ASI 2013 update 3: the Arctic goes POP

During the melting season I'm writing (bi-)weekly updates on the current situation with regards to Arctic sea ice (ASI). Central to these updates are the daily Cryosphere Today sea ice area (SIA) and IJIS sea ice extent (SIE) numbers, which I compare to data from the 2005-2012 period (NSIDC has a good explanation of sea ice extent and area in their FAQ). I also look at other things like regional sea ice area, compactness, temperature and weather forecasts, anything of particular interest.

The animation on the right consists of NSIDC
sea ice concentration maps, one for each ASI update.

Check out the Arctic Sea Ice Graphs website (ASIG)
for daily updated graphs, maps, live webcam images and
the Arctic Sea Ice Forum (ASIF) for detailed discussions.

June 21st 2013

Happy June Solstice!

With the fading of the persistent cyclone (PAC-2013) that held the Arctic in its grip for several weeks, the slow start of the melting is now definitely behind us. The cold has almost dissipated and massive heat waves in Alaska and Siberia spell trouble for the ice that is still clinging to respective coasts. The melting is shifting gears as we speak.

But 2013 is still trailing most of the other years, and especially 2012 that put on quite a show last year around this time. Whether 2013 can make up the deficit in weeks to come, depends as always on the weather, but also on the postponed effects PAC-2013 might have had on the ice pack, especially in its centre. There are large zones that look particularly weak, full of small ice floes, but it's not entirely sure what will happen, and more importantly, when it will happen.

Sea ice area (SIA)

The 2013 trend line (based on Cryosphere Today sea ice area data) was about to reach a cluster of years following a series of five century breaks in a row, but an uptick reported today threw a spanner in the works.

Here's the graph based on the latest data:

2013 trails 2012 by a massive 826 thousand km2, but is not trailing that much when it comes to the daily average decrease. Last year saw an enormous 111K daily drop in June, and 2013 is currently on 108K. When it comes to century breaks 2013 is performing decently with 21 century breaks for the season so far, which is already more than 2005 and 2006 had at the end of June.

Here's the link to my updated CT SIA spreadsheet.

The SIA anomaly has now dropped below the 1 million km2 mark:
Sea ice extent (SIE)

IJIS didn't report any sea ice extent data for a couple of days, which happens every once in a while, but everything's fine now. The 2013 trend line is still above all the others on this graph:

Just like last year we see a lag between extent and area data, where area seems to decrease much faster than extent. This usually has to do with melt ponding, to which SIA is more sensitive than SIE, but another factor this year could be the 'holes' in the interior of the ice pack - due to PAC-2013 - that definitely don't get registered for SIE. Sea ice area and sea ice extent graphs start to look more alike during the second half of the melting season.

Here's the link to my updated IJIS SIE spreadsheet.

Regional SIE and SIA

Regional graph of the week, taken from the Regional Graphs page:

This week we turn our attention to the Laptev Sea where most of the recent decline has taken place. As we can see on the historical graph showing data from the satellite era there were some big anomalies in 2011 and 2012 that occurred at the end of the melting season. This, of course, had to do with massive heat getting built up in the water, preventing the Laptev Sea from freezing over quickly.

A prerequisite for that large amount of heat is an early opening up of the Laptev Sea, like the one we are seeing at this very moment, even faster than last year. There's a good chance we'll also see the so-called Laptev Bite, a northward opening up of the ice pack towards the central Arctic. What's causing the Laptev Bite isn't entirely clear yet. Some people speculate it might have to do with the way the ocean floor is shaped, causing warmer waters from below to penetrate the halocline and get at the bottom of the ice.

Sea Level Pressure (SLP)

Let's have a look at what the animation of Danish Meteorological Institute SLP images for the last two weeks shows us:

PAC-2013 falls apart, immediately followed by other cyclones, but before that happens, the cyclone combines with high-pressure areas on the other side of the Arctic, over the Canadian Archipelago and Alaska, to create a small Dipole. This intrusion of high-pressure areas is what is causing the increased speed with which sea ice area declines by bathing the coasts of Alaska and Siberia in sunshine, causing the fast ice to turn blue, a sign of widespread melt ponding.

If that set-up keeps up, this blue ice will disintegrate and retreat from the coast, and so it makes sense to see what the 6-day weather forecast by the ECMWF model looks like:

It looks like the high-pressure areas are here to stay for a while longer, and so the ice in the Beaufort Sea can finally start to retreat from the Alaskan coast, much later than almost all recent years around this date. At the same time a high-pressure area over the Kara Sea will deal summarily with the ice there. And as a bonus, there's a third zone of high pressure near Hudson Bay and Baffin Bay where there's a lot of fragile ice waiting to be transformed into its liquid form.

Temperatures

With PAC-2013 now out of the way, it's time for the cold air temps in the Central Arctic Basin to finally exit. The heat waves in Alaska and Siberia can clearly be made out as well, but no anomalously warm temperatures over the Arctic Ocean as of yet:The DMI 80N temp graph is finally showing an extra uptick towards the 0 °C threshold, but it is taking an exceptionally long time and the modelled air temperature at the top of the Earth is still way below average:

Compared to two weeks ago, the DMI sea surface temperature anomaly map shows more orange and less dark red, except for the Bering Strait, where things are much warmer at the surface than they were in the last two years:

Lately I've noticed that the ice floes that have passed through Fram Strait are much more dispersed than usual, as can be seen on the latest satellite image (if you look past the haze):

Perhaps warm waters there are melting the floes much faster than usual and if transport through Fram Strait is slow, we could be seeing an ice-free Greenland Sea off the east coast of Greenland. I could be wrong, but I don't think this has happened often. Like a lizard shedding its tail.

Things are no less interesting on the west coast of Greenland, where Disko Bay is filled to the brim with warm water (image obviously courtesy of DMI):

Disko Bay is the place where icebergs start their journey, after leaving Jakobshavn Isbræ, one of the largest and fastest flowing Greenland glaciers (it drains 6.5% of the Greenland ice sheet and produces around 10% of all Greenland icebergs), also known for the largest glacier break-up ever caught on tape, as shown in the Chasing Ice documentary.

We'll see whether the anomalously high SSTs will have an effect on that region.

Update conclusion

Like I said in the first two ASI updates, it was a matter of time before conditions would align and the Arctic would go POP, like a new garden where after a few years everything suddenly falls into place, plants start to grow abundantly and the ecosystem comes into being. This moment seems to have come.

I'm expecting a very fast decline in area numbers - also known as The Cliff - especially after the slowest start in years. There's a lot of ice on the edges of the ice pack that had already melted out by this time last year, but at the same time there are more 'holes' in the interior of the ice pack that could increasingly play a role in July and August.

Whether the records will be broken for the second year straight (something that hasn't happened often in the Arctic, if ever), is still very much in the air, although personally, I believe that things looked a bit worse last year around this time. It's interesting to see the difference between a good and a bad start to the melting season. I think 2013 will start to catch up with 2007 and 2011 now, 2012 might be too big a hurdle, but I'm not ruling anything out. Nothing in the Arctic is a dead certainty.

We'll see where the 2013 melting season stands after the smoke clears in two to three weeks.

---

PS

I'll be gone from home for a week, but will keep an eye on things. It might take longer for comments to get released from the spam bucket. Sorry in advance.

Comments

[LRC]

Here is my main reason why I think AIS is going to go pop and that is structural strength of the ice.
Proof: A cyclone hits early in the melt season and basically destroys the ice at the north pole.
At Barrows you get some rain and the ice virtually vanishes.
Ice sheets that seem to be safe all of a sudden brakes apart (believe you would find it by wave action). This all to me means that the ice no matter how thick is very weak. So all you need is a combination of rain, wind and heat and this ice will go very fast. How many are willing to bet that in the next 2 months you will not have plenty of all 3 events happening? The ice extent may be great, but that ice is as weak as it has ever been and it will not take much to make that ice disappear.

[John Christensen]

@LRC,
You are correct in this assessment, evidently, as the state of the ice is terrible, and overall structural integrity the lowest we have seen (yet).
The only slim upside that you have to recognize is the fact that a lot of water still has ice cover.
The consequence of the ice cover plus cloud cover/relatively low temperatures, is that we have not seen significant SST increases within the Arctic Ocean or adjacent seas (Beaufort, ESS, Laptev, etc.) - yet.
So the waters have for this summer taken up less heat caused by sun radiation, which lowers the occurence of ice shifting across heated top water layers.
Not saying the situation is not bad, not saying ice is in a good state in any sense, but it has been given a break, which clearly will leave it better off by mid-Sept. than anticipated by early May.
The cliff is still looming - it has only been postponed to some degree.

[John Christensen]

Kara Sea SIA dropping like a stone for two days on CT, which is interesting as the area has the coldest temperatures today of the Arctic region, at minus 3-5C (http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/weather/arcticweather_imagecontainer.php).
Rain, wind, or sensors tricked by clouds?

[Jim Hunt]

A-Team - Continuing our slow motion conversation via the spam filter, might I point you once again at the forum thread on the topic of buoys?

The OBuoy's "angle of dangle" is still being recorded for posterity. I'm inclined to the view that it is now (temporarily?) free floating, and hence upright once again.

Rob Dekker's related thread entitled "Bottom melt in Central Arctic?" may also be of interest.

[Henry1]

re: ice pack in CAB:

Yeah I see the clusters of lower concentration in the CAB, but by this time in 2010 we saw them too. I know they were earlier this year, but it hasn't "seemed" to have gotten decisively worse. The rest of the ice pack looks terrible in several previous years compared to this year. Ice that surrounds the CAB and protects it as it compresses/melts. In short, I don't see how some of these holes in the CAB are going to just open up and cause a mass melt out in a 50 day period.

But that's just me and perhaps I will be proven wrong.

