Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice and jet stream changes

It's the most interesting and actual of all potential risks tied to Arctic sea ice loss and could turn out to be one of the surest signs of changing weather patterns. Which explains the growth in interest and research.

One of the latest scientific papers on this subject, Influence of Arctic sea ice on European summer precipitation, has been written by Dr. James Screen of the University of Exeter and published in Environmental Research Letters (via the Econnexus Blog).

The publication of the paper has been accompanied by a video, which has been put on YouTube by Peter Sinclair from the ClimateCrocks Blog, which makes it easier to embed (thank you, Peter):

 

Freezing season 2013/2014 open thread 2

First open thread reached the 200 comment mark, so it's time for a new one.

Over on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum commenter Espen keeps track of several things related to sea ice and the Greenland Ice Sheet, one of those being the Jakobshavn Glacier - also known as Jakobshavn Isbræ and Sermeq Kujalleq - which I wrote about a bit back in 2010, in 2011 and last year.

It looks like Jakobshavn has retreated another 3 km inland, despite a cold melting season for Greenland:

This time it was the southern branch that retreated most. As NASA's Earth Observatory had it, also back in 2010:

In the winter of 2010, Jakobshavn’s ice front did not re-advance as it usually does, so it began the 2010 melt season in the same location as the 2009 summer melt season. As a result, the glacier had the potential to experience significant retreat during the summer of 2010. The breakup in early July 2010 occurred on the northern tributary to Jakobshavn Glacier. The southern tributary actually drains a larger portion of Greenland’s central ice sheet, so a retreat there could lead to a more substantial ice discharge.

Thank you, Espen!

Freezing season 2013/2014 open thread 1

Here's a first open thread for this freezing season, which will be followed by monthly instalments. I apologize yet again for having been so inactive on the blog. I'm the kind of person who shuts off certain activities when being too busy with momentarily higher-priority stuff, but with the exterior of our house now nearing completion and being badgered by a well-respected member of the blog community (you know who I mean ;-) ), I will try and make the blog more interesting again.

As announced in the comment section of the previous blog post there will be a post-season auto-flagellation and analysis forthcoming, and this will probably lead to more speculation of what to expect next year and after.

In the meantime I want to draw some well-deserved attention to the effort made by Jim Hunt of the econnexus blog who has set up a special website called the Great White Con to document the lies and misinformation spread by GWPF operative and Daily Mail 'journalist' David Rose and other British media outlets. Jim is now making videos to highlight the problems with this propaganda. Here's his latest one:

Have at it!