csnavywx

Ice pack is still getting the crap kicked out of it at the solstice. DMI 80N temps and overall Arctic temps on (yet) another surge and the Kara/Franz Joseph Island area is yet again losing ground. I think we've broken -900 FDD anomaly for the 80N region (not sure on the 66N+), but that's only 175 above ALL of last winter's record total and it's still December. If this keeps up, both the Pacific and Atlantic ice fronts aren't going to put up much resistance this spring. There just isn't going to be enough quality freezing days to build up a good pack at this rate.

The SAM went negative, so that's helped, but it doesn't explain everything. Pure speculation mode: I was wondering if there was a link with the Super Nino earlier this year. However, we didn't see this kind of response in 1998, so I'm having a hard time reconciling that. The big coastal polynyas this year might hold a clue. More warm CDW being directed at the continental margins would explain that.

Yeah, it's definitely not an error. Something rather odd going on down there this year, including the sudden reappearance of the Weddell Polynya.

We're at 8.3M. In order to avoid getting a new SIE low-max record, extent will have to increase by 5.7M before maximum. The record increase between now and maximum is 5.2M, set in 2012-2013. Still possible, but getting to be a tall order.

IJIS extent has opened up a huge lead. Down 46k yesterday (biggest drop in Nov in 10 years), which puts it about 750k behind 2012. 2012 rockets away shortly and is replaced by 2006 for previous lowest (which was the 2nd warmest winter behind last year). I suspect we'll get pretty close to 1M below the record before closing later in the month (2006 had quite the slowdown in Nov before speeding back towards the pack). Anomalies look to "revert" back to +10C above 80N and +6C over the Arctic Ocean as a whole, so we should see some resumption of freezing, if at a somewhat sluggish pace. The real story is the continuing lack of decent freezing degree day totals, which if it continues to be sustained, will put the hurt on spring thickness. Last year was a -650 anomaly (above the Arctic Circle) and -1075 (above 80N) or about 800 overall. A doubling of that anomaly to -1300/-2150 puts us in striking range of near ice-free conditions by summer's end as it causes thickness gains to drop below the critical ~1.7m threshold. I'm far from convinced that we'll get a doubling of those anomalies, but with the way it is going, it might get somewhat close. Speaking of which, there's another strat PV split forecasted in the medium range. Edit: My numbers are a bit off. Ice thickness growth= sqrt(FDD/804) Normal for the Arctic Ocean is 4500 FDD (5500 north of 80N). This equals about 2.2m of thickness growth overall (a bit more at the pole/near Greenland). A -1300 anomaly would drop this to 2.0m of thickness growth. A -2000 anomaly would drop this to 1.7m, which is where you would need to be to get ice-free conditions at the end of summer assuming a normal melt year. A 2007 or 2012 style melt year would require quite a bit less, of course. To achieve a 2500 FDD total for 1.7m of average thickness growth, the average temperature during the freezing season (Sept 15-April 15) would need to average -13 to -14C. That's the number we need to watch. If we keep getting crazy bursts of periodic warmth through say... February, I'd be worried. If it finally mean-reverts and gets closer to normal for a while, it won't be so bad.

Sea ice volume now tanking into record low territory (as of the end of Oct) on PIOMAS. I would suspect that the lack of FDD is continuing to eat away at SIV gains. Gotta wonder if there's a bit of "climate flickering" going on here. I thought the ridiculous +SAT anomalies would have started to back off by now.

Crushing it again next week with temps 10-20C above normal above across a big swath of the Arctic Ocean. Really eating into Freezing Degree Day totals and making it tough to thicken that ice up. If this keeps it up (again) we're gonna have some serious spring thickness problems when it comes time for maximum in March.

This is the latest I've seen the ESS stay open like this. We're now 400k+ below the previous record on extent.

The mean spring thickness needs to drop to around 1.7 to 1.8m in order to melt out regularly during the summer. Obviously a warm summer helps, but that starting thickness is quite important (as we saw this year).

Edit: Chubbs beat me to it. AMSR was -145 and shadow CT was -170 yesterday.

Probably surface pond re-freeze. The upcoming pattern features a +3-4SD ridge (570-582 dam) over the CAB and a -2SD low near the Kara, so the upcoming week should feature some significant late losses. It may be enough to lock a 2nd place finish, but we'll see.

To finish 2nd, shadow CT needs to drop 326k from its current readings. (It would need 996k for 1st.) The next few days look fairly cold and stormy, but the EPS shows conditions favorable for melt from D5 onwards. As weak as the remnant ESS arm of the pack is at the moment, I would expect almost all (if not entirely all) of that part to melt off. The Laptev arm isn't looking too hot either, but it's late enough that it'll probably survive in some fashion. At this time, a solid 2nd place finish looks good. Pretty remarkable, considering the vast majority of the summer remained colder than normal.

