WidreMann

11 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

Both 2015 and 2016 had extreme losses in extent the final week of August, so I'd expect 2017 to separate from them more by 9/1 on NSIDC. Jaxa is a little less obvious as 2015 didn't have as steep a drop late as NSIDC had.

The U Bremen AMSR2 is probably a little more like NSIDC:

 

 

 

Temperatures are now averaging above normal 80 north and neither the GFS nor Euro look great for continued cold temps. At least we don't have big storms messing things up. That's the saving grace. I bet we'll see a drop in the next two weeks, but it seems majorly unlikely to beat 2012, or even last year, I think.

On 8/9/2017 at 10:09 PM, ORH_wxman said:

Cryosphere Today...it was a webpage from U Illinois that tracked sea ice area from the SSMI/S satellite. NSIDC uses the same one but they don't really show much data on area...all their graphs are extent. CT put the area in graphical format and also in tabular format. But it stopped transmitting data sometime in early 2016...at first they said they were going to be back soon but then the site went dark and it never updated. 

Area is nice to use because it tends to be a better predictor of extent 30-60 days out than extent itself is...but not having CT's easy-to-read data is really annoying. 

That's where I used to go all the time, I just didn't know that was the acronym you were using. I do miss it as well. Much more detail and good anomaly charts as well.

9 hours ago, forkyfork said:

the loss of CT data really puts a damper on tracking 

What's the CT data?

I would trust the dynamical more than the statistical, because we are in uncharted territory here. Even so, it looks like the median of those models would still be above 2012.

3 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

Late month update on area....how other years compare to 2017:

2016: -300k

2015: -190k

2014: +340k

2013: +50k

2012: -520k

2011: -330k

2010: -110k

2009: +410k

2008: +350k

2007: -320k

 

We are closest to 2013 right now, but when you look at the numbers, it doesn't necessarily that means where we will end up. You can see that 2008 still had pretty high area at this point (350k ahead of 2017 and 300k ahead of 2013), but much of it was vulnerable ice in the Laptev so it melted back quite a bit in August....whereas a year like 2013 had already melted out most of the vulnerable ice so it stalled and finished significantly higher than a year like 2008. The next closest year is 2010. I still think a finish close to 2010 is probably the most likely right now. That year finished at 3.07 million sq km for area....though really anything plus or minus 200k from that is fair game.

Just to make sure I understand, when it says -320K, for example, it means 2007 had 320K less than 2017, or the other way around?

3 hours ago, Sophisticated Skeptic said:

sea levels falling?

https://www.iceagenow.info/sea-levels-are-falling/

maybe explains why new islands are forming near north carolina.

http://www.cnn.com/travel/article/new-island-north-carolina/index.html

funny too how the arctic flip occurred right after the election.  considering how severe the ice melt was during the beginning / middle of last winter, we 'should' be much lower by now.  Even ORH seemed perplexed from the flip.   (few pages back)

If there ever was a secret project to save the arctic ,we'd never hear about it anyway.  (too many would complain / troll about chemtrail or other experimental programs)

The sea levels get really high and then level off for a year and you are saying they are falling? That graph shows a very noticeable and consistent upward trend for decades. Who cares if one year is more variable? We had a super-nino. Everything is a little messed up right now.

I don't know what "Arctic flip" you are talking about, but it was in sorry shape last summer and remains in sorry shape now. All that happened was that we had a slightly below normal May and June, so the degree of ice melt was less than we might have expected given the awful shape the Arctic ice is in. It's still way below normal and has been the whole season. Nothing changed drastically last November after the election, nor after Trump took office.

If you are going to have a real debate, at least use actual facts.

29 minutes ago, skierinvermont said:

I know it's nitpicky but that last bar is no where near the line of best fit for that period (07-17). To get a flat trend like that you'd have to go from '10-'17.

I did it in 1 minute in Paint.NET, so it's going to be ****ty (and I did mean for it to be from '10-'17, but wasn't being careful). Also, that period is very tumultuous, so I don't think a linear trend from 2010-2017 is meaningful. We'll have to see how it looks after a few more years, especially after we recover from the super-Nino.

On 7/23/2017 at 9:59 AM, chubbs said:

We are running below the trendline so can't give this prediction a gold star yet..  

It looks like there was a slow rate until the early 2000s and then we are basically level since 2010.

Yes, this one: https://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php?board=3.0

I had seen csnavywx post there, so I figured there was at least some legitimacy. But there's definitely an unnecessary amount of doom and gloom.

It's funny y'all are saying this, because on the Arctic sea ice forums, they seem to be convinced that we're going to have some ridiculously low year because the ice is in an unprecedented poor state. And yet the AMSR data does look considerably better than 2012, no doubt. I think the concern comes from PIOMAS being near or below 2012 and potentially overstated. We'll see. I'm moving into the camp that we won't beat 2012, but it won't exactly be pretty either.

Given the state of the ice, very thin and broken up, I don't see how we don't beat 2012 by a decent margin. While the pattern isn't terrible, it's not great either. We certainly will beat it on volume.

And yet snowcover has been very high this year. Perhaps that argues for a positive feedback cycle that might offset some of the losses expected due to warming. It'll be interesting to see how that affects the proposed changes in Siberia and in the general circulation. Either that or this year truly is an anomaly.

44 minutes ago, so_whats_happening said:

curious what causes the low around the beginning of july to not continue does it have to do with at this point most of the outer regions have melted out and you just have the core which usually maintains?

It is an anomaly chart, so what you are really asking is why doesn't the anomaly just get worse and worse. My guess would be that the sun angle starts to lower at the end of June and southerly parts of the arctic begin to have night, so heating effects lessen as the summer goes on. That means there's a sort of upper limit to how much warming will happen.

I still don't see how we don't beat 2012. The pattern doesn't look great for the foreseeable future and the ice is in terrible shape. Extent may be better than 2012, but thickness is downright awful. I could see us falling off a cliff in July.

6 hours ago, Snow_Miser said:

Didn't know you were a skeptic too at one point. I accepted the mainstream conclusions of the science, when it became abundantly clear that we were still warming, and there was no sign of any prospective cooling. Learning more about the subject didn't hurt either. It's been over 3 years since I recognized this.

There are no energy accumulation lags. Zero. It is like saying that a pot on a stove will continue to gain energy, even after the burner has been turned off. It makes no physical sense. So the continued upper ocean heat accumulation is totally inconsistent with reduced solar activity. It is just not causing current climate change. 

Getting back on topic, a pretty poor pattern for the Pacific side of the ice is on the way. The 12z ECMWF is advertising well above normal 850 hPa temperatures in the medium range and beyond for that region. Kind of surprised we still saw sizable losses over the last few days, despite cooler than normal 850 hPa temperatures. Unless recent losses have all come from the Hudson Bay. I think persistence type predictions of the sea ice minimum, like June melt ponding have the potential to be more inaccurate than usual this year. With the ice being so thin, it won't take as much to see sizable losses in the coming couple of months. 

I went through a skeptic phase too. I was in high school and I was naturally skeptical about all sorts of stuff, if only to be contrarian. I also didn't like the idea of winter going away. But the evidence became overwhelming and I jumped ship.

I would bet on PIOMAS, just from having looked at satellite pictures of the state of the ice. There's no way we have thick ice in enough places to justify the total volume being on par with the last few years.

4 hours ago, CaWx said:

I agree with a lot of what you are saying. AGW will not be a doomsday scenario like alarmist portray, however very significant changes will happen if we fail to reduce CO2 emissions to levels in the low 300ppm range. I think humans would be able to adapt to major warming, but I'm afraid many other species will not, which could cause major ecological issues. We shouldn't gamble with our relatively stable environment, 2-4 degrees C, could put extraordinary pressure on global food and fresh water supplies. If Greenland were to melt out, it would cause trillions of dollars to relocated massive amounts of people around the world further inland. Also you said we haven't seen massive changes to our atmospheric patterns, we might not have seen large changes yet, but if the arcitic sea ice fully melts out, you will begin to see more extremes. 

