Arctic Sea Ice

2015/2016 Winter analysis

I think this winter is going to get studied like crazy,
for quite a while. It’s a very interesting time.
        Jennifer Francis, Washington Post

The extraordinary temperature anomalies in the Arctic since the start of the year haven't gone unnoticed in quite a few media outlets, and I apologize for not having joined the fray of actuality. On the other hand, context trumps actuality, as we need to compare to previous years and get a feel for what this prelude to the melting season may mean. In that sense, I'm early with this year's winter analysis (compared to last year).

Let's start studying like crazy, shall we?

It's a lot of text and images, so if you're feeling a bit tl;dr-ish today,
skip to the conclusion at the bottom of the page.

Surface air temperature

Here are the monthly temperature graphs for November-February in the Arctic Circle, from 2005/2006 to the past winter, based on the NCEP reanalysis dataset:

Last November saw the highest average monthly temperature in the 2005-2015 record, followed by a lower December, relatively speaking. Things then get a little bit crazy after the turn of the year, with the January 2014 record getting broken by almost 3 °C! February isn't far behind either, almost 1.5 °C higher than the already 'warm' February of 2014. This is unprecedented.

To see where temps were least low, I've created average temperature maps using the Daily mean composites page from NOAA's Earth Science Research Laboratory website, comparing the 2015/2016 freezing season to those preceding the years with the lowest minimums on record (click for a larger version):

Giant metaphor crashes through the ice

This ties in with the recent blog post about Consensus and consequences. From the Cantech Letter online magazine:

Giant metaphor crashes through the ice
in Canada’s North

An 80-thousand pound metaphor crashed through the ice in the Northwest Territories Saturday in the form of an off-white Western Star fuel tanker.

The CBC reports that the tanker was carrying heating fuel to Deline, a town of about 500 near the Great Bear Lake. The accident happened just three days after the territory’s transportation department raised the allowable weight on the Great Bear Ice Crossing from 10,000 kilograms to 40,0000 [you have got to be kidding; N].

The truck is currently semi-submerged in the top portion of the ice, which one official estimates to be between 100 and 120 centimetres thick. No one was injured in the incident.

The symbolism of a fuel truck trapped in the ice in Canada’s north will not be lost on anyone who follows news from the scientific community about climate change.

Recent data from the NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirms that global warning is particularly intense in the Arctic —a phenomenon referred to as “Arctic amplification”. In January, scientists confirmed a record low level for Arctic sea ice. And the data for January was particularly worrying.

“We’ve looked at the average January temperatures, and we look at what we call the 925 millibar level, about 3,000 feet up in the atmosphere,” says Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “And it was, I would say, absurdly warm across the entire Arctic Ocean.”

Read the rest of the article here (permafrost also gets a mention).

Speaking of which, here's a cool animation (in German) from the Alfred Wegener Instute explaining what Permafrost is:

 

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:

A wetter and warmer Arctic

Later this week I'll be posting more analysis of the current, very interesting melting season, but here's something that popped up in my mail box via Google Alerts.

It's an article from Alaska Dispatch News on a scientific paper by Linette Boisvert from the University of Maryland and the NSIDC's Julienne Stroeve, based on AIRS (Atmospheric Infrared Sounder) satellite data for the 2003-2013 period, which reveal that the Arctic has become warmer and wetter, lengthening the melting season. I had a short chat with Dr. Boisvert during a poster presentation at this year's EGU General Assembly. This is one of the few papers analyzing AIRS data in relation to changes in the Arctic.

Here's the article:

As sea ice shrinks, the Arctic gets warmer and wetter, study finds

The Arctic is getting warmer and wetter, changes linked to melting sea ice and more persistent open-water conditions - NASA Earth Observatory

The Arctic became warmer and wetter since the beginning of the 21st century, a self-reinforcing trend likely to continue because it is linked to sea-ice melt and more persistent open-water conditions in the world’s northern ocean, a newly published study concludes.

Data from NASA shows that average surface temperatures across the Arctic Ocean increased an average of 0.16 degrees Celsius per year from 2003 to 2013, and air temperatures rose 0.09 degrees Celsius annually over the same period, says the study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters.

The changes weren't evenly distributed, though. They were dominated by large increases in the November-to-April period,during which Arctic-wide surface temperatures rose 2.5 degrees Celsius and air temperatures rose 1.5 degrees Celsius from 2003 to 2013.

Arctic warming -> extreme weather debate

Andrew Freedman outdid himself on Climate Central with an excellent overview of the scientific debate on the link between Arctic sea ice loss and a wavy jet stream causing weird and extreme weather. Coincidentally (?) there's an "extreme kink" in it right now that just caused the warmest December temperature ever measured at any site on the Alaskan Arctic Ocean shoreline region.

Freedman wrote the piece following the publication in Nature of a new paper - with Jennifer Francis as co-author - that claims that rapid Arctic warming has an influence on extreme summer weather events. The last couple of years a lot of pioneering research is being done in this area, which in my view is one of the most exciting and important scientific corners currently around. Which explains why more and more experts are keeping an eye on developments.

Study Adds to Arctic Warming, Extreme Weather Debate

A new study for the first time found links between the rapid loss of snow and sea ice cover in the Arctic and a recent spate of exceptional extreme heat events in North America, Europe, and Asia. The study adds to the evidence showing that the free-fall in summer sea ice extent and even sharper decline in spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere is reverberating throughout the atmosphere, making extreme events more likely to occur.

A giant panda was playing with ice cubes in Chengdu, China to cool off from the summer heat in August 2011. Credit: Zhongjun Liu

The study, published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change, is the first to find correlations between rapid Arctic warming and extreme summer weather events, since previous research had focused on the links between Arctic warming and fall and winter weather patterns.

While the study adds to the body of evidence pointing to the outsized role the Arctic is playing in shaping weather patterns, it won't end the debate within the scientific community over whether and how what is happening in the Far North could be having such far-reaching impacts.

There is virtually no controversy among climate scientists and meteorologists that massive changes have occurred in the Arctic environment during the past three decades, and that those changes are largely due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions.

Since the 1980s, Arctic sea ice extent has dropped at a rate of about 8 percent per decade during September, which is when the sea ice cover reaches its annual minimum. A record minimum was set in 2012. For a size comparison, consider that the area of summer sea ice lost since the 1980s would cover about 40 percent of the continental U.S., the study said.

Spring snow cover extent loss during June has dropped even more precipitously than sea ice cover, the study found, at a rate of about 18 percent per decade since 1979.