Gray-Wolf

Have I missed something?

https://earthdata.nasa.gov/data/near-real-time-data/rapid-response Now that light is arriving back into the basin i thought I's post the link to the Modis images (near real time or Mosaic). Am I seeing a broad band of disruption along the Alaskan north shore (like last year?) and , if so, will this lead to the opening of the southern sectors of the Beauforts Sea as early as last melt season? Also, if you look at the Baffin end of the Parry channel (deep water NW Passage) am I seeing thin ice for the first 1/3 of the channel with an ice bridge before the thicker ice? Does it look like flow into Baffin has drifted ice out of the channel???

Hi P.P.! My current concerns about an 'abrupt warming' is based upon the past glacial events where temps just rocket out of deep glacial max's? It appears that the planets albedo is plenty enough to offset the turnaround from negative forcing to positive forcing for quite a while? It is only when the extra energy, that a kinder orbital positioning brings with it, has reduced the ice to the point that an albedo flip occurs that the energy suddenly appears in the climate. We have just passed such a point so how much 'hidden energy' have we suddenly got bouncing around our climate?

Hi BFTV! Feb max? that sounds like bucking the trend of late? Are you thinking of a kind of 'faux max' with transient ice in Greenland/ Barrentsz as ice expands/flows into those regions and pushes out to areas where melt occurs? So like when wind events spreads out the ice and gives a false extent gain before the ice falls foul of the 15% or less marker? It has been a different type of freeze season this time though with the AO acting in a different way than of late. I wonder if this is tied in with a natural signal and not a 'low ice' forcing? (or both). I just hope we do not see an early start to the season as the thin ice must surely wane in the same way that we have seen over recent years (no matter what predominant weather we get) and nearly a month longer in melt would surely lead to renewed record losses due merely to the thin ,young nature of the ice? I will also be watching for a re-run of last years H.P. anoms over Southern Greenland? Anyhows, the first sign that we might be needing a new thread?

With the volume measures we have I think I'd prefer a smaller extent myself!!! (and inside the basin !).

How long before we get the first post telling us about the recovery and promising us record ice by Sept?

Astronomers say it looks to be unrelated to tonights fly by (different orbit) but maybe it's all part of some past violent breakup of a much larger body throwing out fragments into different orbits? This was obviously far smaller than tonights object but will there be more of a similar size to come as we pass through the debris field? It would be cool to see a 'daylight' fireball though. I've seen a few nightime incidents and heard one 'sonic boom' from one that exploded not far above ground but nothing close to those images!

Hi TWS! I also think it has a lot to do with the 'Human Condition'? Most folk are still hardwired in the old 'natural' way of being (no 5 year plan for them!) and so cannot see 'longterm' in any realistic fashion? Part of the 'freedoms' that accompany financial security is the ability to look over the long term, working week to week (or month to month as it is today) does not best prepare folk for such abilities and so they are tended toward a very myopic view of the world. As such past is rapidly forgotten and future is dismissed with only 'today' of importance. We see climate concern as ,and just after, we see an extreme weather event but this quickly fades back and is forgotten (overwritten?) by more pressing concerns. As such I find it unlikely than the vast majortity will ever concern themselves with the personal impacts of climate change until it is hurting them directly even if they are aware that such a time is coming. They will tend to justify 'lack of concern' in many ways but ,come the crunch, they will have absorbed enough info to then seek to blame the folk who 'did not act' (on their behalf) under the weight of evidence. Eat , drink and be merry! for tomorrow we die.

Yes Keith the record low ozone hole is having an instant impact with the Weddell sea ice apparently able to push out beyond the torque of the circumpolar winds/currents! Let's see how that impacts mass loss over the rest of the Southern summer?

Very Well put ffO! With our climate it appears to not be so much about the final outcome as the direction we are headed in and the impacts such a trajectory takes us through? I am in full agreement that we can expect no galvanized action toward mitigation until well beyond the point when insurers no longer pay out for losses incurred by climate weirding? Direct threat to a sovriegn nation is the only thing that our political masters will respond to as , at that point, the costs of such action will not cost them the next election due to 'mismanagement'. This is partly our fault as if every person was clamouring for huge investment to offset climate change impacts then the politicians would be falling over backwards to show how they could better manage such than any other party. Whilst the public sit mute we get B.A.U. and the public will sit mute until they are froced ,by circumstance, to act. Should this 'Sar's like' virus suddenly look like going pandemic, with a 50% kill rate ,we would see just how quickly money can be found and resources deployed (and how quickly democratic liberties would be removed from us all) to deal with the crisis. Whilst it is only a 'possible' for such a pandemic to arise only limited funding is employed in R&D into how best to mitigate such an incident.

