arctic freezeup

[Old Rocks]

The Arctic Ice freezeup has continued its course along the very bottom of the past freezeups.

Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice Area

The present freezeup is over 1.6 million square kilometers less than the norm. And we are nearly done with this year. The differance between the previous low point and this years low point was the greatest that it has ever been. And then there is the total volume;



[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnCy-R7mLHI]PIOMAS Arctic Sea Ice Volume 1979 - 2012 September 2nd - YouTube[/ame]

 

[waltky]

Granny gonna take a cruise across the North Pole...

Say Goodbye to Arctic Summer Ice
12 April 2013 - By the time today's babies graduate college, there's a very good chance they could celebrate with a cruise across the North Pole.

That's according to the latest study on Arctic summer sea ice, the frozen pack that lingers through the Northern Hemisphere summer. In past decades, there's been less summer ice, and it's growing thinner. The research, published online Feb. 21 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, says major sea ice loss could come within a decade or two, though some ice will stick around near Greenland and Canada's Arctic islands.

The results come from analyzing different approaches to predicting Arctic sea-ice melt. Researchers James Overland, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Muyin Wang, of the University of Washington, looked at three common modeling techniques to come up with the best forecast for when the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer. "There is no one perfect way to predict summer sea ice loss in the Arctic," Wang said in a statement. "So we looked at three approaches that result in widely different dates, but all three suggest nearly sea ice-free summers in the Arctic before the middle of this century," she said.

Here are brief descriptions of the three modeling styles the study takes on:

* Models relying on past sea ice trends, or changes in total amount of sea ice, predict a nearly ice-free Arctic by 2020.
* A more stochastic approach, which incorporates random large sea-ice melting events, like the big ice losses in 2007 and 2012. This model suggests the Arctic could be ice-free by 2030.
* The climate modelers, who rely on global climate information to gauge Arctic warming, estimate sea-ice loss will hit around 2060. This is likely too slow, Overland and Wang report in their study.

No matter the model, it's reasonable to conclude that a nearly ice-free Arctic summer will very likely occur before 2050, and possibly by 2025 or 2035 (in a decade or two), Overland and Wang said in the study.

More Arctic Summer Ice Gone by 2050, Study Estimates|Climate Change | LiveScience

 

[depotoo]

I notice they left out the 2010 max in the images which showed In March 2010, average Arctic sea ice extent was 15.10 million square kilometers (5.83 million square miles). This was 670,000 square kilometers (260,000 square miles) above the record low, set in March 2006

 

[waltky]

possum thinks the Arctic gonna just melt away...

Warming of the Arctic is ‘unprecedented over the last 1,500 years,’ scientists say
December 12,`17 - The Trump administration’s mixed views on climate change notwithstanding, a group of federal scientists on Tuesday released a stark report on the warming at the top of the planet, suggesting that it is unparalleled in more than a millennium.

“The Arctic is going through the most unprecedented transition in human history, and we need better observations to understand and predict how these changes will affect everyone, not just the people of the north,” Jeremy Mathis said in a presentation at the 2017 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans. Mathis is director of the Arctic Research Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Mathis was unveiling the 2017 Arctic Report Card, an annual NOAA report that documents the changing conditions for floating sea ice, the glaciers of Greenland, the thawing permafrost of the high latitudes, and more. Mathis was introduced by retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, the acting administrator of NOAA, who said the report is important for two reasons that “directly relate to the priorities of this administration” — namely, its implications for national and economic security.

Ice floes and fog surround the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy in the Arctic Ocean on July 29. The cutter is the largest icebreaker in the Coast Guard and serves as a platform for scientific research.​

Gallaudet, a Trump appointee, brought up the example of naval submarines in the Arctic. He said operators had told him that the environment there is “the most hazardous [that] they’ve ever reported” because of the increased mobility of ice floes. The new document is peer-reviewed and was produced by 85 scientists. It is released annually, and it is the first time it has been released during Donald Trump’s presidency (the last release was in December 2016, post-election of Trump but pre-inauguration). It finds that although the warming in the Arctic was not as stark in 2017 compared with a record 2016, the region continues to warm up at a pace that is roughly double that of the rest of the planet. Consequences include the ongoing melting of Greenland, which is a leading driver of sea-level rise as it adds about 270 billion tons of ice and water to the ocean each year, and increasingly — although this remains somewhat contentious — weather effects that so many people experience in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

A new section in the annual report puts the ongoing warming in a broader context and finds it extraordinary when compared with data from “paleo” records, which seek to determine what the Arctic’s temperature was like in ancient periods long predating modern thermometer observations. That section observes that the current decline of Arctic sea ice is “outside of the range of natural variability and unprecedented” in the past 1,450 years, based on one reconstruction of past sea ice behavior. The speed at which Arctic surface temperatures are rising, meanwhile, is unprecedented in (at least) the past 2,000 years, the report asserts, based on other research. “This data set shows that the magnitude and the sustained rate of warming of the sea ice decline is unprecedented over the last 1,500 years and likely longer,” Emily Osborne, a researcher with the NOAA Arctic Research Program, said at the New Orleans event.

Arctic (land stations north of 60° N) and global mean annual land surface air temperature (SAT) anomalies (in °C) for the period 1900-2017 relative to the 1981-2010 mean value. Note that there were few stations in the Arctic, particularly in northern Canada, before 1940. The data is from the CRUTEM4 data set, which is available at www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/.​

The change is not just to the overall extent of floating Arctic sea ice (which has been greatly reduced). The ice is also thinner and less long-lived, and it rarely remains frozen throughout the summer and into the next winter. In 2017, “multiyear ice,” which is older and lasts through the summer melt season, made up just 21 percent of total Arctic ice, Osborne said. In 1985, it was 45 percent. The new report, like a climate report released in November by the Trump administration, raises the question of how to parse the government’s position on climate change. On the one hand, leaders such as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have played down the human role in climate change. Yet key government-scientific reports and studies have aligned with the findings of mainstream climate science. “Like the Climate Science Special Report released in November, the Arctic Report Card is completely at odds with the policies and statements of the Trump administration, which continues to question the reality of human caused climate change,” Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center, said in a written statement. “The Report Card dispassionately documents an array of striking changes in the Arctic environment, which it attributes to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

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[ding]

Warming of the Arctic is ‘unprecedented over the last 1,500 years,’ scientists say

That's what happens during an interglacial cycle.