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Thanks to all for the discussion.
2016 Arctic cyclone, update 2
So, the storm has been raging for a while now. The latest Environment Canada weather map shows it's at 984 hPa. According to this tweet by PhD climatologist Brian Brettschneider a IABP buoy from the University of Washington measured a lowest central pressure of 966.5 hPa, which is somewhat lower...
Color Eli skeptical. Not that there are emissions from the ice shelf, but rather that they are not of the magnitude that Shakhova claims. Looking at the SCIACHAMY column density it appears that the major emission in Russian Eurasia is from the middle of Siberia north China and the SE Asia rice paddies
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2013/11/eli-and-weasel.html
And the wind cries methane
We return with some more info from the land of unknown, the land that is very important for our own land, but of which we do not seem to want to know more, as we are strangely comfortable with the unknown. I'm talking about methane, of course, the potent greenhouse gas of which enormous quantit...
Be cautious about "methane" bubbles from clatherates. First of all they may only be partially methane, second considerable methane will be solvated on the way to the surface and thus turn into oceanic plant food. There are studies which show that methane and petroleum leaks in the ocean increase plant production (for example near the Deepwater Horizon blowout)
Emerging Research Questions in the Arctic
Here's something that might be of interest to US citizens who follow what's going on in the Arctic and have ideas about what kind of science and technology is necessary to increase knowledge: a short questionnaire by the Committee on Emerging Research Questions in the Arctic of the National Re...
Heck, even Eli behaves here:), must be the frigid atmosphere.
A well earned congratulations from all at Rabett Run
Arctic ice loss and armchair scientists
John Abraham, known as the dragon that slew the Viscount and an excellent climate science communicator, approached me a while ago with a couple of questions concerning the blog and Arctic sea ice in general. He turned it into this ego-inflating article on the Guardian website: Global warming, A...
Anyone remember the coasts of Greenland being so ice free?
Third storm
Are we getting used to this? After the persistent cyclone in May and June, and the spiffy, but short-lived cyclone of two weeks ago, the Arctic is visited by yet another intense storm that goes below 980 hPa. In fact, according to Environment Canada it is currently at 976 hPa, which is lower tha...
Or let the currency inflate a bit more. See Iceland
Reinhart-Rogoff Weblogging: No, Their Argument for Austerity Now Out of Fear of Debt Didn't Seem to Me to Make That Much Sense
Let me highlight a passage from the ["Understanding Our Adversaries" evolution-of-economists'-views talk](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/04/understanding-our-adversaries-who-are-the-foes-of-expansionary-fiscal-policy-and-why-weblogging.html) that I started giving three months ago, a passage...
This is more about the treeline moving north than greening from ground plants. Trees far up in the new northern forests will be evergreens. The needles will contribute to warming throughout the year, both in absorbing sunlight through the spring, summer and fall, but also in insulating the ground during all seasons.
A drastically greener Arctic to come
I try to donate money to organisations that plant trees from time to time, often combined with efforts to provide the poor in Africa and Asia with efficient wood stoves, but also try to make sure the trees are planted in more southerly latitudes, as green stuff in more northerly latitudes tend...
Really well done. thanks
New PIOMAS vid
800 frames, 30 minutes of work per frame, but Andy Lee Robinson did it. He updated his PIOMAS 3D video to include all of 2012: Thanks, Andy! Great job!
Eli hopes that everyone realizes how this ties in with the pursuit of Charles Monnett by BOEM. Monnett's leaking of BOEM documents to PEER caused a minimum of a four year delay in Shell's drilling in the Beaufort and Chuckchi Seas, that cost Shell a pile of money. If that was not enough, he blocked Shell from setting up a shell environmental study of the Arctic in place of a real one.
Shell drill spill?
It all sounds so simple: Arctic sea ice is retreating, so let's get over there and start some off-shore drilling! Unfortunately the Arctic isn't a friendly place, not to humans and not to oil executives. Commenter Lodger links to this ominous news article about the Kulluk, "a $290 million off...
Allow Eli to contribute
Looking for winter weirdness 4
Here's a small one, related to the previous winter weirdness post. Apparently China is also experiencing a colder winter than usual. Allow me to just copypaste the entire article from China Daily: China's cold winter linked to Arctic sea ice loss The unusually cold winter this year in China m...
Sam, the damn things are going to get buried over the first winter and floated in the spring. Limited usefulness.
The real AR5 bombshell
The whole fake skeptic propaganda effort disguised as 'leak' is boring me to death, but of course it's interesting to have a sneak peek preview of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and see what they will have to say about Arctic sea ice. Geoff Beacon from the Brussels Blog already had a g...
""There is very high confidence that climate models realistically simulate the annual cycle of Arctic sea ice extent". Because I don't think there is, really."
Now some, (Crandles for example), but not Eli might think this a useful metric, given that the Mayans might be moving the Earth's orbit using time machine technology in preparation for a plunge into the sun.
The Bunny, OTOH, would be much more interested in how the freeze up and break up days in various places (Hudson's Bay, etc.) are changing.
The real AR5 bombshell
The whole fake skeptic propaganda effort disguised as 'leak' is boring me to death, but of course it's interesting to have a sneak peek preview of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and see what they will have to say about Arctic sea ice. Geoff Beacon from the Brussels Blog already had a g...
One of the interesting things about clathrates is that a) the collapse does not have to be over a short time and b) a fair proportion of the methane will be solvated into the sea water and then oxidized. There is at least some work on that, although the estimates of the immediately threatened clatherates on the coastal shelf may be low balled
Arctic methane: Why the sea ice matters
Here's a video from the Arctic News blog, which is run by the people from AMEG (Arctic Methane Emergency Group). I'm not a big fan of geo-engineering, especially if it supports the continuation of business-as-usual, but as this video has some good speakers that dare speak of worst-case scenarios...
First as with all the others a wish for a well earned holiday. Yes the Arctic ice situation is out of control, but in such a chaos it is best to wait and see when nothing is to be done
Second, exposing Eli to the crowd, a wild assed guess. With the compaction (everyone booed and hisses when the bunny wondered">http://rabett.blogspot.com/2012/08/toujour-gai.html">wondered whether there would be any ice south of 80 N, but it is going to be close), the refreeze is going to be very fast north of 80, and very slow south, as there is no floating ice to keep the top layer relatively fresh and cold. It's going to be a two step, with the first being cooling the upper layer down well below O C.
ASI 2012 update 10: (wh)at a loss
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 IJIS sea ice extent (SIE) and Cryosphere Today sea ice area (SIA) numbers, which I compare to data from the 2005-2011 period (NSIDC h...
Federal and state government employment hides the large number of contractors hired from body shops to do the necessary work. Given the local nature of the hiring it would be essentially impossible to characterize the numbers.
'Niall, Babe, I Got One Word for You: Census'
Niall Ferguson doesn't know what he is talking about: Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Going Viral?, by Invictus: I had barely finished reading Niall Ferguson’s takedown of President Obama when a flood of takedowns of Mr. Ferguson started hitting the web. This post, then, will not be about his News...
If you get a hummer, everything looks like a Niall
Paul Krugman: Kinds Of Wrong
Kinds Of Wrong: >It seems to me that when readers declare that some piece of economics commentary is “wrong”, they often confuse three different notions of wrongness, which are neither intellectually nor morally equivalent. >First, there’s the ordinary business of expressing a view about the econ...
Bellemisc it really depends on how dirty and chopped up the ice is.
Record dominoes 3: Cryosphere Today SIA
There are several scientific organisations that keep an eye on the Arctic sea ice cover and put out graphs to inform us of the amount of ice that is left. You can see most, if not all, of them on the ASI Graphs webpage. I expect the record on most of these graphs to be broken in weeks to come. -...
;(
Record dominoes 3: Cryosphere Today SIA
There are several scientific organisations that keep an eye on the Arctic sea ice cover and put out graphs to inform us of the amount of ice that is left. You can see most, if not all, of them on the ASI Graphs webpage. I expect the record on most of these graphs to be broken in weeks to come. -...
Kind of late to Jimboomega's party, but one of the things that is important is that the ice outside of the Arctic Ocean has declined precipitously over the winter, so if you want something to look at, how about the odds of Hudson's bay not freezing over completely. As it is, ice in the Baltic, except at the extreme northern end is now rare.
That ice is captured in the various sea ice area series.
Record dominoes 1: Uni Bremen sea ice extent
There are several scientific organisations that keep an eye on the Arctic sea ice cover and put out graphs to inform us of the amount of ice that is left. You can see most, if not all, of them on the ASI Graphs webpage. --- I expect the record on most of these graphs to be broken in weeks to com...
And Neven quibbled when Eli proposed a simple bet. Still time to get your markers down for the Rabett Run Exacta.
Record dominoes 1: Uni Bremen sea ice extent
There are several scientific organisations that keep an eye on the Arctic sea ice cover and put out graphs to inform us of the amount of ice that is left. You can see most, if not all, of them on the ASI Graphs webpage. --- I expect the record on most of these graphs to be broken in weeks to com...
wrt the Bremen maps which Eli has featured for a long time at RR, can anyone get them to kill the white for ~ 98%, it makes absolutely no sense visually to go from deep purple to white to a lighter purple. They could slot in a deeper shade of red, btw red and purple. Also the dark green and the lighter greens need to be shifted about to make the scale more intuitive. Where is Tufte when you need him
Cyclone warning!
I have postponed this post until I was sure that what follows is going to happen. Remember the term 'flash melting'? That's when from one day to the next large swathes of ice disappear on the University of Bremen sea ice concentration maps. We witnessed one such instance last year when a relativ...
Another effect is that the saltier water from down below has a lower freezing point. Coating the ice with that stuff will result in serious melting as in throwing salt on your sidewalk.
Cyclone warning!
I have postponed this post until I was sure that what follows is going to happen. Remember the term 'flash melting'? That's when from one day to the next large swathes of ice disappear on the University of Bremen sea ice concentration maps. We witnessed one such instance last year when a relativ...
The interesting thing about 1997 was the shift out of a (mostly) annual cycle with slightly colder winters and warmer summers than the baseline, as shown in the sea ice anomaly, to a steep and fairly even decline in all seasons. Then in 2007 so much of the old ice was wiped out that we got the strong annual cycle.
The freshening of the sea from the melting ice new ice must be contributing to the rapid, shallow freeze. That explains the extensive refreeze this winter.
CT SIA anomaly drops below 2 million km2
With a drop of 174,867 square km for July 17th reported by Cryosphere Today (run by the Polar Research Group at the University of Illonois at Urbana-Champaign), the 2012 sea ice area anomaly has dropped below 2 million square kilometres, compared to the 1979-2008 mean: So what, one may ask. It ...
It is an old tradition in forecasting that when your model is in error consistently in the same direction, you apply a statistically derived correction to it (e.g. if your model was always 1 unit low, for forecasting you discount by one unit).
This neatly captures the difference between trend analysis and modeling in purpose. The former is a pure forecast, the later seeks to understand the system, the two together provide the superior forecast because each captures things that the other misses.
It looks like Arctic ice is one of those cases.
Oh yeah, people may be using different definitions of ice free:)
PIOMAS July 2012
Another month has passed and so here is the updated Arctic sea ice volume graph as calculated by the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center: This year's trend line is still tracking below last year's record. In fact, the difference in volume ...
Eli may have missed when someone wrote it above, but FWIW a major reducer of energy absorbed at high latitudes is the angle of incidence. At glancing angles the amount of reflection from surfaces goes to 100% (this makes it possible to reflect x-Rays)
ASI 2012 update 5: when graphs agree
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 IJIS sea ice extent (SIE) and Cryosphere Today sea ice area (SIA) numbers, which I compare to data from the 2005-2011 period (NSIDC ha...
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