[A-Team]

I don't see any significant similarities to 2010 -- can you post an image or two supporting that view?

It is really the central Arctic that we want to keep an eye on, especially the older ice. The peripheral seas are toast -- it matters not whether early or late because once we're down to all first-year ice, it melts away every summer from there on out.

I hope someone can share the magical secret imagery that has allowed them (or their favorite algorithmic product) accurate assessment of the state of the ice in the central Arctic -- it certainly isn't Modis visible, infrared, active or passive microwave because all of these have been significantly affected by cloud cover the entire last month.

Certainly the 18 and 36 Ghz channels have struggled over the last five weeks to see through the clouds for even a single day, especially in two broad swaths (between the Chuckchi and north pole, and along the CAA).

Montaging the best days does however allow a general picture to emerge of a huge swath across the Beaufort/Chuckchi/East Siberian Sea (best view on June 18th), a second immense swath of different melt character extending down centrally to it from Svalbard (persistent cyclone impact area), the multi-year ice squeezed in the middle like toothpaste (according to Navy Hycom), and the usual open waters above the Bering Strait and in the Siberian bays.

As the two large swaths effectively melt out in the coming month, removing the buttressing, the warmed multi-year ice will spread out visco-elastically, thinning it and exposing it to storms and currents.

In the past, it took a 'black swan' weather event to reach an extreme September state; with the ice so weak today, a gray swan or even an off-white one might do it.

[David Vun Kannon]

Mostly off topic, but since A-Team mentioned buttressing, the following video is talking about glacier acceleration when the buttress of the floating ice shelf in front of them collapses. From AAAS 2013 meeting.
http://membercentral.aaas.org/multimedia/videos/ice-sheets-sea-level-and-other-surprises-benefits-understanding-some-beautiful-pla

Recommended for its easy to understand, yet compelling, content.

[Klon Jay]

I'd like to point out that for extent (http://meteomodel.pl/klimat/arcticice_nsidc.png), this year is about where 2007 was at this point, or with DMI (http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current_new.png), about equal to 2009, which diverged with 2012 only at the end of July. For area (http://meteomodel.pl/klimat/arcticice.png) it's below 2009 and almost same as 2011. 2011 and 2012 area diverged on day 210. Just looking at extent or area doesn't always tell us a lot.

[Klon Jay]

Henry, take a look here, you can toggle back to last year as well.
http://earthdata.nasa.gov/labs/worldview/?map=-725024,-470272,2039776,1549056&products=baselayers,MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_TrueColor~overlays,arctic_coastlines_3413&time=2013-06-28&switch=arctic

[jdallen_wa]

Selectively quoting John Christensen:

The only slim upside that you have to recognize is the fact that a lot of water still has ice cover.
The consequence of the ice cover plus cloud cover/relatively low temperatures, is that we have not seen significant SST increases within the Arctic Ocean or adjacent seas (Beaufort, ESS, Laptev, etc.) - yet.
So the waters have for this summer taken up less heat caused by sun radiation, which lowers the occurence of ice shifting across heated top water layers.

All true; however, the benefit of that loss of input may be overstated. I think there are very powerful energy inputs into the basin which will make up for that deficit on an annual basis, even if we don't see ice dropping below 2007/2012 levels.

Consider the SST anomalies in the Greenland, Norwegian and Barents Sea, as estmated by DMI

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/satellite/index.uk.php

Over most of the region, surface water temperatures are running from 1-4 (or more) degrees warmer than normal. In total, the average anomalie is actually between 2-3C. That represents a huge input of energy, and it is all persistently being swept up into the arctic by Atlantic flow.

http://climatesignals.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/arctic_currents_big-632x488.jpg

I think it is no accident that the area in the CAB in the worst shape tends to lie directly over the primary inflows of warm Atlantic water brought by the North Atlantic Drift. How that energy specifically is being transferred, we haven't seen, as the water temperature data at depth has not appeared consistent or reflect it. However, we know it is moving into the basin at depth. I do believe if we were to tally the net enthalpy, and consider the additional energy being picked up outside of the basin, as indicated by the SST anomalies, we may find it makes up for the shortfall in insolation. It should at least make a serious dent in it.

Unlike insolation, which works on a very specific layer of the Arctic Ocean, I would expect the effect of warm currents would be more generalized, and as such, their effect would be distributed both over a larger area, and longer period of time.

*So*, once again, the weather this year at high latitude means our current climate may have dodged a bullet. Considering all of the energy inputs, we easily could be in far worse shape.

[Klon Jay]

Aaarg -- I don't know why the end parenthesis was added into the URL on my links, and I didn't even make the links, I just pasted the URL in, so I guess I'll blame Typepad, not IE.
http://meteomodel.pl/klimat/arcticice_nsidc.png
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current_new.png
http://meteomodel.pl/klimat/arcticice.png

[LRC]

http://www.livescience.com/28399-clouds-greenland-ice-melt.html
http://www.science.su.se/english/about-us/news/humid-winds-towards-the-arctic-affect-the-summer-ice-cover-1.136733
These 2 reports seem to be saying that we should be wary about getting too excited about cloud cover cover protecting ice. In fact it seems that if the cloud is thin, but the air still holds high moister then the ice could be melting at very high rates.

[Christoffer Ladstein]

Not only the ice goes POP, also the Polar bears, or at least number of dens at Svalbard, where they are counting dens yearly. At Kongsøya, east of the main islands, they found only 2 dens this spring, a few years ago they easily tracked 50 dens... all due to retreating ice, combined With late freezeback in the start of the Winter, a crucial time for the bears!

Article .

Map .

[Aart Bluestoke]

Posted by: jdallen_wa | June 28, 2013 at 03:30
Why wait?

http://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/nu-16_metric_e.html

--
Current Conditions:
Highest Temperature (1978-2012) 24.3°C 1993
Yesterday Max: 28.6°C
Tonight Low: 12°C
Tomorrow Max: 31°C
Normal Max: 14°C

when the difference between normal and current is bigger than the difference between freezing and normal, you know something unusual is happening

[jdallen_wa]

Yoiks!

Thank you for that, Aart.

We are actually reaching temperatures where thermal transfer from air to ice *CAN* cause significant melt...!

At least it's peripheral....

[Chris Biscan]

Potential major pattern change.

But more-so the Atlantic side(Nansen Basin) get's smoked and then smoked harder and then harder by incoming warmth and sunny skies.

[Chris Biscan]

The Euro goes Death Star on the arctic:

[Phil263]

IJIS is posting a 165,469 sqkm drop for June 28th. SIE is now below 10 million at 9,919,219.

[Kate]

I'll be more specific when I post things I've found.

This model looks like the hot air from Alaska will be funneled into the arctic by the jet stream in the next day or so. I think we'll be able to see the effect of this on the cryosphere images as it sweeps across.

http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/nhemjetstream_model.html

If you run the Cryosphere animation for the last 30 days you do see the sweeps of warm air thinning the ice. I wont post many links, they seem to stuff up on me.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

[wanderer]

Extent drop, Area up?!
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html

[Gerardrocher.blogspot.com]

Looks like the sun is finally coming in the central arctic from 3rd of July, and also a plume of hot air from Canada. Will we see then a change in the melting trend?

[GreenOctopus]

Dipole emerges around the 6th of July, expected to carry through the end of the 11-day ECMWF. High pressure of about 1035 hPa emerges over the Beaufort, about the pressure threshold of an anticyclone.

[Neven]

I'm back from my travels. Spam bucket will be emptied more frequently and faster. Thanks for your patience.

[Jai Mitchell]

Current temperature in Kugluktuk is 28.8'C

http://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/nu-16_metric_e.html

Highest temperature on record for this location was 29.3C in 2007

there was similar temperatures (26.5) in July of 2012.

[jdallen_wa]

GreenOctopus said Dipole emerges around the 6th of July, expected to carry through the end of the 11-day ECMWF.

Charming. 5 days of Anti-Cyclone over the Beaufort, at the start of July. Churn the ice, give it 24hour full-power sunlight, and suck heat into the region as frosting.

Can anyone think of a worse scenario?

[Christoffer Ladstein]

+30C at Kuglutuk, 1 PM local time, phew!! That's just SO bizarre, knowing they have only 1 month of summer, 10.7C in mean July temperature.
Meanwhile Northern Europe seem to witness the 3. lousy summer in row...

Up North at Svalbard on the other hand, the average June temp will be 2.5-3.5 Above normal, continuing the trend the last decade.

Anyone able to explain that "spooky" "smog"ice With no debris, outside the eastern coast of Greenland? Seem to occur every year, and the "front" between ice and water is so absolute!

[Larsboelen]

Christoffer,

WeatherPro currently has Kugluktuk at 32C with a heat warning, smashing the old record by 7.7 degrees. MSM isn't picking it up, they seem more interested in California having a hot weekend.

I think this is major (post) tipping point stuff!

[Kate]

Alert temp is around 7C at the moment...also very warm and the air from Canada/Alaska is still to hit

[Steve Bloom]

That 32C Kugluktuk high is amazing. I'm sitting here in Oakland, about 2000 miles south and on the edge of the Great Southwest Heat Wave of 2013, with a high of about 30C and thinking I'm suffering! Yikes.

[A-Team]

118F (47.8ºC) on front porch at our Tucson house. (I am 44º N 123ºW for the summer though, warm but nothing special @ 85/29.)

[Hans Gunnstaddar]

Good timing on your return Neven. As of today looks like ice extent starting to dive! The race is on as we see if it can catch 2012.

http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

[Klon Jay]

Kugluktuk should be about +18C anomaly, but this looks like it's about normal there.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01b.fnl.html

[A-Team]

Chris did an interesting evaluation of Navy Hycom using Modis 3-6-7 over at Dosbat.

To get past the clouds on the Modis tile R04C04, he layered multiple days in Gimp with most recent on top. Then, making sure the alpha transparency channel was on, he started erasing clouds in the top layer until only ice was left there. Using the color picker, the erased region can be selected, no matter how complex. Hiding now the top layer and making the next active, clouds can be erased from within the selection, with the effect adding ice there to the ice from the first date.

And so on, until the whole scene is a see-through montage of the most recent cloud-free patches of ice. Thin clouds are ok if floes etc can still be seen through them. Gimp allows capture of screen visible no matter how many layers are involved; final contrast adjustments are made on that as a separate image file.

This region of ice has been moving but measuring that by the false color recomposition method I described earlier, recently it has been a couple of pixels a day if that so a non-issue provided 4-5 days suffice to get the montage. This works on R04C04 but not on many other regions which have been in continuous thick cloud for 4-5 weeks.

Modis provides a trick to precisely capturing exact boundaries of a tile: open R04C04 from the full Arctic view, then go back in the browser -- the tile will be outlined. Its lower left hand corner is the north pole. The number of pixels to the nearest corner of Banks Island 341.5 combines with the number for Navy Hycom 101.0 to give the needed enlargement for the latter, 338%.

Below I simply overlaid Navy thickness at 11% opacity on today's Modis visible. Tile R04C04 is outlined and other promising areas are present. Chris's method could be done with any type of satellite imagery, such as Terra Worldview 1-4-5 or Jaxa color.

However large swatches of the Arctic simply have not had enough clear weather to make this work for June.

But with clearer skies coming -- and so many competent people contributing here -- we could apply this to all the tiles and wavelength combinations to see just where things stand at the beginning of July.

[A-Team]

Here is another cloud-removal technique, illustrated for the mystery zone above the Chukchi.

This involves capturing swaths during the day used in preliminary releases. For Jaxa, 124º W, this involves saving images every couple of hours from 5:00 am to 7:00 pm. These are *not* archived.

Some swaths being nicer than others, a montage can made for the day for an area of special interest with the same methods as above but removing blue and pink.

That can best be done by decomposing the image into CMYK etc and erasing the unwanted features channel by channel and then recomposing to RGB.

The yellow in Jaxa color are gravity waves of small wavelengths comparable to that of microwave sensor -- caused by wind on more or less open water.

This large swath is also melting/thinning very rapidly but is very different in character from the central polar region highlighted by Navy Hycom.

[Data Guy]

A-Team,

"44º N 123ºW"

That sounds like Corvallis or Eugene, OR
If so, you know that summer got here yesterday and will only get better in the next few days.

[A-Team]

Yes indeed, in Eugene OR patchouli oil season has arrived.

Werther has also been doing fine work on the mesh-pack and rubble on the kitty-corner Modis tile over at the forum, using rather different methods but reaching similarly ominous conclusions.

Here I made some headway taking off clouds below Wrangel Island on Modis visible but there are some areas still where the sun just don't shine.

The idea here is to make successive cloud masks and delete them to alpha channel transparency. This area is worse off than represented in Navy Hycom, like R03C04 below the region Chris studied.

[MaGa]

Thank you A-Team for all your nice pics and animations. I like the Modis-Hycom overlay.

Now, I think we are right on top of the cliff. What's currently going on all around the Arctic is simply incredible. Temperatures are high all around the place and forecast to increase even more. The snow in the center of the ice pack is rapidly melting and the color of the ice already changed from blue to white and even gray or brown in places. That's the last stage of melting. We will soon see rapid extent drops in all boundary seas. And the holes in the center will be the killer this year! Let's take a few easy numbers:

Albedo of snow covered ice: 0.8
Albedo of open water: 0.0
Open water between the ice: 22.5%

This means double the energy input per area, right at peak insolation. That will melt a lot of ice which is already thin. I don't see how we can't get a new record minimum this year!

[MaGa]

Sorry, it should be 25% open water in the calculation above.

[Jai Mitchell]

In the gulf of Alaska has been the largest and most persistent low pressure vortex I have ever seen. A week ago I was calling this a "cut off low" but then it remained, and continues to remain.

http://hokukea.soest.hawaii.edu/satellite/satanim.cgi?res=4km&chnl=ir&domain=hus&period=720&incr=30&rr=900&banner=mkwc&satplat=goeswest&overlay=off&animtype=flash

parent page here: http://hokukea.soest.hawaii.edu/satellite/index.cgi

Models are now showing this persistent vortex being disrupted and reforming in the next few days.

http://weather.utah.edu/index.php?t=gfs004&r=NA&d=TS

The effects of this vortex contributed to the flooding in Alberta and the high temperatures in Alaska, it is forcing north/south movements on it's lateral borders. It is unclear what long term effect it will have on the sea ice but the nature of this beast is highly unusual due to its apparent reformation and failure to be carried north and east by a now weaker jet stream.

[Kate]

Greenland melt ponds - the reason I'm posting
I'm wondering how much fresh water that is on the map, how big are they??

Melville satellite image - not sure the link goes there

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/image_container.php

[Kate]

try this, go to Melville map
http://www.dmi.dk/dmi/index/hav/satellitbilleder.htm

[Shared Humanity]

Jai...

Isn't that low in the Gulf of Alaska simply another symptom of a jet stream that has virtuallt stopped moving? The high pressure ridge bringing all of the heat to the western half of the U.S. is another symptom as is the anomalously cold weather over the upper Midwest and the persistent warmth and flooding that is occurring all along the East coast of the U.S. This pattern has been more or less in place for a week.

[Chris Reynolds]

A-Team,

My approach was far more simple, I only use Gimp to make animated gifs, I find it so complex I haven't a clue how to layer and do what I did.

I used Arcsoft Photostudio and layered, then just switched layers on and off to judge where to manually rub out the cloud regions so as to get the most ice.

I only noticed this thread because I was getting a spike in traffic from here.

[Chris Reynolds]

Ahhh, and there we have the reason I'm not bothering posting here. I'm in the spam folder again.

I see that activity on this blog is why the Forum is relatively quiet.

[As always: sorry. It seemed to go a bit better, but apparently not so much. N.]

[A-Team]

Here is Navy Hycom thickness for 30 Jun 13 overlaid on Ascat 5.3 Ghz for the same date. This is not as effective as Navy over Modis visible because the white-on-white of the latter is nicely tinted whereas Ascat is too dark. I deleted a lot of intermediate thickness ice leaving just the thinned region and multi-year ice.

These two have not corresponded that well over the last 4-5 weeks, in part because scatterometer sensing deteriorates this time of year but also because the thinning model is missing a large patch towards Svalbard. The goat's head is no longer visible -- whether it is still there and just 'under the radar' or disrupted awaits the return of colder ice in the fall.

[A-Team]

Here is Navy Hycom thickness for 30 Jun 13 overlaid on Jaxa for the 'same' date.

The best way I've found so far for getting rid of the blue and pink cloud microwave emissions in this imagery is to decompose the RGB into CYMK and retain only the K channel. This is similar to but slightly better than keeping the blue channel (the 18V Ghz channel) from the original RGB. Some clouds remain (whitish regions).

Again, the Navy thinning corresponds fairly well centrally and with the intrusion into MYI but is missing the long swath heading towards Svalbard and understating developments in the broad latitudinal swath through Wrangel. The lower image has been treated to draw these regions out.

[Shared Humanity]

As the melt season progresses, it will be interesting to watch the fate of the fairly cohesive pack of thicker ice which seems to have separated from the main pack of ice in the CAB and appears to be drifting towards the New Siberian Islands.

(What makes them new, by the way? Haven't they been around for a while?)

[NeilT]

I'm finding the uni Bremen AMSR2 concentration map interesting.

Looking at June 29, this is what I saw in May, replicated again but with a stronger breakdown. What is full Purple in the CAB I expect to remain fairly full purple. Those next to the continents I expect to melt. The rest? Who knows but it doesn't look good for the ice.

It will be interesting to see, come july, August and September, just how much each month shows this trend to continue.

Right or wrong, it will be interesting to know.

[A-Team]

As followup to NeilT's observations, I would add that the uni Bremen AMSR2 product saeems by far the best physical fit to collective primary satellite imagery. In terms of ultimate accuracy, we await their final calibration but I don't expect scaling to change by much.

It may be understating the situation along the 80th parallel, far western meridians because of persistent cloud cover. However I would agree with its implied early melt-out of the Northwest Passage and the still-frozen surface state of Siberian rivers emptying into the Kara Sea.

In terms of predictive suggestions, it does not seem plausible that much ice will remain in the top half of the image below (45W-225W), nor a good proportion in the shades that are already light purple and below by the end of June. The darkest purple alone is not possible viscoelastically as a stable end stage for September.

If the multi-year ice is severed and the western part caught up in the Beaufort Gyre, the map R. Gates provided earlier is looking quite reasonable -- and that of Paul Beckwith not out of the question given some extreme August weather.

However with the ice pack off the trolley tracks this year, we'll have to wait to see where things eventually ends up.

[Neven]

Uni Bremen always was my favourite SIC map, but now with AMSR-2 even more so.

Thanks a lot for the great overlays, A-Team.

[Rlkittiwake]

Is "the cliff" more a function of insolation or a function of the areas of ice that are melting out?

In 1984 "the cliff" started on day 176 and ran until day 204. Hudson Bay, with an area of 1.3 MKM^2 totally melted out during that time, as did a large part of the Kara Sea (0.8) and the Baffin/Newfoundland Sea (1.6).

Even though "the cliff" has been happening earlier and earlier, there's nothing in the data that says it can't start today and run for another month.

[Kitesurfsantacruz.blogspot.com]

Hello everyone. I've been lurking here for about year trying learn as much as I can. I find this blog to be an amazing example of the power of social media to create global communities that are a force for positive change (Bravo Neven!).

I've lately been browsing NASA Worldview imagery more and more carefully each day, and noticed something near the NP just now. Could this be what I think it is?

http://earthdata.nasa.gov/labs/worldview/?map=-45110.286291,-48690.54186,322505.713709,138957.45814&products=baselayers,MODIS_Terra_CorrectedReflectance_Bands367~overlays,arctic_graticule_3413&time=2013-06-30&switch=arctic

Look at the shape in the center of the image. Perhaps it is too small to really be the Goat's Head, but the the resemblance is uncanny! I couldn't get the shape to show-up any other way except by using the "Terra/MODIS Corrected Reflectance (3-6-7)" layer.

I'm not sure if the link provided will show the same image by the time the day is done or not, but I did also save a copy to my local drive.

Cheers,

Gideon

[Kitesurfsantacruz.blogspot.com]

The first time I pasted the URL into a new browser, it showed-up with the right layer applied. When I click on the URL in the post, however, it shows-up with the standard (true color) image, and you can't see the shape I'm trying to highlight. I posted a copy of the image on my own (long neglected and otherwise off-topic) Blog here:

http://kitesurfsantacruz.blogspot.com/2013/06/random-post-possible-image-of.html

Cheers,

Gideon

[Kevin McKinney]

"What makes them new, by the way? Haven't they been around for a while?"

The New Siberian Islands have been around as islands since about 7 k BP, which is pretty new, geologically--but nomenclature-wise, they've only been 'New' since the 18th century or so...

;-)

[Jim Hunt]

Some glimpses through the clouds this morning, courtesy of WorldView. Near the North Pole:

Then heading further towards the Bering Strait, at around 75N:

[Neven]

And the fast ice between the New Siberian Islands and the Lena Delta has started to fall apart yesterday, a tad slower than in 2011. All of it should be gone in about 15 days.

[Chris Reynolds]

My final prediction for this year's CT Area minimum, massively revised upwards due to the slow start of the melt season.

Previously 1.75M to 2M.

Now...

75% probability of this year being between 3.22M km^2 and 4.15M km^2.

Reasoning here:
http://dosbat.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/june-status-part-1-ct-area.html

Feel free to throw assorted rotten fruit and vegetables at me. ;)

[Lars Kaleschke]

Neven:

Uni Bremen always was my favourite SIC map, but now with AMSR-2 even more so.

Thanks, Neven, the Uni Bremen sea ice website was my favourite spare time project, which I started back in Summer 2000. Now I'm visiting my favourite sea ice blog in my spare time ;-)

http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/guestbook_closed.html

[fryingpan136]

Viewing the Navy 30 day gif, I noticed the last frame, which is projected - not actual, shows a huge chunk of thick MYI pulling away from the north coast of Greenland. Hopefully the Navy forecasts are not as accurate as they seem to me. Otherwise, if not this year, then probably soon, the thickest ice will become quite mobile. That is worrisome.

[Jai Mitchell]

Inuvik Northern Territory is currently 28.3C which is 2.2 C higher than the previous all time high temperature reached in 2008.

http://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/nt-30_metric_e.html

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

I noticed on Modis today that there's significant break-up south of Banks so the W end of the NWP is starting to open up.

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/single.cgi?image=crefl1_143.A2013182200500-2013182201000.250m.jpg

[Dan P.]

First post from some new home brew image processing. As a polar orbiter nearly every one of MODIS's 17-18 daily orbits takes images the north pole: the poles are the most heavily-surveyed area of the planet for these high-resolution multi-band instruments! However the various public products are not geared towards the Arctic and woefully underrepresent this high rate of data, leaving us in the Arctic with just a poor daily mosaic of badly stitched pieces of various cloudy passes.

Here's my first alternative: simply paste together every one of those swaths and let the eye make some sense of it. Here I have used channels 1-4-3 to approximately reproduce the MODIS "true color" composition. I chose a region centered around the pole; the width is 400 pixels and the pixel size is 500m, which is the top resolution of all but channels 1-2 of MODIS (I do intend to process those at 250m eventually).

The animation is 16 frames from a single day (June 25th, chosen simply because I happened to have downloaded all 6 GB of the swaths covering the pole that day). Not every swath covers even this small frame, so there is a bit of persistence to portions of the animation.

It was a formidable task getting up to speed on processing the .hdf files and particularly learning enough to get georeferencing around the pole to work properly for image alignment. But most of the pipeline is automated now, so I can start producing better products.

I've had trouble producing a version of the 356 that looks as good as NASA's, but I've also produced some other band combinations that are intriguing (and I have access to all of them now if you have any requests!)

[Neven]

Very nicely done, Dan P! It's really exciting to have all you guys making stuff on their own. I have to find a way to incorporate these things somewhere. Maybe start my own scientific agency. ;-)

[A-Team]

Extraordinary effort, DanP! Floe drift can be seen even for this one day window.

