Arctic Sea Ice

Winter solstice

Today is the winter solstice. If you live on the Northern Hemisphere of our planet Earth, today is the shortest day of the year. In a sense it's the start of the countdown towards a new melting season, with the Sun slowly creeping northward a bit every day, although the sea ice still has a couple of months to expand and thicken some more, of course.

Most of you who are interested in the Arctic, probably know that during the 2015 AGU Fall Meeting NOAA put out its annual Arctic Report Card. The report contains a lot of details on everything concerning the Arctic in 2015, and that mostly means melting. Melting sea ice, melting glaciers, snow cover loss, etc., and the consequences thereof.

There's a very good article by Yereth Rosen on the ADN Arctic Newswire website, and Robertscribbler also put a blog post up today, but if you want a quick, visual summary, there's this video that NOAA put out last week:

Some other news concerning the Arctic that received traction in the media lately, is this new paper by Yeager et al. that was published in Geophysical Research Letters two weeks ago. Its title Predicted slowdown in the rate of Atlantic sea ice loss lacks the nuance that what is actually meant is winter sea ice loss, but it's explained in the rest of the text. Strangely enough, a paper by the same authors also appeared on the Nature website last week in which the nuance is omitted entirely, in both title (Possible pause in Arctic sea-ice loss) and text. Then again, the rest of the text is behind a pay-wall (edit: never mind, I have been informed that it's just a reference to the GRL paper, not a paper in itself).

Either way, the theory is that a weakened Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) will prevent warm Atlantic waters from going deep into the Arctic, and thus in winter sea ice will expand. See this informative Science Codex article for further details and quotes from the paper's researchers, such as this one:

All Arctic storms, great and small

If I had to name one website that does the best reporting on Arctic sea ice, its disappearance and the implications thereof, it would have to be Climate Central. Climate Progress is an excellent source as well, but Climate Central doesn't let even the tiniest detail escape. Its senior science writers Andrew Freedman and Michael D. Lemonick cover everything people need to know about one of the major current events on our planet.

Take for instance Lemonick's latest article on this GRL research paper discussing the Great Arctic Cyclone of 2012. I'm using the name, coined first I believe at the time by commenter R. Gates, but I won't be comfortable with it until I haven't seen a repeat in the next couple of melting seasons. Things are usually called Great in hindsight, but what if we see more Great Arctic Cyclones pop up in coming years? Will the next one be called the Similarly Great Arctic Cyclone of XXXX, or worse, the Even Greater Arctic Cyclone of XXXX? But I digress...

Great it definitely was. We assumed as much, but now it has been confirmed by Simmonds et al. that the GAC-2012 is the most extreme Arctic summer storm on record. It even ranks 13th when you add all those fierce winter cyclones. Mind you, since 1979 no fewer than 19,625 Arctic storms have been recorded.

One other interesting piece of info from this paper is that apparently "the authors couldn’t establish that the unusually large areas of open ocean contributed to the storm’s intensity". I would think that all that open water - that was exceptionally warm around that time - acting as fuel for the cyclone is a no-brainer, but it seems it's not as easy to establish a link. Here's an image of DMI SST anomalies at the time of the storm that was used for ASI 2012 update 9. I can't help but think that all of that red must have had something to do with the intensity and longevity of this freak storm.

I guess we all remember how this monster looked (via AtmosNews):

Lemonick, however, wrote an even more interesting article around two weeks ago, called Arctic Storms: A Climate Danger Nobody’s Talking About. It's about Polar lows, winter storms, a phenomenon I learned about while researching back in August what kind of a storm the Great Arctic Cyclone actually was.

Here's the first half of his excellent article: