New NASA videos

Last week NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center published a two-part set of videos called A Selective History of Arctic Sea Ice Observations. These videos are short, simple, but extremely informative. And very nicely done, I may add. So now you must watch them!

Part 1:

And part 2:

NASA also released a video a couple of weeks ago, which I've overlooked, and it features my hero Dr. Tom Wagner putting the 2014 melting season in context. Is there a climate science communication award we can give this good man?

Finally, here's a video I had forgotten to post a couple of weeks back, but as it's about the consequences of Arctic sea ice loss, it remains ever actual. The music is overdone, but the speakers are excellent. Hat-tip to Robertscribbler:

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Update September 14th:

Here's another video I had forgotten to post, made be Andy Lee Robinson, the creator of the Arctic sea ice volume death spiral video, who kicks off the Arctic Sea Ice Bucket Challenge:

 

Comments

[Susan Anderson]

@Jai Mitchell, your material is fascinating.

I don't actually suffer from "east coast bias" nor do I ignore the plight of Canada and the south, since those "blobs" from the Arctic (reducing it to the most vulgar language to make clear how rough is my thinking) have some rather wholesale effects in various parts of the globe. Water vapor animations have been my daily study for many years now; here's a favorite, but of course Nullschool and Maine Climate Reanalyzer have provided more visual input.
http://synoptic.envsci.rutgers.edu/site/sat/sat.php?sat=nhem&url=../imgs/wv_nhem_anim.gif

I don't discount the Pacific, but am puzzled as to why Dr. Trenberth, for example, tends to make it either/or with Dr. Francis when it's clear the containing nature of the Arctic circulation is broken and having knock-on effects and the effects interact/add to each other. Of course the Pacific is a gigantic input. Yes, this is lay language, but most of the world are laypeople (more than 99%) and when people "get" it in local terms it is quite helpful. It's clear that there is more blocking and it's clear that the normal patterns of hot and cold are reversed. My niggle is whether or not the cold is "leaving" the Arctic as opposed to, say, being generated by it. I talked with Tenney Naumer about this; her understanding, of course, is much more accurate and complete than mine.

I finally realized that continuous wave generation is not the same as actual movement, that things are transmitted without the original stuff moving. (Once again, terrible sloppy language, I know.)

Of course, we all are thinking, one way or another, "how bad is it?" (sloppy again). Is the reversal of hot and cold as disastrous as it seems from here?

[wayne]

Great late melting action with surface air temperatures lesser than 0 is far less boring as 2014 melt season ends.

http://eh2r.blogspot.ca/2014/09/extremely-late-in-season-spontaneous.html

[Werther]

That's right, Wayne.
Not boring at all. Drop for the day about 33K, which is extreme that late in the season. Only 2005 had such decline for the day (-50K).
Interesting, sea ice declines while peripheral lands start to get a first snow cover.
NW passage is almost blown open, sea ice in the East Siberian Sea is reduced to scattered floes and ice-milk.

[Andy Lee Robinson]

Here's an update to the Arctic Sea Ice Bucket Challenge - it's just beginning to go viral!

http://climatecrocks.com/2014/09/18/the-arctic-sea-ice-bucket-challenge/
http://climatecrocks.com/2014/09/21/arctic-sea-ice-bucket-update/
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/09/21/climate-science-ice-bucket-challenge-the-complete-collection/