XDA

Over at The Cryosphere Today, the daily tally of the World's sea ice shows the following--in the North on the first day of Spring, the sea ice is just barely below normal and, in all 14 sub-areas, the sea ice is the same as, or above, where it was last year (5 are the same and 9 have more ice, some of them a lot more ice). The center of the Arctic Ocean, that is, the area inside 80 degrees latitude, is all frozen over and apparently much of the ice is thicker now than it was last Winter.
Although NASA reported two days ago it was thinner than usual. However their microwave measurement require new and not well tested modeling so take that with a grain of salt for the time being.

In the South, the sea ice is expanding in the Southern Autumn and is now more than a million square kilometers above normal. All told, the World's sea ice is just under a million square kilometers above normal. Last Southern Winter, there was more sea ice around Antarctica than ever and this Southern Summer less than usual melted (indeed, in only three Summers in the past 30 has the Antarctic sea ice melted more).


So we know that there is much more sea ice than normal, we also know from the state of the art Argo system that the sea itself has cooled recently, and we know in the past 15 months, no matter what measure you use, the World's mean temperature has gone down a full degree F.


No wonder the push is on to change the Warmie branding from Global Warming to Climate Change.

Another ice age is a climate change.

UPDATE: I've been thinking about Arctic sea ice thickness. Each year about ten to eleven million square kilometers melt completely away and three to five million square kilometers remains through the Summer. So most of the sea ice through the Winter will be what's called new ice, less than a year old, between one and two meters thick. Older ice, two to six years old, gets to be about 3 meters, and it is less salty and harder for reasons I don't fully understand. There are times the ice stacks up on top of other ice (mainly in pressure ridges) so the upper limit for thickness for sea ice is about 5 meters. But because of the absolutely normal yearly melt and refreeze cycle, most of the sea ice is new ice. This consensus information is not syncing up with the recent NASA story, which said that "perennial [older than one year old] ice used to cover 50-60 percent of the Arctic" If it generally melts from the normal 14.5 million square kilometers to the normal 4.5 million square kilometers every Summer, a loss of 70% (meaning 30% is left) how in the world could there be 60% multi year ice? There is something wrong here, if not with my math, perhaps with the definition of the term 'Arctic.' More later.

Labels: The Cryosphere Today; Global Warming

I look at the University of Illinois' website The Cryosphere Today almost every day to see how the global warming climate change is effecting the poles. I have noticed that one graph of temperature anomaly, in the North, does not match the other, and that the totals from the 14 areas in the North do not match either graph. I have twice brought this to the attention of the contact person with no response. So, today I noticed this notice on the site:

We are experiencing some data problems with the current timeseries data. Please
disregard the current timeseries data from mid-February 2008 to present until we
rectify the data issues. The spatial maps should be fine.

Good to see someone was noticing. I wish I knew what 'timeseries' meant.

UPDATE: I hate to pile on, but take a quick look at this graph of the ice cover of Hudson's bay. It shows a near 60% reduction (and recovery) in the bay ice cover over the past few weeks. However, if you look at the satellite photos over that period, no such catastrophic melting is visible. Come on, guys, level with us. You're having major data problems and you need to tell us what happened and what you've done to correct it. Good science is always transparent.

Labels: The Cryosphere Today; Global Warming

When things looked bad last Summer, and a full third of the 'permanent' sea ice in the Arctic had melted away, you couldn't swing a dead cat and not hit some sort of coverage of that fact. Now, as we approach the maximum sea ice period of the new year, no one is talking about the near complete recovery in the Arctic Ocean. According to the University of Illinois' website called The Cryosphere Today, now nine of the 14 areas have more ice than normal and only three are down from where they were at this time last year. Indeed, measured against that time, the Arctic sea ice has increased in a year nearly 840,000 square kilometers. What's that? just over half a million square miles? Two Texases worth? The sky may indeed not be falling, after all.

In the Antarctic, coming off a record year for sea ice this past Southern Hemisphere Winter, as the minimum sea ice period approaches down there, the amount of sea ice is still above normal*.

*Normal is the mean established by satellite measurement for the period 1979 to 2000. Whether that period was actually representative of the amount of sea ice at the poles over the last 10,000 years or so is absolutely unknown.

Labels: The Cryosphere Today; Global Warming

I had dinner with old friends on Saturday and talked a bit about Flux Density Values until someone fell asleep face down in the dessert. There was talk about the loss of ice at the North Pole. No, I said. All fixed now. The Arctic Ocean is now almost completely covered by sea ice. Indeed, 8 of the 14 areas up there have more ice than normal. Five have less and one area is a push. Except for the approach to Murmansk and the White Sea, in the Barents Sea northeast of Norway, which has visibly less ice than normal, everything is fine.

Labels: The Cryosphere Today; Global Warming

Labels: The Cryosphere Today; Global Warming