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ThE SnYpEr AzZ
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I've been wondering how the different effects of summer wild fires net out. On the one hand, the smoke and ash in the atmosphere block some solar rays. Because most of the fires are in the summer, this should be a significant negative feedback. When the pollution settles onto the earth, it will produce positive feedbacks which vary according to the surface. Darkened sea ice and glaciers retain significant extra heat. Is there any math out there that simulates these effects by location and time of year ?
ASI 2014 update 7: late momentum
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 2005-2013 period (NSIDC has...
Don't lump people who question the Warren Report with your other lunatics !
Record dominoes 9: PIOMAS sea ice volume
The people from PIOMAS have done an extra data release (there'll be another one next week for all of the August data). This data shows us that yet another record domino has fallen, after so many others already. This is one of the biggest dominoes out there, especially now that observational data...
How much rain typically falls under Arctic Ocean lows this time of year ? I would think significant rainfall on thin, patchy ice could cause as much destruction as wind.
Peeking through the clouds
When low-pressure areas take over the Arctic, they do two things: make the ice pack diverge and increase cloudiness. The diverging of the pack is hidden by the clouds, but we can sometimes see the holes in the ice pack through holes in the cloud cover on the LANCE-MODIS satellite images. We saw...
It hadn't occurred to me that there would be so much debris and sediments ripped out of Greenland by the raging meltwater. This will widen channels and speed up glacier movements year-round and could be a significant positive feedback for GIS disintegration.
The wet side of Greenland
When writing The dark side of Greenland, a recent blog post on decreasing reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet, with images comparing the southwest of Greenland with satellite images from previous years, I of course realized that when that ice sheet becomes less reflective, it will soak up mo...
When the Greenland lakes drain, some of the water makes its way to the oceans, while some descends through the ice sheet and refreezes. I believe that experiments have been done by researchers putting instruments and/or substances into moulins. Have any results been published as to what percentage of meltwater reaches the sea ? I believe this could be an important parameter as the number and size of lakes steadily increases.
Fringe fries part 2
This is a follow-up to the first Fringe fries post from 3 weeks ago. I've compiled a couple of comparisons of Arctic regions, so we can see how 2012 stacks up against previous years. Remember, you can check out the Concentration Maps page on the ASI Graphs website, which is very handy for a quic...
In another 4-5 billion years, our sun will be a red giant and grow outwards, making it very hot on earth. Therefore, the next thousand or so ice ages, along with the intervening interglacials, are just noise along this warming path. The best planning we can do is to try to project which continent will drift to one of the poles in 4 billion years, and buy land there.
The Double Recovery of Arctic Sea Ice
This is a re-post from Dr. Inferno's concise but brilliant analysis: The Double Recovery of Arctic Sea Ice Just two months ago we learned that Arctic Sea Ice Is Normal For The First Time In At Least Seven Years http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/nsidc-arctic-ice-extent-normal-for-t...
Most of the northern U.S. and Southern Canada has zero or little snow cover right now. This is unusual for early February. Anecdotally, late winter and early spring temperatures are correlated (inversely) with snow cover where I live in Southern Ontario. I wonder how much the reduced albedo will impact this year's March-April temperatures. I know there are localized effects (normally, fast-melting snow suppresses daytime temperatures on otherwise warm days ; not this year it seems) as well as more widespread effects from the lower albedo.
Barentsz and Kara
I had grown accustomed to writing Barentsz Sea without the Z, as everyone does. But I've decided to no longer scorn my Dutch roots. The Barentsz Sea has been named after Willem Barentszoon, a Dutch explorer and cartographer who died looking for an open Northeast Passage (now known as the Northe...
4000 km3 not 4 million.
PIOMAS September 2011 (volume record lower still)
The PIOMAS graphs at the Polar Science Center of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington have been updated. It reached an all-time low of 4.4 thousand km3 last month, but went down some more as we can see on Larry Hamilton's stack graph (Larry also wrote a great blog pos...
What strikes me is that there is not that much motion of the ice. For all the discussion of gyres, pressure gradients and currents, most of the ice melted in place this year.