Maybe the most alarming predictions won't come true, but even the middle of the road predictions are scary enough. Of course we will adapt, as will the rest of life. It just won't be pretty. There is enough suffering in the world as is.

4 minutes ago, Joe Vanni said:

I don't think we are going to get anywhere debating this when we are at the end of the global warming period, so you get the see the warm results of the past 36 years. I'm not debating that we have had great warmth, but I question the validity of saying the warmth is fastest on record. We are going to have to wait a few years when people actually see the cooling begin and that it has lasting power. We've been spoiled with this warmth but that's coming to an end. 

It's funny you say that right as we've had an extreme acceleration of warming unlike anything in our period of direct record. There's really no data that says otherwise. Maybe there were rapid warmings in the pre-weather record days that have been washed out of our tree ring and ice core analyses (though unlikely). In any event, it's not happened during the period of our modern industrial civilization. We've seen how smaller-scale climate changes have had a big impact on historical civilizations. What will this do to ours?

To add to this, people are failing to grasp that AGW is about how humans are applying a small modulation to an existing system, and there are small changes, but they are very significant for life on earth. With CO2 at all, the planet would be some 50 degrees cooler, I believe. Raising it by 3 or 4 degrees, therefore, is not a big deal in terms of the numbers. But it is a big deal when it causes sea levels to rise and some land to be inundated. Again, it's not a lot of land. Most land will be fine. But we have a lot of cities on the coasts. That's a big deal for humans. When rising CO2 increases acidity levels in the ocean, it still may not be by much. But it's a lot for the life that lives there, that starts to die off when it can't handle the change in water chemistry.

What we are talking about is life's sensitivity to change, not about gigantic changes to the atmosphere (which we really aren't making). Life can handle change, but over larger time periods. When there are significant changes in a short time period, a lot of life dies off. Of course, in time, it will recover, as it did 65 million years ago, or during other extinction events. It's bad news for humans, though, because we depend on the ecosystem as it is. We can mitigate with technology or general inventiveness, but it will be a very big blow to our current civilization. That's why people should care. Not because the planet will explode (it won't). Not because one weird species of frog in outer Mongolia will go extinct (why should anyone care about that anyway?). Not because temperatures will go up by a billion degrees (they won't). It's because the small changes made to a climate that has been fairly stable for civilized human history have big effects for life and human life, which is sensitive to small changes. What good is oil and profit if we can't eat, can't live where we used to? That's the trade-off.

On 6/5/2017 at 2:48 PM, Snow_Miser said:

The higher thicknesses relative to normal are getting exported in the Fram, according to the May PIOMAS update. Across the Arctic Basin, lots of thinner than normal ice.

From Zack Labe.

That's brutal. Will we even have any ice come late September?

Some run-to-run consistency in the long range would be nice.

On 3/28/2017 at 6:42 AM, chubbs said:

CFS for April through June. CFS has been predicting that a dipole pattern will be favored this spring for a while now. Of course these long lead forecasts are quite uncertain. Posting this now to document for a later re-check.

Above normal heights everywhere. Wow.

Dipole is good or bad for ice?

Regardless of NAM vs non-NAM, any time we rely on cold air to show up during the storm, we're GOING to get screwed. Our best storms always have the cold air already in place well ahead of the storm.

Just now, Cold Rain said:

Oh, and you just know that Gulf convection is going to play a negative role here.  It will.

In the meantime, it's imperative that the Euro hold serve tonight.  That is a must have.

It won't. It was a jerk at 12z and it'll be a jerk at 00z. It's gonna look like the NAM, I guarantee it.