Yeah, you're right about that. It was below normal, but I would've figured it ended up colder with all of the cloud cover we had. July 2013 and July 2016 look similarly cold on NCAR, but with different spatial patterns:

Yeah, really goes to show how important future wintertime temps will be in determining when we go ice-free. Last winter was so atrocious that even a good summer pattern had a hard time saving it.

I'd be super-wary of using the most recent numbers. They're ball-park at best (high uncertainty) The 2014 number was already revised up and the 2013 number was revised way up. The drop was contingent on Chinese coal use dropping something like 8%, but this comes right after a massive upward revision in Chinese coal use (10-17%!) in the decade through 2013. Those stats are like a fine wine, they get better with age, so don't be too surprised if that number gets revised into the positive range a few years from now. I buy a slowdown in Chinese coal use -- there was outright contraction in industry earlier this year (and half of coal use in China is in that sector) -- but I'm wary of that 8% number. In any case, some of that is likely to be temporary. I don't equate a manufacturing recession and a stock market bubble with GDP decoupling from carbon emissions, but apparently there's a lot of folks (Greenpeace, for instance) who are uncritically accepting that conclusion.

Not that I know of. Not sure it would do much good, because MOST of the current "deal" is nothing but brackets. Any country can dispute any part of the text for any reason by requesting to put brackets around it.

Yeah, and this is the bracketed piece of crap the negotiators have produced so far: http://unfccc.int/files/bodies/awg/application/pdf/draft_paris_outcome_rev_5dec15.pdf It's better than Copenhagen, but that's not saying much. 1 week left. Not sure how they're going to come up with an agreement with any real teeth.

That'd work for me. Might even get that money back in the long run through reduced pushback to interventionist foreign policy. Combo it with a fee and dividend plan and let the market boost it too. As bad as that leak is, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the 20 million barrels per day of oil we burn currently.

While the WSJ isn't doesn't exactly have a good rep. when it comes to discussions on climate change, I think they have a strong point with here with nuclear. The math doesn't realistically work without it. Even James Hansen has been strongly advocating a nuclear path for some time now for the same reason. We're cruising to blow easily past the 2C/450 ppm "guardrail" pretty quickly with the way things have been going. I'm not holding out a lot of hope for Paris, but it really does seem like it's the last chance to do anything meaningful in time. Otherwise, we're going to be stuck with ineffectual patchwork deals that don't have enough teeth to get the job done in a timely fashion.

I would grant you that there's some uncertainty in the data, but I'm having a hard time seeing that it really has anything to do with temporal resolution. Tree rings are, by default, have basically 1-year resolution, right? The authors do note that there is the possibility that a few years in the 16th century might possibly have been lower (due to the aforementioned uncertainty), but we're still talking a very long return period (centuries to millennia -- 3100 years according to their method).

Higher temperatures increase evaporation and evapotranspiration, so it most definitely does matter what the temperature does. The effects are mutualistic.

A year above 2013 isn't out of the ballpark, but I think it will have to come fairly soon (within the next several years). Thing is, we just came off a solid month of a very similar +GPH and +MSLP anomaly patterns to that of the 2007-2012 pattern. Very similar. That's something we didn't manage for more than a few days at a time during the last two seasons. So the call for 2013-2014-like patterns continuing in the future may be a bit premature there. Hell, we don't really know why that pattern occurred and persisted as long as it did in the first place. There is no real precedent for it in the record or reanalysis data. That's interesting to me. Chalking it up to a correlation with the AMO doesn't really hold much water though.

Isotherm, you're essentially making an efficacy argument. But as already determined by the IPCC, most forcing efficacies fall between 0.8 - 1.2. There is a slight slant towards most natural forcings having an efficacy average of about 0.9, whereas GHGs usually fall around 1.1. Ergo, the basic point does not change.To be sure, there's some uncertainty there, but If Earth was very sensitive to natural forcings, it's more sensitive to CO2.

I know the 280 ppm in 20 years comment is a bit hyperbolic on purpose, but we don't do anything on the scale it would require to do that. Iron ore is a billion ton a year business. Oil is 4 billion tons. Coal doesn't even touch 10 billion tons a year and that's a solid bulk fuel. You're talking about sequestering a gas on a scale at least 10 times that? Nasomuch.

I'd definitely put 10 feet as a tail risk instead of "at least", but if we want to discuss feasibility, I think there's enough evidence to at least suggest that it's possible if the WAIS is as unstable as it seems to be recently, particularly through interactions between the retreat of Pine Island and Thwaites' grounding lines.