Arctic Sea Ice

Comparing

Last week, I opened a special thread over on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum to compare 2012 and 2019, because basically, that's what it comes down to at this point. In the thread, people post data, maps, graphs and satellite images to get an idea of how this year matches up with 2012. Towards the end of the month, I hope to use some of that material to provide a summary, before heading into the final phase of the melting season.

Today, one ASIF commenter called Comradez posted a YouTube video in which he compares 2012 and 2019 satellite images of one part of the Arctic (the intersection between the Beaufort Sea and Central Arctic Basin), which is exactly what I would hope to see when opening the thread. Here it is:

A couple of days ago, I saw this video on the broader implications of ice loss around the world. It's from one of my favourite alternative news channel called The Real News Network (highly recommended):

That's it for now. More to come towards the end of the month. We won't know whether the 2019 melting season will result in a new record low minimum, but we'll probably know whether it's still possible or not.

Hurricane Florence and Arctic sea ice

Yet another destructive hurricane has hit the US, following a highly unusual path, smashing precipitation records all around. Dr Jennifer Francis breaks it down in this excellent video from The Real News Network (please, share):

 

The 2016 melting season in images

The Arctic year started with the warmest January and February on record:

The mild winter led to one of the lowest maximums on record, lowest even on some graphs.

And then in April, just before the melting season started, things got exciting very early in the Beaufort Sea (animation shows March 30th to May 4th):

This caused a big, early lead on sea ice extent graphs such as JAXA's:

Iced lightning

From a children's book:

"In The Legend of Lightning and Thunder, a traditional legend that has been told in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut for centuries, two siblings resort to stealing from their fellow villagers, and inadvertently introduce lightning and thunder into the world. This beautifully illustrated traditional legend weaves together elements of an origin story and a traditional cautionary tale, giving young readers an accessible window into centuries-old Inuit mythology that is specific to the Kivalliq region of Nunavut."

In the Arctic, the harbinger of climate change, anthropogenic global warming is causing another natural phenomenon to occur more frequently (besides coastal erosion, permafrost degradation, wild fires, etc), especially along the northern coasts. In the past, sea water would keep air temperatures too cool for thunderstorms to develop, but this is obviously changing.

Below are excerpts from a blog post by blogger/commenter Apocalypse4Real (who keeps a close eye on methane readings in the Arctic):

Iced Lightning - Lightning Strikes at 80 North

On July 8 and 9, 2016 the National Weather Service published special weather statements regarding the potential for thunderstorms in Barrow, Alaska and on the North Slope. There was not a thunderstorm reported in the media, although on July 10, 2016 there was a cloud to ground strike 15 miles from Barrow.

Curious, I decided to research the background of Arctic Coast or Arctic Ocean thunderstorms, starting with Barrow and Wainwright, Alaska.

Here's what I found, and what came at the end made my jaw drop in regard to lightning strikes and thunderstorms over the Arctic Sea Ice - and the massive changes in the last 16 years of increasing thunderstorm activity over the Arctic Ocean.

Crisis in the Cryosphere

I recently received an e-mail to draw my attention to a recent two-part
feature article on the Scientific American website by Dr. John J. Berger,
an independent energy and environmental consultant.

The article called Crisis in the Cryosphere is about the changes going on
in the world of ice and snow - our world of ice and snow - and the potential consequences of these changes. It was published 6 weeks ago,
but its content is relevant every second of the day.

Here's an excerpt from part 2 that deals with Arctic sea ice:

Melting ice, Nunavut, Canada. Credit: Louise Murray / robertharding/Getty

Summer sea ice in the Arctic cools the Earth because it reflects solar heat that otherwise is absorbed by darker less reflective ocean water, warming the planet. But half of the end-of-summer summer sea ice found in the Arctic in 1950 is already gone. This loss has helped drive Arctic temperatures up by multiples of the world’s average temperature rise, accelerating permafrost thawing and Greenland melting.

At the projected 2.7° to 3.5° global temperature increase projected as a result of the emission-reduction pledges made last December at the global climate accord in Paris, all summer sea ice will disappear once temperatures approach 3°, a condition that has never occurred in modern human existence, according to ICCI.

The complete loss of summer sea ice will have significant impacts on the world’s weather, ecosystems, and economy.  Greater instability in the jet stream, less stable polar fronts, and more extreme weather in mid-latitudes are expected. Ice-dependent marine food chains and ecosystems may collapse, and traditional Arctic cultures will be devastated.

Read the entire text here (part 1) and here (part 2).

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:

 

Consensus and consequences

The following brief communication was published on the The Cryosphere Discussions website two days ago: Does it matter exactly when the Arctic will become ice-free?

It's a good question, albeit a rhetorical one. The authors argue that a "robust definition of ice-free may reduce confusion in the community and amongst the public", and start by asking what the exact definition of ice-free is.

We consider four plausible definitions of the date of an ‘ice-free Arctic’. We apply the commonly-used threshold, for which northern hemispheric sea ice extent (defined as the total area of ocean with a sea ice fraction greater than 15%) is less than 1 million km2. The threshold of 1 million km2, rather than zero, is used because ice can be expected to remain for some time along the northern coast of Greenland, whilst for navigational purposes the central Arctic is ice-free. The ‘first ice-free year’ is then defined as:

A. The first year that at least one day is ‘ice free’.
B. The first year when the September mean is ’ice free’.
C. The first time the final year of a 5 year running mean of September monthly mean extents is ice-free.
D. The final year of 5 consecutive September monthly means which are ’ice-free’.

The question is an interesting one to ponder, and not just from a scientific perspective. Still, discussing the exact definition of ice-free may itself become a smoke screen that shrouds a more important issue, and thus cause even more confusion. Fortunately, the authors seem to be aware of this when they state in their paper's final paragraph:

If global warming continues unabated...

Here's a Discover magazine article I noticed a couple of days ago, containing a nice (but big) animation that shows how many days per year (parts of) the Arctic will be ice-free in the future if things keep going as they are:

If global warming continues unabated, humans are likely to completely remake the map of the Arctic in a few decades

Ice was in the news quite a lot last week. There was, for example, the news that Antarctica could be gaining, not losing, ice, at least for now.

Lest you were tempted to breathe a sigh of relief, critics pointed to contrary evidence. And there were also these unsettling findings about the gigantic West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

But far to the north, some equally important news unfortunately got less attention. For the long and short of it, see the animation above.

I created it to portray in visual form what a study published last week has revealed: Unless we start reining in greenhouse gas emissions, “our projected impact on the climate system will change the face of Arctic sea ice,” says Katy Barnhart, who led the study while she was at the University of Colorado’s Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research. (Full disclosure: I’m a professor at the University of Colorado.)

The animation shows computer model simulations of how Arctic sea ice is likely to respond to continued human-caused warming. More specifically, it models how the number of days of open water change each year from 1920 to 2100 under a “business-as-usual” scenario. By 2100, according to the study, much of the Arctic has greater than 150 additional days of open water as compared with the pre industrial period prior to 1850.

Read the rest of the article here. Of course, it's not about the open water per se, but about the consequences for ecosystems and climate, not just regionally, but for the entire Northern Hemisphere.

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.

Public knowledge and perceptions about the Arctic

University of New Hampshire professor of sociology and occasional guest blogger on the Arctic Sea Ice Blog, Lawrence 'Larry' Hamilton, is doing ongoing research into the public perception of what's going on in the Arctic (I've written about his work previously here and here).

In anticipation of a new research paper that is about to be published in Polar Geography, Larry has written an article for ARCUS to explain what it's about:

Tracking Public Knowledge and Perceptions About the Arctic

By: Lawrence C. Hamilton, Carsey School of Public Policy, University of New Hampshire

The U.S. public knows that something is happening in the Arctic. It involves melting ice, because that has been mentioned in so many news accounts and scientific reports. But where exactly is that ice? Is it still melting? What might that mean for people who live far away? On such points public awareness becomes fuzzy, with some people's perceptions shaped by their ideology instead of geographic or scientific knowledge. These findings emerge from research that has been asking Arctic knowledge questions alongside the usual public opinion or political items on national or statewide surveys.

The first research of this type involved the General Social Survey (GSS), a flagship nationwide instrument supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. In 2006 and again in 2010, the GSS carried a "polar module" of questions assessing levels of public knowledge about polar regions, and concern about polar climate change. Analysis of those surveys found that knowledge improved slightly from 2006 to 2010, while levels of concern stayed about the same—and were strongly divided in terms of ideology (Hamilton 2008; Hamilton, Cutler and Schaefer 2012a). Ideological divisions prove to be so strong they actually reverse the effects of objectively tested science literacy. Concern about polar climate change tends to increase as science literacy rises among people who self-identify as liberal or moderate. Among the most conservative, however, concern about polar climate change tends to decrease as science literacy rises (Hamilton, Cutler and Schaefer 2012b).

The GSS results inspired a second generation of polar survey research asking more specific questions. In this note we look at one example about Arctic ice:

Which of the following three statements do you think is more accurate? Over the past few years, the ice on the Arctic Ocean in late summer...

• Covers less area than it did 30 years ago.
• Declined but then recovered to about the same area it had 30 years ago.
• Covers more area than it did 30 years ago.
• Don't know/no answer.

New Hampshire surveys from 2011 to 2015 tracking public awareness of Arctic sea ice area decline: (A) all respondents, and (B) separated by beliefs about climate change. Image courtesy of L. Hamilton.

Sixty-eight percent of those responding to a 2011 national version of the Community and Environment in Rural America survey (NCERA) knew or guessed the correct answer—ice area has declined. In fact, since 2007 the extent of Arctic sea-ice in September remains over a million square kilometers lower than it was 30 years before. Public recognition of this striking change, however, varies with political orientation and with beliefs about climate change. For example, 80 percent of the NCERA respondents who personally agree with the scientific consensus that climate change is happening now, caused mainly by human activities, answered the sea ice question correctly. On the other hand, only 32 percent of those who think climate change is not happening answered this question correctly. On this and other factual questions, it seems likely that many people chose answers derived from their more general beliefs about climate change (Hamilton 2012).

Read the rest of the article here.