It is really scandalous how Arctic satellite data has been left in shambles -- billions spent on launching instruments and pennies getting it into a useable form. HDF4/5 etc are exceedingly offputting -- arcane formats and preposterous generality when 99% of end users just want a simple picture or animation.

It is infinitely more efficient for one upstream specialist to make the obvious half-dozen products than for thousands of end-users to invest their time on this internal grit -- the reality is, most of them won't and don't. And so the data just goes to waste.

I can just see these centers shrugging, saying not our remit. But it is their remit.

Even when they do kick out endproduct images, we are left spending hours fixing unscientific palettes that are staggering in their stupidity. I hardly ever see an image with a scale, a specified projection, time stamps on the swaths, or an appropriate lossless palette. Somewhere they got lost in command lines and seemed to have skipped class for Cartography 101.

HDFView for HDF4 and HDF5 on Mac, Windows, Linux, Solaris
Panoply for NetCDF and HDF on Mac, Windows, Linux
Quantum GIS for GeoTIFF on Mac, Windows, Linux

[A-Team]

Here is an example of perfectly good Shizuku data stored in a user-hostile ftp array and provided solely as a cliché thermal palette that is exceeding tedious to grayscale into a scientific palette.

I would like to have a brief chat with the person who opaques expensive data with a crappy lat/long grid and a gratuitous 18-pt font 90º at the north pole. These are to be supplied as a separate mask, if at all.

The images had to be captured one request at a time -- so multiply that by 7 channels x 2 polarities x 2 orbits x 30 images = 840 requests just for one person to look at one month.

For stuff that was a no-brainer to pre-compute and provide. There's no cost to it -- storage is cheap and no one is using cpu cycles at night.

I'm seeing a near-total disconnect between data providers and data users. No one home at the help desks -- they need to listen a whole lot better.

The animation shows the last 31 days of 6 Ghz vertical ascending. This is quite an interesting wavelength for passive microwave -- it seems to be accurately capturing certain features of the Arctic ice and is not too affected by clouds.

The 'brightness' color scale represents the temperature of a classical blackbody that would peak at the same peak.

[A-Team]

Same animation as above, with a complex palette enhancement that sought to differentiate and monotone the brightness temperatures. Quite a bit of work but I'm not sure it added that much value.

This involved converted each frame under the initial palette to HSV, retaining only the hue H, equalizing that in grayscale space, and colorizing that linearly so white represents open water and the darkest blues what seems from other considerations to be the thickest ice.

The warming/melting of the ice in the last few days is quite remarkable.

[A-Team]

Here is some coming weirdness according to Navy Hycom 02-09 Jul 13 -- the ice pack seems to be inhaling, pulling in on itself and creating some strech marks as it does so.

[Al Rodger]

Rutgers Uni snow cover weekly anomalies for June dropped down to a minimum of -5.6m sq km for 2013, ending the year-on-year plunge of the last three years - 2010 -5.1m, 2011 -5.8m, 2012 -6.9m.

[Magma]

As a geophysicist working in a field unrelated to meteorology or climate I entirely agree with A-Team's comments on the quality, usability and accessibility of a great many relevant datasets, maps and figures. It really is quite off-putting and presents a high (and wholly unnecessary) hurdle to researchers of all stripes.

[Apocalypse4Real]

Dan P and A-team,

Thanks for all the imagery work in the last few posts, it does illustrate the fractured mush nature of the CAB ice pack, and the impact of temperature and sunlight on the weakened ice.

One other observation, from A-team's work, the Fram Strait ice flow is about dead.

Whatever ice is making it to Kronprins Christan Land (Cape Nord), seems to be melting out before turning the corner. The higher temps in Northern Greenland may be having a major impact as well as wind direction changes.

[Chris Reynolds]

No need for image manipulation. Just click and check out yesterday's MODIS R04C04 grid cell.

The clouds have cleared!
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/imagery/subsets/?subset=Arctic_r04c04.2013182.terra
If you have broadband it's worth clicking on 250m. It's fantastic! :)

[Espen Olsen]

Chris;

It is called Terrazo Ice ;)!

[Doug Bostrom]

A little heads-up on a novel approach for those who don't often visit the forum: at the forum topic Home brew AMSR2 extent & area calculation topic Wipneus has released a time-series breakout of extent by region, with comparison to 2012. It's quite thought-provoking.

[Kate]

The latest Cryosphere Today image shows far more red along the northern coasts of Canada and Alaska than yesterday. The heat wave air has just passed over the ice and destroyed it!

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/NEWIMAGES/arctic.seaice.color.000.png

[Kate]

And if you do a 30 day animation you can see the effects of the big storm and the heat wave - they shade huge swaths of red when it sweeps past. Really amazing to watch. And you see that any ice coloured red/green disappears within 3-5 days usually. Wonder what will happen over the next week!

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/CT/animate.arctic.color.0.html

[L. Hamilton]

DMI 30% has dropped 500k in the last two days, now well below 2008 or 2009 at this date.