Melting season 2011 (video)
Just like last year, Arctic.io has produced an animation that shows how the melting season developed this year: Quote: Above animation starts with a full image of the Arctic mosaic taken first week of May and then updates all cloud free parts day by day and frame by frame. Although it ...
Kevin,
I read the summary of the paper and I think I get the gist of it. Perhaps the pattern of decreases and increases will produce few large negative changes and frequent small positive ones. But if extent goes to zero in 50-60 years I doubt if there will be but a few cherry-picked decade-long periods where extent has increased (consider the anomaly of the 1998 to 2008 global air temperature drop versus all the positive decadal changes since the late 1970's). The paper said the chances of a decrease or increase in sea ice over a random decade are "equal". I don't buy it.
Mike.
Arctic ice melt could pause in coming decades
First the ice extent had been 50% less during the Holocene Climatic Optimum than it was in September 2007, now we have models saying the ice could expand during some decades just as easily as contract, according to this NSF press release (hat-tip to Noel): Researchers find unexpected results in ...
Yes. But the line is going from current value to zero in a few decades, so the slope of the expected ice extent (or area or volume) is always negative. This means that it is more likely that extent will decrease than increase in any given short-term time frame. Even if variability is extreme.
Arctic ice melt could pause in coming decades
First the ice extent had been 50% less during the Holocene Climatic Optimum than it was in September 2007, now we have models saying the ice could expand during some decades just as easily as contract, according to this NSF press release (hat-tip to Noel): Researchers find unexpected results in ...
TZ :
You had me looking for "Fulder"'s paper which is about marijuana. I believe you meant the "Funder" paper about driftwood. I haven't read it either but maybe I'll give it a try.
Mike.
Arctic ice melt could pause in coming decades
First the ice extent had been 50% less during the Holocene Climatic Optimum than it was in September 2007, now we have models saying the ice could expand during some decades just as easily as contract, according to this NSF press release (hat-tip to Noel): Researchers find unexpected results in ...
I am not sure which paper you are referring to but I haven't read it. It just doesn't seem possible that the probability of an increase is "equal" to the probability of a decrease in the short term when the slope of the expected amount of ice is always negative, regardless of the variability. Perhaps the function is of such complexity that it is "expected" that there will be reversals but I would need to be convinced of that.
Mike (yahoo assigned me this stupid moniker and I don't know how to change it).
Arctic ice melt could pause in coming decades
First the ice extent had been 50% less during the Holocene Climatic Optimum than it was in September 2007, now we have models saying the ice could expand during some decades just as easily as contract, according to this NSF press release (hat-tip to Noel): Researchers find unexpected results in ...
"The simulations also indicated that Arctic sea ice is equally likely to expand or contract over short time periods under the climate conditions of the late 20th and early 21st century".
I don't see how this can be mathematically true. Even if AGW is only responsible for half of the sea ice loss since 1980, that is something like 3 1/2% per decade. Whatever the standard deviation of the annual ice change is, the expected value is still a loss, with a higher probability of loss than gain in any given year. The probability of net ice loss increases for longer periods of time, eventually approaching 100% (the house always wins eventually).
Arctic ice melt could pause in coming decades
First the ice extent had been 50% less during the Holocene Climatic Optimum than it was in September 2007, now we have models saying the ice could expand during some decades just as easily as contract, according to this NSF press release (hat-tip to Noel): Researchers find unexpected results in ...
If you look closely at the satellite image for July 8 you will see a lonely polar bear on an ice floe near the north pole holding a small sign that says "HELP PLEASE".
SIE 2011 update 11: the heat is on
During the melting season I'm regularly writing updates on the current sea ice extent (SIE) as reported by IJIS (a joint effort of the International Arctic Research Center and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and compare it to the sea ice extents in the period 2005-2010. NSIDC has a good ...
Temperatures for April and May in Churchill, Manitoba and Iqualuit, Nunavit averaged significantly below normal. The ice on Hudson Bay was thin but started melting late.
Hudson Bay
After having kept a close watch on the Bering Sea (which is now practically empty of sea ice), we turn our attention to the Hudson Bay, by comparing this year's sea ice concentration with that of previous years.For this I have again gratefully made use of the University of Bremen archive of sea ...
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Jun 22, 2011
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