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Only tangentially related to this post, but what do folks here make of the blog post below? Is this storm "freak weather" or does this have long-term climate implications? Also, what does the extreme temperature anomaly imply for next year's melt season?
http://robertscribbler.com/2015/12/27/warm-arctic-storm-to-hurl-hurricane-force-winds-at-uk-and-iceland-push-temps-to-72-degrees-f-above-normal-at-north-pole/
Winter solstice
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 coup...
Slightly off-topic -- Looking at today's images at http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/ssmis/index.html , I notice significant melting in the CAA straits & waterways. Is this typical for this time of year? I seem to recall melting in this region only occurring at the end of the melt season, not in spring. Not an encouraging sign if this is new behavior...
Perception of the Arctic
There was a time, not too long ago, when I didn't know the Arctic existed. Sure, I knew there was a North Pole and that it was cold there, but somehow I always thought that the Arctic and the Antarctic were the same thing, that someone had forgotten to add the Ant-. And of course, polar bears ...
Sphaerica: I agree in principle that melting should slow down as we approach the minimum, as this is historically what has happened. However, just as a minor reminder of planetary geometry, the sun doesn't set north of 80 deg N until very close to the equinox, so that region is still getting 24 hours of sunlight! Qanaaq (77N) sees its first sunset of the season on the 22.Aug, and the "sunset line" move northward daily as we approach the equinox, reaching 90N exactly on the equinox. This means there's still plenty of solar input available to fuel melting.
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. -...
I'm looking at today's UBremen SSMIS map (at http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de:8084/ssmis/index.html) and wondering how long it will be before we have no areas with 100% coverage. We still have 2-3 more weeks of high summer before melting slows down...
More news on CryoSat-2
I'll probably update this post tomorrow (updated now, see below), but Timothy Chase writes in to say that the Guardian has an article today with news related to CryoSat-2, the satellite that has been launched to measure the thickness of Arctic sea ice (among others). So I'm putting this out now,...
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Aug 11, 2012
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