etudiant

The site is blocked off because of unrelated construction at the nearby Castle, so the untrimmed shrubbery around the station is currently epic.

Think the idea of caring for our spaceship is just common sense, less sure that historic methods will be adequate for that, given an unprecedented human crew size. The Dutch seem to be working the problem pretty intelligently. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/

Thank you for this, a lot of work and thought went into it and it is much appreciated. Any chance of a follow on, maybe towards the end of August?

Thank you for the explanation. So it means the oceans are absorbing the heat and getting warmer? Separately, what is 'negative SAL forcing' and what drives that?

What is 'atmosphere depletion'? I've not heard the term previously.

Is this not also near the spot where the Franklin expedition became entombed? These are pretty ideal places for ice to accumulate, no big gyres or currents to flush the multi year ice towards warmer waters.

Peculiar, it shows a huge surplus around west Africa, where there are reportedly major dust storms severe enough to impact the US Gulf coast. It also shows a major deficit in the southern part of Africa, which seems in conflict with recent rains that have materially replenished the Cape Town reservoirs.

Think this data represents the mass balance for the single year only, so we may have an increment to the total ice mass, rather than a wash. The total Greenland ice cap is estimated at about 2.8 million cubic kilometers, or 2.8 million billion tons of ice, so adding or subtracting a few hundred billion tons does not change the overall picture.

Hi StormchaserChuck!, You post these pictures of 500mB anomalies as if they were self explanatory. They are not, at least to ordinary mortals such as myself, so I have no way of judging whether they are meaningful or just pretty pictures. Please help make your message more comprehensible.

It would have been more productive if this kind of more nuanced appraisal had been articulated, rather than the 'doom is at hand' catastrophic AGW stories that have dominated the discussion. As is, climate scientists are consequently somewhat in the position of the boy who cried wolf, their alarm falls on deaf ears among the general public. I

Seems that this is a new thought ' the climate system has a instantaneous state change resulting in multi-meter decadal sea level rise.' There is some evidence in the ice cores that swings can be very abrupt, but afaik, nothing like that is indicated by any of the climate models. So this is postulating a massive model failure, which may well be the case. The counter argument is of course that the current warming has been a cyclical event, somewhat as in the 1920s and that cooling is likely to continue into the 2030s.

They have a generator?

Betting the grid will hold up? At 111*F, things will get pretty tight imho.

Thanks, I see where you are coming from, the northern oceans are warmer than in 2012 and the pattern of heat anomalies over Russia is similar. Against that, the Greenland to Alaska side of the Arctic is below normal, rather than above. That suggests the direction of the flows will matter. Is there an expectation that the flow direction will be Russia to Canada? I do remember seeing masses of driftwood deposited on the northern shores of Iceland, which the guide told us had come across the Arctic from Russia, so that may be the rule.

The heat is not yet showing up, at least in the DMI (Danish Meteorological Institute) Arctic temperature tracking: http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php So where is it? Separately, with all this accumulated oceanic heat, can we forecast a new low for September Arctic ice? What if anything could gum up the process? It is important to couple the measurements to real forecasts, else the utility of the measurements becomes arguable.

Afaik, the Arctic melt is largely driven from below, by warmer ocean water. It would be very useful to have some actual water temperature data characterizing the various currents that impact the Arctic Ocean. Obviously the data is really hard to get, but surely someone has worked this problem.

Do these air temperature changes have any substantial effect on the ice melting process? My impression was that melting is mostly driven by direct solar heating and increased sea water temperature.

I'd thought the air temperature was not as significant as the water temperature in driving the amount of melting in the Arctic. Is this a misperception?

I don't understand why there is this belief in linear models. Everything we know about climate and weather says jumps are the norm, not slow and gradual transitions from one state to another. So why would we expect arctic ice to behave differently? Based on precedent, we should bump around a record low for a while . Then, if the environment remains favorable, we jump to a zero late summer ice regime. The Viking records suggest as much. The real question is whether this is a cyclical or a secular development. Does anyone have any substantive input towards answering this question?