csnavywx

Best chance is going to be late tonight through tomorrow. Outflow channel opens up to the north, SSTs jump and shear is low for a while. However, that's going to be dependent on how the inner core looks by that time.

Starting to lose definition on radar. Probably due to both upwelling and partial concentric ring around the old eye. It's starting to move, but it might be a tad too late to salvage the inner core. Time will tell this evening.

Keep an eye on the steering flow above 500mb as well. The upper level anticyclone to the west of the storm (visible on the 250mb streamline charts) is going to influence the track as well and may provide enough steering influence to be a deciding factor (through 96hr or so). That light northeasterly flow in the upper levels may be just enough to keep it moving at a slow pace (3-5kt) vs a near stall. Dorian's strength will also come into play as well (via diabatic effects). These are normally small factors, but with the loss of major steering currents, they become the drivers and can make a notable difference when it's a marginal case like this.

Nuclear would be significantly cheaper than trying to build out massive storage systems. While daily storage seems like a solvable problem in the medium term, seasonal storage does not. Baseload nuclear takes care of that pretty neatly and much sooner. Part of the reason solar and wind are so cheap is that they displace generation only at the margin and are at relatively low penetration. Once you get past a certain penetration (I believe 10-15% for solar atm), it becomes significantly more expensive because of the aforementioned intermittency problem. Wind is even worse, because (at least here in the US), climo wind peaks are in November and March, not exactly the time of year where you need power the most. As part of a legit climate plan, I'd be up for subsidizing and standardizing nuclear in a hurry. Build a bunch of standardized current-gen reactors and work on getting a standardized design for 20-30 years from now. It's probably the fastest way to bring emissions down. And we need speed -- the hour is late. We seem to be screaming along at 2.5-3ppm/yr, which is putting us dangerously close to a RCP 6.0-8.5 scenario through mid-century.

A pretty strong argument, imo. Not much support for anything below 2C at this point, especially after the corrections to the lower-end estimates in the recent past.

It's not necessarily aerosols here, it's clouds and changes to the behavior of marine stratocumulus in particular. Once the new parameterizations for marine stratocumulus are included (which tend to produce more realistic results when compared to previous versions), sensitivity jumps. It remains to be seen whether that's real or not. Also, one has to keep in mind that TCR is probably the more relevant short term metric and it has been shown to be somewhat more insensitive with higher ECS (ergo, TCR increases more slowly with higher ECS). So even if ECS does end up being like 5C from 3C, then TCR "only" jumps from 2.0 to 2.8C.

It looks cool over the central CAB the next few days at least -- before that small low gets nearly smashed into oblivion by the developing blocks and wave break over the Npac. The strong push of warm advection from the Russian side will keep this year in contention next week.

Wouldn't be shocked if we fell 300-400k behind by the end of that. There's some opportunity for catch up next week if that ridging shows up, but it does look like we'll slip solidly back into 2nd place.

While there's a lot of weak ice, there isn't quite as much as 2012, so I expect this year to fall slightly behind by the end of the first week of August. Maybe 200k or so. I actually think we could see record low volume, but come in second on extent and perhaps 2nd or 3rd on area. The MYI in the central CAB will undoubtedly make it, but given how warm winters have been the past few years, I expect it to start looking more and more like it did in 2016 at the end of the season, looking a little thin and ragged. Also, given how unusual this year's -AO pattern was (partially due to a dynamic final PV warming), I would expect a reversion to the mean next year. But this is the Arctic, and you never know....

A purely statistical model would have basically "missed" 2012 at this point. Probably 2007 as well. I suspect the issue has to with the behavior of extent numbers when volume gets very low.

This dipole will probably largely finish off the ESS, Chukchi and Laptev. Beaufort probably won't have much left either. Not looking great for the CAB either. Only the Atlantic side is doing okay this year.

Yeah, going to be tough to beat that early Aug. swan dive that 2012 had. Upcoming dipole might help give it a run for its money though.

The crazy thing is, with that temp trendline, this May-June period will be merely average by 2030-2035 -- though I would expect it to slow down after a while due to widespread melt moving earlier and capping temps near the melting point.

The classical dipole we tend to refer to typically means higher pressure on the Greenland/CAA/North American side of the basin and lower pressure on the Eurasian/Russian side. This results in a net wind and ice transport from the Pacific to Atlantic side of the basin. This typically causes high melt via transport of continental air over the central ice pack, compaction and export out through the Fram Strait and towards the Atlantic, where deep warm water makes quick work of even very thick sea ice. A reverse dipole is the opposite situation.

I'd be willing to bet we don't beat 2013 without a VEI 6 or strong VEI 5 tropical volcano. There was a significant step up in temperatures (globally) since 2013 and it featured some of the most benign weather possible in the Arctic (wall to wall +AO/NAO).