is incidental to the main ice compression event.
Posted by: A-Team | March 13, 2013 at 13:29
Here is a new Arctic Death Spiral
http://haveland.com/share/arctic-death-spiral-1979-201302.png
February average is still lower than last year, in spite of the welcome regrowth.
Posted by: Andy Lee Robinson | March 13, 2013 at 13:47
Hey, that 'death spiral' is pretty good... Dr. Serreze's famous comment has launched quite a few graphs now.
Posted by: Kevin McKinney | March 13, 2013 at 14:39
A-Team..
Looking at the image of Navy-predicted ice drift and speed, it seems some of the effects will have to be compaction along the CA. Could this help some of the MYI to survive the coming melt season and build in the next freeze season?
Posted by: Shared Humanity | March 13, 2013 at 15:28
Following up to my previous comment above, it took about 20 days last year from the beggining of signs of [imho] bottom melt at Banks island until there was an opening formed between there and Mackenzie bay, given this is much earlier in the [melt?]season lets give it 30 with nuetral weather so around the 28th+/- but before the 10th of April even with unfavourable weather until we see the same this year.
Posted by: johnm33 | March 13, 2013 at 19:27
Shared H, yes compression could result in ice ridges or over-thrusting, resulting in thicker compacted ice there. Ice ridging is difficult to observe. The best shot at that was a couple of weeks back with Modis visible seeing shadows from nearly horizontal sunlight very early in the day. The ridges are only tens of meters wide whereas fractures can grow to tens of kilometers across.
Actually, the motion vectors really suggest only a tiny triangle of compaction with the main body of old ice splitting in two, the eastward portion moving along the shore to the Fram and the westward half moving towards the melt zone in the Beaufort.
The event is still 4 days off -- heavy black (warm) clouds are moving into the area. So the first issue is no surface visibility at all with visible or infrared imagery and radar not quite having good enough resolution. Fracturing is continuing as we speak, so the second issue is the status of the ice at the time the compression event begins.
I put the March 17th Navy over a March 13th infrared Arctic Composite. This shows the cracks fairly well relative to the predicted downward ice motion. The image extends off Typepad over to the Fram.
Posted by: A-Team | March 13, 2013 at 21:45
Johnm33, have you been following the Nares as well? It looks to me like something has changed over there in the last couple of days. Melt coming up from the south. The Nares has a long observational record and there is all kinds of high resolution imagery for it, so it is favorable for year-to-year melt onset comparision. I
I've attached some 12-13 March infrared imagery, newer ones at the top. The three lower rows represent channels 4,3,2 so they could be combined -- perhaps informatively -- into single color images.
Posted by: A-Team | March 13, 2013 at 22:57
Hi A-team,
(lot's o'crickets in 'ere, wot? ;^)
Here's my comments on AMSR-2 regular observations and the Spinup plan, from Aug 10, 2012:
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/arctic-summer-storm-open-thread/comments/page/1/#comment-6a0133f03a1e37970b0177440bf9c9970d
It's my opinion that significant ridging can only occur in MYI, which has the mechanical strength to resist further breakup, and the thermodynamic energy content to resist melting.
Specifically, when new salty sea ice is subducted, it melts down to the level of the old ice keel. First year ice can not grow much beyond its thermodynamic equilibrium depth.
Good work on the new gyre images. Thanks!
Cheers,
Lodger
Posted by: Artful Dodger | March 13, 2013 at 23:09
A-Team, I thought I had a blog post with a comparison of Nares ice arches in previous years, but can't find it (should've given it a category of its own, silly me). Of course, there's the Nares expert blog from Andreas Münchow: Icy Seas. And the imagery on his university work page.
Posted by: Neven | March 13, 2013 at 23:16
BTW, I expect that ice arch to hold until June at least.
Found the images of previous ice arches on my hard disk. Don't know what date though, but I guess it's about the location and shape of the arches.
2003
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2004
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2005
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2006
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2007
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2008
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2009
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2010
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2011
Posted by: Neven | March 13, 2013 at 23:28
I have updated the METOP 2 IASI CH4 imagery from March 5-12. Almost each 12 hour report has recorded concentration levels about 2100 PPBv, in some parts of the imagery.
There has been a significant amount of release activity in the Norwegian, Barents and Kara Seas. As fracturing has occurred in the Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi Seas, there are spikes of methane as that trapped under the ice leaks through.
In the last few days, areas with thawing also reveal higher levels of methane for short periods of time.
Finally, Antarctica has a cloud of higher concentration of methane (above 1890 PPBv) that has been spreading over a larger area.
I have attached three Google Earth overlays to give an idea of dispersion and concentration of CH4 during the last few days - in the Arctic Methane Release thread on thr Forum. These represent only a single mb layer of methane within a 12 hour period of concentration. The whole series of 586 mb and 718-742 mb GE images will be added to my website by tomorrow.
https://sites.google.com/site/a4r2013metop2iasich4co2/home/2011-airs-ch4-359-hpa-vs-iasi-ch4-970-600-mb
A-team, your image wizardry continues to educate and inspire me. Thanks for all you are doing for observing this incredible winter/spring season.
One more thing, yesterday on the Ellesmere imagery there was not only plumes, but some of them were dark - meaning heat release from the fractures above Borden Island. I'll post an example on the Forum.
Posted by: Apocalypse4Real | March 14, 2013 at 00:20
Hi Neven,
A quick Google finds your Jun 17, 2011 post:
Nares Bridge is falling down
Cheers,
Lodger
Posted by: Artful Dodger | March 14, 2013 at 02:08
A-Team fwiw my view is that the retreat of Nares from the south is due to the pressure of PW/AW? from the north undermining the ice as it breaks through, that means it would have to be very energetic at Lincoln, which predicates a rapid thaw of the whole channel, and even as I say it I don't believe it, but can't think of a plausible alternative. If it was coming from north of Banks is.through to Devon is. you'd think it'd be exhausted likewise through Nares but from where to the south? zero possibilities. So on a balance of probabilities basis I'd guess PW halted by the thick ice of the pyramid turning south.
But don't quote me.
Posted by: johnm33 | March 14, 2013 at 02:15
Thanks, Lodger, I did manage to find that one, but I was actually looking for those ice arch images. Some of them are from Patrick Lockerby's blog, some not, can't remember, didn't label properly either.
Posted by: Neven | March 14, 2013 at 02:40
I have updated the IASI and AIRS/Giovanni CH4 imagery through March 13, 12-24 hr.
According to Dr Yurganov, the CH4 readings in the Norwegian and Barents seas are the highest recorded by IASI.
See:
https://sites.google.com/site/apocalypse4realmethane2013/home
Posted by: Apocalypse4Real | March 14, 2013 at 17:01
To all members of Crackheads Anonymous: There's a new blog post dedicated to the cracking event. Please continue the discussion there (or on the ASIF).
Posted by: Neven | March 14, 2013 at 21:59