Arctic Sea Ice

Our beloved ice pack

People who have kids probably know that feeling when their kid has a fever and they watch him/her for a while at night to see how he/she's doing. That's what I felt when dabize sent me his latest declouding art, a composite image from the LANCE-MODIS satellite images (click for a larger version):

Dabize explains:

This is essentially a photomontage of Days 228-232 for tiles r03c03,r04c04,r03c04,r04c03 (terra, 1km)

I blurred the cloud tops of any area that had simply NO clear weather over the past 5 days.

This had the effect of making some areas of cloud look a bit like ice, but I think the difference is clear in most cases.

Our kid, 2012, looks sick at the edges, but well enough in the centre to carry it through the rest of the melting season and spare some shamelessly goalpost shifting people the embarrasment of having to eat defrosted crow. I don't know about the rest of the family yet. 2012 wil probably infect its sibling years. We'll see as soon as 2013 develops its first fever.

Peeking through the clouds 4

Commenter dabize has sent me the latest 'declouded' version of the False-Colour Composite images Environment Canada makes of the LANCE-MODIS satellite images. They give us an excellent view of week to week changes. Due to some resolution incompatibilities I had to exclude last week's image (it's in the 3rd instalment of this Peeking through the clouds series), which makes the changes caused by the Arctic summer storm even more pronounced:  

Peeking through the clouds 3

Clouds blocking our view of events below make the False-Colour Composite images Environment Canada makes of the LANCE-MODIS satellite images very welcome (for further explanation read the first and second blog posts with the same title), especially after they have been 'declouded' by commenter dabize.

The latest animation showing weekly changes from July 3rd to August 7th:

Here's another panel dabize made showing the latest declouded false-colour composite image on the right, and changes compared to a month ago (red) in the image on the left, and to a week ago in the image in the middle (click for a larger version):

Thank you, dabize!

It will be interesting to see the declouded images in two weeks from now. Why two weeks? The Arctic has been so incredibly cloudy because of that huge summer storm that I wonder if we're going to be able to see much next week. But who knows.

As mentioned in Peeking through the clouds 2 with regards to the NWP:

Peeking through the clouds 2: animation

This a follow-up to last week's blog post with the same title, in which I discussed the MODIS Composites that are made every week by Environment Canada. Their False-Colour Composite image which can be downloaded here is particularly interesting because it allows us to see through the clouds. This is useful, because low-pressure systems have been dominating the Arctic in the past weeks, and that means that clouds hide the situation below.

Now right after I posted this blog post commenter dabize sent me alternative versions of these composite images, in which he had removed the clouds even more. This image that he sent me yesterday clearly shows the ice loss (red) since June 5th up till now:

But even more visually stunning are the blue images he sent me that I have turned into an animation (each frame represents a week of averaged LANCE-MODIS satellite images):

First images from AMSR2

Hat-tip to commenter Arcticicelost80.

Yesterday JAXA released the following press release:

SHIZUKU Observation Data Acquired by AMSR2

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has released some observation images on the Earth acquired by the Global Change Observation Mission 1st - Water "SHIZUKU" (GCOM-W1). The SHIZUKU was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center at 1:39 a.m. on May 18, 2012 (Japan Standard Time) and entered into the A-train orbit on June 29, then has started regular observations since July 3, after increasing the antenna rotation of the onboard Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) to 40 rpm.

We will continue the initial functional verification (for about three months after launch,) then confirm data accuracy by comparing it with observation data acquired on land, and perform initial calibration and inspection operations including data correction.

I'm not really sure when AMSR2 will replace WindSat for the delivery of SIE data. Maybe next year?

The dark side of Greenland

Last January Dr. Jason E. Box. research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center, reported on his Meltfactor blog that the Greenland ice sheet was getting less and less reflective. Albedo, the reflecting power of a surface that is defined as the ratio of reflected radiation, is high when the ice sheet is covered with white snow. But as temps go up this snow starts to get darker, more of the surface below gets uncovered and a vicious cycle starts: more snow melts, snow gets dirtier, reflects less solar energy, more melt, etc. Other factors that influence the albedo of the Greenland ice sheet, is total prior snowfall, rain, and snow impurities, such as dust and soot from wildfires and human-produced pollution. The sooner the snow starts to deteriorate in spring/summer, the less reflectivity and thus more melt there will be.

The image above comes from a more recent blog post on Meltfactor: Greenland ice sheet reflectivity at record low, particularly at high elevations. Albedo at lower elevations is lower, because temperatures are higher there and more of the surface below the snow/ice becomes bare.
Dr. Box writes:

Siberia burns

This hasn't anything to do with the Arctic sea ice directly, but as everything in and around the Arctic is inter-related and inter-connected, I wouldn't call the following news article a dissonance on the Arctic Sea Ice blog. Of course those fires will also probably cause some soot to fly towards the ice pack. Things are apparently even worse than in 2010.

Earth Observatory Image of the Day:

On June 18, 2012, a total of 198 wildfires burned across Russia and had charred an area that covered 8,330 hectares (32 square miles). Many were in central Russia, where firefighters have battled uncontrolled fires for months.

The latest flare-up prompted Russian authorities to declare a state of emergency in seven regions, including the Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous area, the Tyva Republic, the Sakha Republic, Krasnoyarsk, Amur, Zabaikalsky, and Sakhalin.

Kind of blue

There has been a bit of a discussion of this in the ASI update 3 thread, but it looks interesting enough for a separate blog post.

In the past three days the fast ice in the region between the New Siberian Islands and the Lena Delta has started to take on a blue colour (see below). I noticed a slight difference between this year's LANCE-MODIS images and last year's, which seem to be brighter, but this definitely looks blue.

What could be causing it? Someone suggested it's melt ponding, or river dicharge from the Lena, which unfroze a while back (video). It could also be caused by the way light is refracted by the surface, absorbing green and red, reflecting blue. Or perhaps something in the atmosphere. As the small image on the top shows it is also picked up on sea ice concentration maps.

It's something in the ice, the atmosphere or the satellite sensor.

Either way, there must be something going on there, as it's very warm in the Siberian coastal settlement of Tiksi (red spot in the image), where the May record of 16.1 °C in 1954 was smashed today by at least 5 °C (edit: make that 3 °C, I didn't know there were two weather stations in Tiksi). And it's been anomalously warm there for over a week now according to the Russian Pogoda i Klimat website.

Last year I made an animation of this region: New Siberian Islands. The fast ice started to break up there towards the end of June. One would expect it to happen sooner this year.

Beaufort break-up

Commenter Dr Tskoul posted a link to this Youtube video he made from the MODIS Terra satellite for days 90 to 143:

It looks spectacular, doesn't it? All because of the large and strong high pressure system I mentioned in the first ASI update. Check out the animation of DMI SLP images and focus on that big yellow/orange/red blob over the Beaufort Sea.

Last year that region looked quite spectacular as well:

NASA image of the day: Bering Sea

A little over a month I looked at the situation in the Bering Sea, with sea ice cover larger than it has been for the last decade. This hasn't changed as NASA's Earth Observatory shows with the following satellite image of the day and accompanying text I have reproduced below:

Bering Sea Teeming with Ice

For most of the winter of 2011–2012, the Bering Sea has been choking with sea ice. Though ice obviously forms there every year, the extent of the ice cover has been unusually widespread this season. In fact, the past several months have included the second highest ice extent in the satellite record for the Bering Sea region, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

The natural-color image above shows the Bering Sea and the coasts of Alaska and northeastern Russia on March 19, 2012. The image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Black lines mark the coastlines, many of which have ice shelves or frozen bays extending beyond their land borders.

NSIDC reported that ice extent in the Bering Sea for January was 562,000 square kilometers, at least 104,600 square kilometers above the 1979 to 2000 average. Though numbers were not released for February, the pattern persisted through to March 2012.

Continue reading at NASA's Earth Observatory website...