Arctic Sea Ice

EGU 2017 call for abstracts

Here's a short blog post for all of you out there publishing in the scientific literature (you know who you are). There's little less than a week left to submit your papers to the various sessions organized at this year's EGU General Assembly.

The first session I'd like to mention, is one chaired by my namesake Neven S. Fučkar from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the invitation for which I received in my mail box yesterday:

We hope that you will be interested in attending and presenting your Arctic work at the following session at EGU 2017, 23-28 April 2017 (deadline for abstract submission: 11 January 2017, Wednesday 13:00 Central European Time):

Polar Climate Predictability and Prediction (co-organized: CL3.03/AS1.22/CR1.6/OS1.15)

The Arctic sea ice cover and many other elements of the cryosphere are experiencing significant changes over the modern observational era. The polar climate is crucial for the Earth’s energy and water budget, and its variability and change have direct socio-economic impacts. However, most of climate models are not yet in position to provide us with accurate predictions of polar climate. We welcome presentations advancing understanding of the mechanisms that control polar climate variability on sub-seasonal to multi-decadal timescales and climate change in both hemispheres. We encourage submissions that examine sources of polar climate predictability in a hierarchy of models, and link polar processes and predictions with mid- and low-latitude climate. We look forward to studies using remote sensing data, field observations, proxy data, theory and numerical models encompassing climate projections, reanalyses and forecast systems. This session aims to further connection between the atmospheric, oceanic and cryospheric research and operational communities. Furthermore, the session is an opportunity to present and discuss plans for the Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP), with its Core Phase commencing mid-2017.

We look forward to seeing you in Vienna,

Neven S. Fuckar, Virginie Guemas, Torben Koenigk, Matthieu Chevallier, Ed Hawkins, Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, Rym Msadek, and Helge Goessling

But there are many other interesting sessions as well. Here's a list:

EGU2016, my impressions

Just like last year, I had the opportunity and time to visit
the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2016. There were several sessions on subjects related to the cryosphere and remote sensing, but most of the interesting Arctic sea ice-related stuff was happening on Thursday.
So, that's when I went to Vienna.

The day started quite strongly with a press conference called Sea ice decline in the Arctic. Dr. Alexandra Jahn from the University of Colorado talked about models and internal climate variability and Dr. Dobrynin from Uni Hamburg talked about how - as the Arctic loses more sea ice - there will be more, bigger waves eroding coasts and shallow seabeds, etc. This was all very interesting and how I expected a scientific press conference to be: about research looking at the past or the future, based on a painstaking and time-consuming process that involves lots of hypothesizing and data crunching.

However, to my surprise, yet another speaker was talking about the things we like to talk about here and on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum, things that are happening now, things that affect the melting season. Dr. Marcel Nicolaus from the Alfred Wegener Institute explained how a very warm winter resulted in less ice growth (check this previous blog post called CryoSat-2 confirms: sea ice volume is low), and as a consequence this melting season could be seeing new record lows. Depending on the weather, of course.

Robert McSweeney from Carbon Brief asked Dr. Nicolaus and several other scientists about their views on this:

So, that was pretty cool. After the press conference I had time to upload a few images to the ASIF and then went on my way to visit the oral session called Rapid changes in sea ice: processes and implications.

The session consisted of various interesting presentations.
Here's an overview:

Cryosat-2 confirms: sea ice volume is low

Last month I made a comparison of CryoSat-2 sea ice volume distribution maps for the 2015/2016 Winter analysis, but it was off because the dates didn't exactly match. Better images have emerged during this year's General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (more on that later this week):

These images come from a poster that was presented at EGU2016 by Dr. Robert Ricker from the Alfred Wegener Institute. This poster, as well as some stunning images of the Arctic, is included in the latest AWI press release, which followed Thursday's Sea ice decline in the Arctic press conference at EGU2016 by Dr. Marcel Nicolaus (also from AWI):

The Arctic is facing a decline in sea ice that might equal the negative record of 2012

Data collected by the CryoSat-2 satellite reveal large amounts of thin ice that are unlikely to survive the summer

images courtesy of Stefan Hendricks, Alfred Wegener Institute

Sea ice physicists from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), are anticipating that the sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean this summer may shrink to the record low of 2012. The scientists made this projection after evaluating current satellite data about the thickness of the ice cover. The data show that the Arctic sea ice was already extraordinarily thin in the summer of 2015. Comparably little new ice formed during the past winter. Today Dr Marcel Nicolaus, expert on sea ice, has presented these findings at a press conference during the annual General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.

Read the rest of the press release here, and some good reports on The Carbon Brief, The Arctic Journal, and yes, The Daily Mail.

I attended the press conference and was surprised to see such an accurate and actual portrayal of current conditions in the Arctic. Usually these scientific press conferences are about things that are behind us, like the previous melting season or some such. But Dr. Nicolaus jumped right into it, discussing the temperature readings from buoys in the Arctic that showed the North Pole experienced temps above 0 °C at the end of December, after which he discussed the latest CryoSat-2 results.

Quite a bit of sea ice volume was indeed lost during last year's melting season (see this prescient guest article I wrote for John Abraham's Climate Consensus - the 97% blog on the Guardian website) and after a record warm/non-cold winter, the ice pack's overall thickness looks similar to that of March 2012. Regional differences with 2012 are displayed on this comparison map (red means more ice now than in 2012, blue the opposite):

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: