There were fewer snow and ice extremes than in 2012. Many regions and components of the Arctic environment were closer to their long-term averages, but the effects of a persistent warming trend that began over 30 years ago remain clearly evident.
The impacts of the warming climate on the physical environment during those 30 years are influencing Arctic ecosystems on the land and in the sea.
Here's a video accompanying the report:
And a longer video showing the press conference announcing the report at the 2013 AGU Fall Meeting, last Thursday:
Climate Central's Andrew Freedman, who was present at the press conference to ask questions, has another excellent summary of the report here.
It's the most interesting and actual of all potential risks tied to Arctic sea ice loss and could turn out to be one of the surest signs of changing weather patterns. Which explains the growth in interest and research.
One of the latest scientific papers on this subject, Influence of Arctic sea ice on European summer precipitation, has been written by Dr. James Screen of the University of Exeter and published
in Environmental Research Letters (via the Econnexus Blog).
The publication of the paper has been accompanied by a video, which has been put on YouTube by Peter Sinclair from the ClimateCrocks Blog, which makes it easier to embed (thank you, Peter):
It's been a couple of weeks since the USCGC Healy has been cruising the Arctic (Beaufort Sea mostly) for Arctic West Summer (AWS) 2013, and a lot of science is being done as we speak. I'm getting first-hand reports from Ben Pelto - glaciologist and glacier change archiver Mauri Pelto's son - a grad student studying paleoclimate who is working on his M.S. at UMass Amherst. Yesterday he sent me this wonderful picture with a polar bear in the middle:
The picture was taken 70 miles off the coast, west of the Mackenzie river, and it shows in how good a shape the sea ice is in this part of the Arctic, where it was actually quite thin at the start of the melting season. Expectations were that a lot of it would melt out, just like last year when the ice was supposedly thicker, but the weather has been so cold and cloudy - except perhaps for a brief one week spell of clear skies - that a lot of the ice has survived and is still blocking the western entrance of the Northwest Passage, which is almost certainly not going to open up for the first time in 5 years (more on that next week). We'll have to see what this will mean for the coming freezing season and next year's melting season.
To get back to the Healy: a lot of interesting science is being done, mainly collecting sediment cores for a research project that focuses on the causes of the Younger Dryas period. For people who are interested in what's being done exactly on the Healy, there's quite a bit of blogging activity this year from the ship, for instance by Healy's public affairs officer, a 16-year old high school student called Alan Guo, and this one by Danny Blas, a teacher from California, who fills his blog with entertaining videos such as the one below:
During the melting season I'm writing (bi-)weekly updates on the
current situation with regards to Arctic sea ice (ASI). Central to
these updates are the daily Cryosphere Today sea ice area (SIA) and IJIS sea ice extent (SIE) numbers, which I compare to data from the 2005-2012 period (NSIDC has a good explanation
of sea ice extent and area in their FAQ). I also look at other things
like regional sea ice area, compactness,
temperature and weather forecasts,
anything of particular interest.
The animation on the right consists of NSIDC sea ice concentration maps, one for each ASI update.
Due to technical problems, a video will be posted later today or tomorrow.
---
Two weeks ago I said: Bye bye, Beaufort. But the ice in the Beaufort didn't really wave back. It retreated somewhat, but much less than I expected after a full week of ideal conditions. At the end of winter the ice was supposed to be thinner there than last year (when it retreated at an amazing pace) and it currently looks extremely mushy out there, individual floes can hardly be made out. But somehow the ice pack is standing its ground in that part of the Arctic.
Nevertheless, with all the easy ice melting out elsewhere, trend lines on extent and area graphs plummeted, and 2013 slashed some of the difference with previous record years 2007, 2011 and 2012. However, with most of the easy ice now gone and ideal conditions fading out in the past couple of days, things have started to slow down.
There's still a lot of melting potential around (and within) the pack, and with a potentially big cyclone forecasted to form in a couple of days, there's no telling what can happen.
Sea ice area (SIA)
Cryosphere Today
has had several big melting periods this month (13 century breaks in 19 days), albeit interspersed with some slow days, and so a very high rate of daily decrease (only 2009 comes close) has brought 2013 real close to 2007 and 2011, and the difference with 2012 has been reduced further to a little over 500K.
Arctic Sea Ice Blog commenters come up with all kinds of ways to make sense of or visualize what's going on with the ice pack, tweaking satellite data, 'declouding' images or compiling animations. In this blog post I want to show a couple of those efforts.
Commenter Danp opened a thread on the ASIF a couple of days ago, showing a cleaned up compilation he made of LANCE-MODIS satellite images (like commenter dabize did last year). The result looks very nice indeed, giving us a clear view of the holes on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, near the North Pole:
You can go to Danp's Google Drive image and zoom in up to a 500m resolution.
Commenter A-Team, of course, keeps rocking hard with his infinite ways of tweaking images to squeeze info out of them. His latest creations can be admired in the recent Nares blog post, but here's one interesting example:
During the melting season I'm writing (bi-)weekly updates on the
current situation with regards to Arctic sea ice (ASI). Central to
these updates are the daily Cryosphere Today sea ice area (SIA) and IJIS sea ice extent (SIE) numbers, which I compare to data from the 2005-2012 period (NSIDC has a good explanation
of sea ice extent and area in their FAQ). I also look at other things
like regional sea ice area, compactness,
temperature and weather forecasts,
anything of particular interest.
The animation on the right consists of NSIDC sea ice concentration maps, one for each ASI update.
Here's another rehearsal for when I grow up and make good videos with a title roll and background music and everything. By the way, I make a big mistake as I go along. Can you hear what it is?
This update should actually be called 'Bye bye, Beaufort and Chukchi', but it doesn't sound as good. As announced in the previous ASI update the trend lines on various graphs have started to drop precipitously, with thin ice on the fringes (Hudson, Baffin, Kara) disappearing fast.
Despite a slow start unlike any other in recent years, which I described in this recent blog post, 2013 is still hanging in there, slowly leaving the less aggressive melting seasons behind and moving towards the record years of 2007, 2011 and 2012.
The question now is how things will proceed, as the amount of easy-to-melt ice is starting to run out. Even though this year's ice pack consists of a record amount of first-year ice, the weather still plays an important role. The interesting thing about last year's melting season was that decrease rates slowed down somewhat when the weather turned bad in July, but didn't stall, like they did in previous years under similar circumstances.
I think the same will go for this year as well, also because area/extent numbers are quite bit higher, and thus still a lot of melting potential. But there's no telling what could happen if the weather is very conducive to melting/compacting/transport for a week or two, and it looks like we're having some of that up ahead.
Sea ice area (SIA)
July is a month where trend lines on the Cryosphere Today
sea ice area graph get divided in the two camps of winners and losers, with 2010 moving from one to the other. Because of steady, substantial drops since the last week of June the 2013 trend line has slowly started to move from one camp to the other.
Just like last year there seems to be a parallel between the rate and amount of decrease of Arctic sea ice (ASI) and the Greenland ice sheet (GIS or GrIS). Last year the ASI extent/area/volume records were obliterated due to periods of blocking high-pressure areas, a huge cyclone, and general thinness of the ice pack, and simultaneously the Greenland ice sheet melted like never witnessed before.
This year the poorest start to the melting season since I've been watching the ASI (more on this later this week) is mirrored by a more 'normal' mass decrease on Greenland. So far. Two weeks ago a great update on the situation on Greenland appeared on the NSIDC's brand new Greenland Today web page. I didn't post about it due to a very busy schedule, but better late than never.
Before I do that though I also want to call attention to the Dark Snow Project. Dr. Jason Box, some other scientists and blogger/video maker Peter Sinclair are on Greenland as we speak, taking measurements to increase our knowledge of the different factors that contribute to GIS mass loss.
They're putting out a lot of videos, but here's a good overview:
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