Now i see why Anthony W. decided to run with his 'recovery' story; http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/02/13/european-satellite-confirms-uw-numbers-arctic-ocean-is-on-thin-ice/

I'm sure for the folk worst impacted by the hole (Australia/southern tip of S.America) it is a very good sign but for the folk who use Antarctica as a sign that ADW is not real then a very bad thing. You will have noted that since the Arctic did not rebound/recover as some had promised all eyes had turned south. With the lessening of the hole's impacts then the sudden upsurge in warming we should expect will leave them very little to crow over (snowfall in winter?). Of course any upsurge in melt will be of grave concern to us all. Thanks for the link b,t,w. I'll check it out!

I think it's a grand idea to have a regular excuse for a shindig! I do also enjoy stopping to mark the time of years also and used to be pretty pee'd that the christians did in so many of our ancient traditions in favour of their desert creed so we lost a lot of our 'natural ' connection to our landscape and it's traditions. I suppose , in reality, I need to be more pee'd off with the Romans who commited genocide upon the stewards of the old religion and left us only the pale reflections of the origional depth and meaning of that tradition. I heard once that there was an isolated Northumberland village that still had a near intact version of the Old ways but that they were kept secret while their traditions were recorded? I wonder if there was any truth in that?

But some poor deluded saps with think it is 'good news' 4? Do you think raising hopes/winding folk up is 'less gloomy' than the truth? How much 'open water' ,available to re-freeze over winter, was there in Sept 82'?

There is an important observation missing from the account above and that has been the impact of the Circumpoar winds/current over the lifetime of the hole. The impacts from the hole strengthened the winds that blow around the southern oceans and drive the ocean circulation around the Antarctic continent. This incease in current and wind speed has effectively kept most of Antarctica in a kind of 'splendid Isolation' from the changes that the rest of the globe has experienced over that time. We now face the healing of the Ozone layer reducing those surface impacts and allowing those 'changes' into the last place on Earth not to see the scale of impacts that the rest of the globe has seen. Remember, the poles face a much faster warming process than places closer to the equator (as we have seen in the Arctic). The Antarctic Peninsula pokes through the circumpolars and has seen some of the highest warming seen on the planet. I do not look forward to that level of change entering into the rest of the continent. It is kind of like another of man's polluting impacts that has ,in fact, saved us from the worst of the warming we have built into the system (Global Dimming). Like the repairing ozone our 'cleaning up' of the pollution will also allow the full impacts of our pollution to be felt. Sorry to put such a downer on things but there it is (as I see it)!

Ha! Good one 4! Saw this over on WUWT and guffawed just as much at the sight of it there! How can folk celebrate that the lower the summer min falls the more ice has to return over the dark of winter??? Unless we find a way of flushing out the river runoff and meltwater fresh prior to winter I'd say that the surface water was keen to freeze more than ever before after a record low??? Mean while we still see record low ice volume for the time of year? What do you think that tells us 4? I'll give you a clue, stretching less ice to fill the same Area??

I'm sorry Songster but the elevated temps to the side of the Delta were present all through the second half of summer and into the winter across a number of sites? The crazy temps didn't last long but a partial 'bulls eye' of temps well above the basin's average did. The warming of the north slope (and it's run off) would be the obvious place to look along with the depth of the ocean along the coast and the early removal of sea ice there last year. I think we'll see similar high temps along all the shelf coasts of the basin as land temps impact the waters beside it. Remember we also saw a dramatic melt of thick ice off the North coast of Greenland through Aug last year (2m over the month if the thickness plots can be trusted) so we do see impacts from a rapidly warming land.

Well, winters worst is behind us and spring awaits. I know the Christianised version of this leaves us with Valantines day/Pancake day (and their own shrove Tuesday/lent) but do you 'feel' the change? We have Sahmain to mark our descent into winter, then Solstice, and now the end of the 'worst' of the dark and cold,'Imbolc'. In past times folk enjoyed the first of the 'new meat' as lambs tails were docked (and went into the pot) but in todays world of year round feast do you mark this passage into lighter nights and promise of the year ahead?

