Arctic Sea Ice

EGU2015, my impressions

Tempus fugit. It feels like an eternity, but it was only last week that I went to Vienna to visit the EGU 2015 General Assembly. This is the overview I wrote last week of all the oral and poster sessions I planned to attend. Here's a summary of my impressions and what I've seen, heard and learned.

Unfortunately, due to circumstances, I had to skip the morning session, but I was in time for a short talk on the results of the Climate Dialogue initiative. This interested me because it originated in the Netherlands, the country where I was born and lived for most of my life, and it gave me the chance to meet up with Bart Verheggen from the Our Changing Climate blog, who was there to present a poster for a paper he wrote on a survey that confirms the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming.

CryoSat-2 sea ice thickness maps

Yesterday at one of the EGU 2015 poster sessions I had a short chat with Tommasso Parrinello, the ESA's CryoSat-2 mission manager. He told me lots of useful improvements have been made in the past couple of months, and if all goes well the satellite can remain operational up to 2020 (no guarantees, of course), which means there will be an overlap with NASA's ICESat-2, allowing for an extended timeseries of sea ice thickness measurement data.

That's great stuff, but it gets better. The most interesting thing he told me - something a lot of us have been eagerly awaiting - is that soon near real-time sea ice thickness maps were going to be put out. He couldn't tell me how soon exactly, but as it turns out, it happened the next day, which is today. The maps can be found and viewed on the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (University College of London) website:

These maps come with the following disclaimer: "Note that the 14 and 28-day sea ice thickness maps are processed from CryoSat Near Real Time (NRT) data. These are preliminary fast access products which do not use all the precise corrections available in the final products, available 30 days later. The archive of monthly sea ice thickness products use the precise final CryoSat data as soon as it is available."

The BBC had the scoop today:

EGU 2015, my first scientific conference

I've been living in Austria for 5 years now, living a mere
2 hour drive from Vienna, but somehow I've never come around to visiting the European Geophysical Union's annual general assembly. This year I've decided to make that drive to the Austria Center Vienna and attend EGU 2015, a decision made much easier by the kindness of the EGU Press Team to provide me with a press pass. Thank you, EGU!

Mind you, I won't be going every day, just on the day that matters most to the Arctic Sea Ice Blog, coming Thursday, as that's when most of the Arctic action will be taking place. Here are the presentations I plan to attend:

Polar Climate Predictability and Prediction (link)

• Uncertainties in the Arctic sea ice cover in ocean reanalyses: are current ice-ocean reanalyses suitable for initializing sea ice forecasts?
• An Inter-Annual Oscillation in the Western Arctic Associated with a Non Stationary Seasonally Lagged ENSO Signal
• Influence of freshwater input on the skill of decadal forecast of sea ice in the Southern Ocean
• Decadal predictability of SST in the Atlantic domain of the Nordic Seas in three CMIP5 models
• Stochastic sea ice parameterizations and impacts on polar predictability
• Impact of the assimilated sea ice data product on seasonal climate predictions with MPI-ESM

That one's in the morning. In the afternoon I'll be going to:

PIOMAS April 2015

Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center:

After the levelling off in volume gain we saw during February (see previous PIOMAS update), the 2015 trend line has continued on a more 'normal' course. The gap with record year 2011 has widened from 1675 to 1907 km3, but other than that 2015 has managed to creep a little bit closer to the other top years. Difference with 2012 went from 1329 km3 on March 8th to 1147 km3 at the end of March, for instance. And 2015 is now lower than big spring melt year 2010, albeit just 17 km3.

The PIOMAS volume graph produced by Wipneus shows the details more clearly:

The trend line on the PIOMAS sea ice volume anomaly graph is still hovering in the positive two standard deviation zone: