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.
It's been a week since I announced that the ice in the Beaufort Sea was going to come under early pressure. Here's a quick update on what has happened so far, how the forecast played out, and what the short-term conditions for this part of the Arctic will be.
As expected, the Beaufort Gyre kicked into action, big time, with winds causing large cracks in the ice pack, moving it westwards and away from the Alaskan and Canadian coasts. The massive polynyas that are left behind, get partially covered with a thin veneer of ice.
Here's an animation showing the difference between LANCE-MODIS satellite images on the first of the month and two weeks later:
Quite impressive, isn't it? As if someone threw a giant brick into it.
Here's an animation showing all days between April 1st and 14th (the file is somewhat large, apologies if it loads slowly):
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:
The lowest point has been reached on all sea ice area and extent graphs, and so the melting season has ended. I'll have more on the details later this week, but here's a quick preview of one of the most important features of this melting season, and that's the decimation of multi-year ice (MYI) on the Pacific side of the Arctic.
Here's a nice video that shows how the melting season developed and ended, based on AMSR2 data. It's made by Felicia Brise of the University of Hamburg, and I've taken the liberty to upload it to YouTube:
There's a stunning contrast between the destruction on the Pacific side of the Arctic, and the relative stable and compact situation on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, even though the ice there was thinnest at the start of the melting season. In fact, this region of first-year ice was so large that it even covered the North Pole, perhaps for the first time on record. I even speculated in my 2014/2015 Winter analysis that under the right conditions the North Pole could become ice-free this year.
But the opposite happened, the first-year ice on the Atlantic side was spared (there was also remarkably little transport of ice through Fram Strait) and it was the multi-year ice on the Pacific side that took barrage after barrage of warm, sunny weather. Now that the ice age distribution maps (developed by J. Maslanik and C. Fowler, and currently produced by M. Tschudi of CCAR) have been updated, we can see how things have proceeded since my last blog post on the subject three weeks ago:
As expected, all of the 5+-year old ice on the Pacific side of the Arctic has disappeared in truly spectacular fashion. As there wasn't that much 4-year old ice to begin with, there will be less of the oldest class of ice next year. On the other hand a lot of the 3-year old ice (green) will become 1 year older, and as said, first-year ice (dark blue) got off lightly.
Nevertheless, it seems that part of the rebound in MYI that happened since 2012 has been wiped out (something I speculated about almost two months ago in this guest blog for the Guardian Environment page). We'll know how much exactly when the NSIDC puts up their monthly analysis two weeks from now. Of course, ice age doesn't necessarily tell us how thick the ice is - this isn't our (grand)fathers' Arctic anymore - but it gives us an idea of long-term changes in the Arctic.
Another indicator is sea ice volume, both modelled and observed. To know whether 2015 will dip below rebound years 2013 and 2014, we'll also have to wait a week or two for the PIOMAS model to be updated. Either way, yet another fascinating melting season is now behind us. Thanks for watching.
Reading the latest NSIDC Greenland melt analysis, I came across this short video at the bottom of the summary. It's about melt lakes on top of the western part of the Greenland Ice Sheet and has nice visuals (you can spot Jakobshavn) and a great voice-over. If you haven't seen it yet, here's your chance:
Events since April 1st in the Beaufort Sea have been even more spectacular. A late cracking event, heat waves and scattered multi-year ice floes, all of it in just one minute and a half. Enjoy:
Jim used data from the University of Hamburg for these animations, with an extremely low resolution of 3.125 km (edit: high resolution of course, for more technical info see this research paper).
Update July 19th:
Jim has added another animation showing the situation along the Northern Sea Route:
Reposted from Peter Sinclair's Climatecrocks blog, a short CBS report that discusses research by Dr. Jennifer Francis linking Arctic warming to the erratic jet stream we’ve seen in recent extreme events:
This is one of the reasons why the Arctic is closer to us than we think, and why its sea ice loss is important for us.
Wipneus, creator of many graph and animations, has posted another gem over on the Forum.
The animation he uploaded to Youtube becomes really interesting after the end of May, when the transport through Fram Strait (one of the reasons that made the 2007 melting season so spectacular) almost completely stalls for much of the rest of the melting season:
Even though it's obvious that the lack of movement and transport was the defining theme of the 2014 melting season, it's still amazing to see it expressed so clearly in this animation. That trunk of ice that always protrudes through Fram Strait into the Greenland Sea, simply vanishes in July.
In October transport picks up again, and in the past few weeks it has been relatively strong. This is somewhat interesting because compared to 2013 a lot of the volume difference is situated close to Fram, as can be seen on this 2014-2013 thickness difference map produced by... wait for it... Wipneus:
If transport keeps up, the difference in volume (with 2013) might become smaller, but we'll have to wait and see what PIOMAS reports. In 2015.
And so, in advance, I wish everyone a happy, healthy, succesful and sustainable New Year!
Last week NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center published a two-part set of videos called A Selective History of Arctic Sea Ice Observations. These videos are short, simple, but extremely informative. And very nicely done, I may add. So now you must watch them!
Part 1:
And part 2:
NASA also released a video a couple of weeks ago, which I've overlooked, and it features my hero Dr. Tom Wagner putting the 2014 melting season in context. Is there a climate science communication award we can give this good man?
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