We've just consigned a chunk of the thick Greenland coast ice to fram. anyone watching the 'ice thickness maps' will have seen the 'stretch' put on the ice by the current atmospherics with a goodly chunk of the ice being pulled into the B.Gyre but the remainder flowing around the tip of Greenland into Fram. The thin ice is rupturing and shearing under the pressure of the synoptics with any coastal contact leading to a mass of small fragmentation floes. If it has another month of this motion left then the thickest of ice risks being drawn out in a plume in front of Bering and we know what occurs to ice situated there! With Imbolc already with us Spring awaits and the harshest of winter is leaving us.......

I got that from the paper BFTW but then it does pose some interesting 'timelines' for change? If i'm taking it in correctly the impacts on winter ice occur whilst summer change is still ongoing? I know i shouldn't but i take it 'ice free' is a given and so am now trying to understand how we will see that period extend into the year and , obviously, poor winter ice is a part of this? A.t.m. we see a thinning of the ice as the last of the multiyear is dealt with so maybe the winter changes can only occur once we have reduced perenial to a certain level?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130211162116.htm So it now looks like the releases could occur much faster than our current models suggest? Good job we're not expecting a period of abrupt climate warming eh?

I wonder at what temp we can expect ocean evaporation from the surface of the Arctic ocean to take place? The 'odd' temps at the McKenzie delta last year would have been near enough to sustain a Hurricane!!??? Should we expect a far more humid (and so heat retentice) atmosphere to develop over the ice free waters each summer and will this impact re-freeze by retaining heat above the warmed ocean longer into the autumn? The other thing modelled was the swicth to ice free winters and this seemed to have an initial abrupt shift to less ice. It linked this with the appearance of convective clouds (and the latent heat released as they form). We already see Arctic sea smoke above new leads through winter so is it just an intensification of this that will suddenly flip the switch to cloud formation? When you look at what can build above a cooling tower ,given the right conditions, I have to wonder how much further we need travel from where we are today for that 'heat source' to be great enough to cause free rise of that moist air into the higher atmosphere?

I think the easiest way to see if the planet is balanced or not is to look at temp trends? If the energy in equals the energy out then we are 'balanced and temps remain stable. If we hold onto more energy than we shed then things warm. The ocean temps (our biggest heat sink) have seen a 0.2c rise in temps in their upper layers over the past 20yrs. It looks like we are still out of kilter? As for the 'boundary layers' I've read , over the years, that this boundary is increasingly breached by more intense thunderstorms punching through into the strat (and introducing more water vapour there?). I remember the storm that brought us Boscastle punched well into the strat? What does extra H2O do to the strat if this phenomena is occurring?

Sorry to bore you P.P. but I feel it's important to re-state my understandings when it appears that the are unheard? It was the same with the Arctic prior to 07' but My 'simple' overview of what must occur now appears closer to fact than fiction? As for 'moving up ther Hill'. I've never said that over the next few years we will see dramatic sea level rise.Even if WAIS were to come on line at the same rate ass Greenland we would only be looking at mm/year.If we saw a doubling period evolve (like we see in Greenland) then by the end of our lives we would begin to see massive hikes each year (many cm's). Our biggest ,immediate ,threat is abrupt warming and the weather extremes that would accompany it. I do not see an evernt comparible with past episodes of abrupt warming (up to 10c over a decade) but a 1 or 2c hike? Would that not prove enough on top of current warming to suddenly place us in the 'danger zone'? Would that not hasten the destabilisation of the permafrosts/GIS/WAIS? If I am suffering anxiety it is for the next 5 years and just how climate will begin to settle to the new energy changes to our north have suddenly introduced into the climate system. Surely it cannot enter the system without impact???

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112780865/hole-in-ozone-layer-getting-smaller-020913/ I can not gauge whether this is good or bad news for me? We know that warm waters have already broken through the circumpolar current that the ozone loss had strengthened but the circumpolar winds had kept the warming out whilst the hole was large and growing? This is the second year it has 'recovered' so we must now be seeing impacts on the circumpolars by now? In past warmings the west Antarctic had always been ahead of Greenland in it's losses but , due to the 'stall' in warming there, Greenland has moved ahead. Will we now see a rapid change with rapid warming across the WAIS with an increased annual mass loss? I suppose we will wait and see?