Gray-Wolf

Hi stew! apart frlom Feb volumes have been horrid! Seeing as the bulk that feb saw put on is first month ice come melt then it'll not really fare too well? (brine packed and thin) Again I have to ask folk to look at the massive fracture event which had ruptured most all of the Arctic ice (including the mutiyear pyramid off Greenland) and how this has to impact upon melt season. The 'leads' that froze over post rupture will not last long come melt meaning a shattered pack with a vastly increased surface area to mass (remember 'defrosting your old freezer? you'd smash the ice so it would melt faster?) It will be a season to study. it may well drop ice so low by July as to raise the spectre of a sun million end to the season (unthinkable eh???) Soon be a new thread (once min is called) and maybe a poll (if BFTV's studies/health allow?)

So again we come down to a 'snapshot' of a UK season promoting discussion about a long term climate shift? Is it just me or is there an Elephant in the room? How many above average months have we had recently compared to 'below average months'? Why are we even thinking about cooling at all? Is it a wish that the truth of warming was , in fact, a myth? The Sun is now gaining in strength so what will be the end result? In the dark of winter clear skies leads to what? In the light of summer clear skies lead to what? If we are looking at 'stuck weather patterns' (H.P. systems this time) what do they bring in the dark of winter? and in the light of summer?? If 2012 brought an augmentation to the patterns that 07's record ice low brought to bear then what would that mean for our hemisphere this summer??? Will the Russian high be even more devastating than ever this year? Will the U.S. drought intensify yet again? Will the China H.P. do similar and intensify? AGW promised us 'extremes'? Hows that looking right now? Any 'extremes' folk remember over the last 6 years? Albedo flip releases immense energy into the climate system (and frees up even more energy that once was spent 'melting ice' all summer). This time last year folk were applauding the ice factory in Bering for bringing us record high ice levels to that region (and I was cautioning putting any faith into ice areas outside the basin as they would be gone by May?) and what happened to that 'cold' start? Record low ice Extent ,Area,Volume. 97% surface melt in Greenland and a ramp up of the Mass loss there from the 2010 'high' levels(which was supposed to be the last a high before a fall???). Petermann calved further back than ever recorded (and the 'undercut' advanced closer to the sub sea level basin under the ice sheet proper beyond). We had a record March and the U.S. baked. The Sun is back our side of the equator. Anyone care to offer up their personal credence by claiming a record cold N.Hemisphere summer in 2013? I'll chip in by forecasting another record breaking N.Hemisphere summer with U.S/Russian/Chinese heatwave/Drought events. record wildfires in the Russian Tundra regions, record Wildfire in Europe and the Med. Record mass loss from Greenland and similar , if not catastrophically lower, Arctic ice Volume/Area/Extent by the middle of Aug. So let us 'discuss' all we want but will anyone face up and offer me records negatives against the ones I'm predicting above? (If the Mods will have them pinned for review in Sept?) EDIT: I think it a sign of the times that this thread has survived this long in the general 'Weather section' and not been binned into 'climate and...' Our basic interest is 'Weather' . Climate shift is now messing with this and makes it pertinent to have it discussed here and not in some section looking at 'future' and not what is now occurring. Well done Mods!

The other thing to think on is where the cold anoms across the N.Hemisphere came from this winter? Were they Arctic Exports or were they home grown H.P. deep colds? Where has this cold blast here come from? Inner Continental cold or Arctic plunge? The past years, whilst we flooded, saw anomalous H.P. systems in the inner continent driving heatwave and drought synoptics. The Sun is now on our side of the equator so if the 'cold' came from an inner continental H.P. what 'temp's will we see from these areas as the sun's strength grows? We may well be seeing the development of new synoptics and they may well lead to deep winter cold but at the same time they will facilitate high summer temps and drought in the same regions (as we have been seeing?) In six weeks the temps in the inner continents will have 'flipped' but will the H.P. systems maintain? If they do then that is Russia, China and the U.S. in deep do do's again with drought and wildfires. As I said previous i just hope the Jet is even more impacted and we drag in some summer warmth and dry as we have drawn in this cold!

For anyone seeing the link from the 07' record sea ice low and the 'change' in N.Hemisphere ciculation then what of the massive drop we saw last summer? How will this add into the effect's we are already seeing? To me 'wave forms' seem to follow simplr rules so if you increase the Ampluitude you decrease the wavelength. Will the added energy we will accrue from even less sea ice (and it's rapid loss through the early season due to the ongoing fracturing of the virgin pack prior to melt season onset) lead to such an amplification of the patterns we have seen since 07'? Will we see constant WAA into areas of the Arctic Basin (further accelerating melt in that region) and a shift westward of the stalled trough that has blighted us these past 6 years? If you saw the synoptics we have seen the recent weeks over summer would that not bring us an extension of the Continental climate across the UK and leave the 'wetter stuff' over west Ireland/Atlantic?. The Home grown inner continental H.P. systems certainly produce deep cold over winter but , as summer arrives, this turns into excessive heat and drought conditions. For the cold around the northern Hemisphere this winter we need not look north but to the inner Continental H.P. systems and the export of this continental cold. Spring is here (though you would not credit it with the snow levels outside!) but just as the 'ice record extents' when ice is driven into areas outside the basin, the late cold will play no part in the summer conditions. The positioning of the Jet Troughs and peaks will and if these are reflecting ice loss from the Arctic Basin (and early snow losss from the continents) then folk will be feeling a tad silly about wondering at L.I.A. conditions when they see the N.Hemisphere in 6 weeks time (once the stronger sun works his majik). I know I cannot alter the Arctic ice loss but I do hope I'm right about the intensification of it's impacts (please do let it be a 'flip' to an even more destructive summer season!!!) and the chance of a summer this year!!!

We've had food price hikes and aid programme shorfalls for the past 3 years due to bad weather across major grain producing areas. The drought has receded in the U.S. but NOAA forecast it's return to over 60% of the country through spring and summer so it looks like things are only getting worse with this being 'make or break' year for many of the small farmers. The other side of the U.S. drought is the raising of saly levels below the growing areas. Continual watering has lead to the salt pan being raised as the water was drawn back to the surface and evaporated. Basically turning the grain basket of the World into a new version of what the Romans did to the Carthiginians lands after the second Punic Wars. Then we turn to Russia. Will we see a return of it's Continental H.P. and drought (with wildfires through the Tundra regions again) this spring/summer? The precurser downstream Greenland anomally is already setting up (and helping mangle the Arctic sea ice) so why won't we? The only issue is last years record Arctic melt. If 07' started this Jet stream convolution into motion then what will the extra forcing that 2012 brought us bring us? An even more convoluted Jet? (higher amplification, shorter wavelength) shifting the zones that have become common over the past 6 summers? Only one way to find out for sure.....lets wait and see!

The algoritm used to show surface melt on the new NSIDC map was skewed.....end of. This does not mean that there is any issue with the usual measurements of mass loss over the summers past just a glitch in the new aid that NSIDC have rolled out for our benefit. The fact NSIDC have invested in this area would suggest that Greenlands losses are now as important as the rapid reduction in sea ice (with the Sea ice news section and it's daily reports) The odd thing is that anyone following the data from NSIDC will be aware of the glitch as it was reported first on the site there. As to why anyone else would need to know that this algorythm was out of kilter makes me wonder why here , and other sites, need to be informed unless certain folk are trying to promote doubt in the science? We saw similar in the way sea ice loss was being measured once it appeared 07's losses were not going to be recovered from (look! Squirrel!) and now we see it in Greenland prior to the onset of the melt season that will question the wisdom of last years mega melt being a 'cyclical freak'. Are folk planting a 'fallback position' for when July brings the inevitable mega melt again? We shall see who , and how many, folk pull this monitoring glitch out in summer as a way to cast doubt on the events we will be witnessing across Greenland then?

Surely we can call max now???

So, it's been with us for over a month thus far and done massive damage across the Beaufort side of the basin allowing massive movements into our side of the basin into Fram. even today we now see the event spreading into the Canadian Archipelago deep channel. Do you think this is just an interesting spectacle or do you think it is a signal of the melt season we are entering with consequences for ice melt extent and speed of the meltout of the bulk of the ice?

The cracking that occurred when ice was normal thickness tended to occur in similar areas at similar times of year (the folk who lived in the areas would exploit such predictable events to hunt). The shattering we see today looks more akin to mid season pack breakup once the ice has thinned enough to allow such behaviour.

What's left of the ice in beaufort.

The 'denialist movement' is as well funded and , as such, fully aware of the truth of the situation. It is in their best interests to 'muddy the waters' to keep their interests as unaffected, for as long as possible, as they can. The recent flurry of interest in global temps has me intrigued as to watch they are distracting folk from? No focus on a 'non-melting' Arctic is there? This 'cool-down' appears to coincide with the wholesale collapse of the arctic so why? Natural variability of temps has always been included in the AGW remit, the rapid collapse of the Arctic was not. The impacts of the collapse are also not included in the original remit of AGW and so science is 'running to catch up' with the events on the ground. Denialism trails the science and makes it's largest gaffs in it's utterances on the subject. The current 'Crackopalypse' event is notable in it's absence from the major Denialist blogs (whilst mainstream in science and complimentary blogs) is it of no importance? GAC12 was played down , both here and in the denialist world, as it raged over the Arctic as 'nothing special' only to then appear as their sole reason for the record melt? Are we about to see the fracture event suffer the same fate as melt season moves into summer? The extremes of last year had many folk re-examine their beliefs on AGW , this years extremes, if the arctic plays a role in northern hemisphere circulation patterns, will surely trump those of a year ago so where will the Denialist movement try and focus their adherents attentions then?

Let's be mindful that this is not a 'tit for tat' affair guys. Whilst we're being given reasurances that nothing is happening out there day by day we see more evidence that major events are unfolding. you'd better be real sure your not standing at the end of a modern 'Younger Dryas' and what we see occuring out there is not the dawn of the abrupt climate shift that brought the origional to an end? In that instance the Greenland records show an 6c temp rise over a 1 decade time span with most of that rise thought to have occured in 1 single year. We were told to look for change first in the Arctic and what do we see there currently? If this year, post the 2012 melt, proves as damaging as the ones following 07' then by Aug you will need to be doing quite a bit of explaining as to why you could not see what is coming when so many folk brought you so much current and varied evidence of it. None of us are escaping this. Some of us are trying to be constructive in our warnings as to what we should expect (forewarned is forearmed) on the evidence that we are all recieving from the branches of science currently engaged in monitoring the changes. Looking at predictions made in an age of less evidence and then holding them up as some kind of 'proof' that the current science is not up to date is not really worth much is it? It's like expecting the folk in New Mexico to know ,beforehand, what Hiroshima would be like for those about to experience it?

Ta BFTV! Hiya 4, it's been an odd winter up there don't you think? Certainly different than others post 07'? With the pack so weak and broken what do you think will occur over the coming melt season?

Are we close to calling Ice Max? Both CT Area and JAXA extent have not regained up to previous max levels and we are now beyond equinox so on the cusp of melt beginning at the peripheries? If so then the Max area occured a month earlier than last years???

Courtesy of A-Team over on even's blog.......this is what i expect to see!

Images courtesy of A-Team over on Neven's blog showing the past months movement. Does it appear the Greenie High has mutated the beaufort gyre and Transpolar Drift into one big arc of export? Should the pattern persist into melt season we risk seeing the Greenland coast floatoff bring all the old ice into this export current??? With the ice now fracturing throughout the basin we have a mush of very mobile ice, most of it FYI. I now have serious concerns for the speed of the 'bulk melt' part of the season and also the implications for the bottom melt end of the season. This year will leave folk in no doubt as to the extent we have altered our world/climate and well beyond a point of no return.(IMHO)

The current daily anom plot for Baffin makes scary viewing does it not? I think those 'willing' to believe we had another 162yrs to wait for the next 97% surface melt across Greenland will have a bit of extra explaining to do come July....... or will they play the pedants card if it's only 96.5% surface melt??? The H.P. that has camped across the North of Greenland is set to start drawing warm airs up there (early melt onset?) but will also have impacts on the U.S. side of things. Are we looking for a similar balmy March to last years there ?(and another drought over the states that suffered last year???) If we believe that low ice impacts Jet positioning and so blocking events/stuck weather patterns surely we are only going to see an intensification of that this year? Ice already in disarray (Inc the M.Y. ice) and thinner than last years cover with extra 'peripheral over our side of the basin this year looking for an early melt out and the Fram Train gearing up as we speak......S'gonna be a heck of an early summer!!! (IMHO)

Hi P.P.! I think you have to use your own brain on this one and look at what we see GHG's doing in the lab and what we have seen them doing in the paleo record? I mean, if you lived in the younger Dryas you may well be moaning about the folk who were banging on about orbital forcings but the science would be there to show you what you ought to expect. If you had lived in that time you might have then found that you would have been better served in looking for why the warming had halted than questioning the science behind the warming now would n't you? (seeing as a ten year period then brought 8c's worth of warming to Greenland.... with most probably occuring in a single year....according to Dr Alleys 2,000 paper on the event)

We appear to have members of the community who wilfully ignore the reductions in TSI at ground level from human pollution and ,as a recent paper showed, medium sized volcanic activity and yet bang on about how a solar slowdown will head us into another glaciation??? We cannot rely upon the sunshade from our polluting ,or Mother Natures 'belches' ,to always provide us with the level of dimming/cooling that it provides us with currently. The loss of TSI at the surface , compared to what arrives at the top of the atmosphere is measured in whole number percentages (i.e. far ,far greater than the modeled reductions from a 'grand minimum') and so any drop in volcanic activity, or clean air technology being more widely used in Asia, will lead to a rapid increase in TSI at the surface even midst a 'Maunder type' minimum. On top of that we have rapid changes to the planets albedo already ongoing leading to a greater absorbtion, and re-emission, of the TSI that reaches the surface (which is then intercepted by record high CO2 and CH4 levels in the atmosphere above). All in all I think that any plunge into a grand Minimum will not even be noticed amidst the rapid climate shift we are now entering into ?

I'd agree with some of the comments in their drift that posting 'earlier dates' than is 'modeled' could impact your career esp. in this Koch Bros dominated blogsphere? Luckily there are still some unpolluted blogs/forums where I read a great deal of sound thinking with dates earlier than 2030 for 'melt out'. When you look at the graph the 'median line' (blue) shows a couple of spikes but no troughs to 'balance out' those spikes? Any such 'trough' would usher in an ice free Sept. 07' is viewed as a 'freak year' due to the synoptics which favoured melt and export. 2012 was 'average' and knocked the 07' record for six? What would an 07' type synoptic do to ice levels??? When you think of how much 'volume' was dropped over 06' and 07' you have to wonder at how much ice we would have seen last Aug if another 'perfect storm year' had arrived? How would that remnant pack have dealt with the Aug ocean's assault? When the end comes it will be ushered in by extreme melt prior to Aug, probably aided and abetted by very thin ice that was well fractured prior to melt onset..........sadly this year looks to be setting out into melt season with the majority of the pack well fractured with recent shear events targetting the older ice off Ellesmere Island and Greenland's north coast.......better hope that the extreme H.P. that is currently sat over the pole does not last into melt season proper eh?

Many areas are already 'suffering' due to sea level rise mike? Do you not think the 8" extra may have had impact at Battery Park when Sandy struck? How many inches over did it get to flood out the subway there? As it stands Greenlands mass loss looks to be doubling every 5 years or so (and set to accelerate) so you can do the math with Greenlands contribution now greater than thermal expansion (2mm last year? so 4mm by 2018, 8mm by 23', 1.6cm by 28' and a whopping 3.2cm by 33'). Now Antarctica is set to come back on line we can also expect to see WAIS losses rival those of Greenland (and if Ross fails then the EAIS will add more than those 2 combined!) over the coming decade meaning that you can bring down the 1"/yr by half. 8" over a century has enabled folk to keep up to the rises but 1" a year??? The noughties saw the london barrage closed how many times compared to the 1990's? 3 times as often? 5 times as often?7 times as often? The data is out there mike, have a gander and then ask yourself 'why?' this occured.

Yet again we see upward revisions of the way Greenland is set to impact us and I suggest it will not be the last such upward revision as we see both the data and behaviour of the ice sheet ,and its glacial outlets, continue to change over time. Over the past decade we have witnessed a rapid increase in measured losses from the north's largest ice sheet, it now appears we could even be seeing a doubling of losses every 5 to 10 years. This low figure leaves us with the possibility of inches of sea level rise, per year, from Greenland in a little over 30yrs! When you bear in mind that past warmings has always seen the west Antarctic Ice sheet lead with at least equal amounts of sea level rises from it's melt you can begin to realise that current predictions for sea level rises due to warming may prove tragically low and lead to costs/losses that will prove far more costly to our world economic systems than any preventative measures we could embark on today. Again I cannot remove the 'forcings' of the Koch Bro's denialist propaganda in removing the type of 'warnings' that should be currently highlighting the dangers we may be facing (they would be labelled 'Alarmist' or 'Doom mongering') and due to our Ozone destroying pollution's we have not seen the W.A.I.S. fore fill it's 'normal' role in leading melt. If we now see the Antarctic Circumpolar's reduce and allow the warming to flood into the Antarctic continent we will see a sudden upswing in losses from there.

Better hope the synoptics currently over the basin are absent once the suns up properly over the ice? Whilst I know many of us will be watching for ice min/ice free basin but I've decided I'll be keeping an eye on how fast the ice goes in the first half of the melt season. The longer we have large areas of open water under sun the faster we lose the remaining ice (and gain more extreme weather events across the northern hemisphere). I still find it hard to believe folk are being pedants as to temps across the planet when such huge physical changes are ongoing?

This is a problem for 'today' with both infrastructure and homes being increasingly impacted. Coastal erosion is a very big issue with whole villages now being re-located. With us now expecting more GAC12 type events the coasts are now increasingly exposed to poundings from seas once 'locked solid' by ice. 4 knows full well the issues on his coastline with the glacial drift suffering from increased rainfalls 'swelling' the clay's and leading to slippage ( as in Whitby) but those deposits are far more stable than ones previously cemented together by ice. So the double whammy is gloop that was once solid permafrost pounded by swells once open water arrives.

But Pete is correct in showing just how such language is met by certain sectors of the community? The content appears forgotten whilst the debate rages over the odd word? Sad really. I think the changes, ongoing, in the Arctic are now well beyond our control and, like out GHG forcings, there is a lot of change already 'in the pipeline' that we have no control over? For me I cannot see that without somehow clawing back the 'fossil' carbon cycle emission that we have added to our atmosphere that the 'hibernating' section of our current carbon cycle is destined to become re-animated (along with the temp rises that this will also entail). This may well take hundreds of years to come about but it must come about if we leave that chunk of human forcing in place as the planet will be constantly searching to 'balance' GHG's and temp and in so doing will be forced to melt more ice sheet ,revealing more hibernating carbon cycle and lowering albedo/reducing energy spent on ice melt and so on and so on until the full carbon cycle is in play and the planet is ice free. At least we'll have a whole new continent to move onto?