Beaufort Starts Early

The 2016 sea ice melt season in the Arctic has started, Beaufort starts early this year, but does this mean it is starting as it means to continue?

Two Cylones that might be significant

Weather forecasts show two possibly important cyclonic weather systems.

July Status: How low can it go?

Rather then do a proper run down of July conditions I have decided to mostly look forward, although in doing so I cover July. In my previous post on sea ice conditions I covered up to mid July, and essentially not much has changed, the Arctic Dipole has dominated through July and sets the scene for August.

Before I begin, apologies for the stupid 'Cookies' message, this is a result of European Union legislation.

Mid Summer 2015 Status

Taking the Arctic Ocean summer season as June to the sea ice minimum, around now is the middle of the summer. In this post I look at the state of the ice mid summer, and offer a guess of what the minimum will be.

Hello Dipole My Old Friend

I have previously written about the Arctic Dipole, and note that it now has a Wikipedia page. Over the last two years it has been largely absent, leading myself and others to ponder whether it was a transitory phase over the 2007 to 2012 period.

It doesn't seem to have been transitory, it has dominated July so far and looks set to continue throughout the rest of July. My expectation is for it to continue into August, that however is just an expectation based on behaviour in 2007 to 2012.

The Slow Transition: The BCE Region

The BCE region is the region covered by the Beaufort Sea, Chukchi Sea, and the East Siberian Sea. For there to be a virtually ice free Arctic any September soon, the BCE region must melt out early in the season. This post is the penultimate post in my argument that we face a slow transition of the Arctic sea ice, after which I will wrap up the argument with a summary, before moving on to watch this season.

Coincidentally, as others including Neven have noted, Beaufort is very interesting right now, this winter's export of multi year ice makes me suspect it will stall, but an early start in Beaufort is promising for a more exciting season than the last two years. Here's hoping...

UK Summer Rainfall - Some notes on the Jetstream.

I've been digging a bit more into record UK rainfall, not a major revelation, but I thought it worth blogging as this blog is essentially my on-line notebook. I don't intend to blog on summer rainfall in the UK again until I've seen what this summer brings.

Post 2007 Summer Melts: Ice or Atmosphere?

The issue of what is causing the increased melt season sea ice losses post 2007 is intriguing, there seems to be two candidate players, the ice and the atmosphere. In my opinion 2013's muted melt gives a hint as to what the main player is.

Summer 2013

Rather than do an August status post this close to the minimum, when the take-home message of the 2013 melt season is already clear, I've decided it's best to do a post on the summer melt of 2013. The actual minimum may warrant a further post, if so that will be done.

July Status Part 2: Atmosphere

NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis data for July is now available, so it is possible to assess what the atmospheric state has been in July, and for the summer so far. The atmospheric state in 2013 continues to be remarkable in the context of the other post 2007 years, and this is clearly the proximate cause of the slow melt season seen in 2013.

June Status Part 2b - Atmosphere and Ice.

In my previous post I produced a series of sea level pressure (SLP) plots from NCEP/NCAR reanalysis showing how anomalous the SLP field for 2013 is in the context of the other post 2007 years, link. As stated previously, looking at Cryosphere Today Area (CT Area) on 30 June one has to go back to 2009 for a single year above 30 June 2013, and back to 2004 to find successive preceding years of higher area for that date. Given the loss of volume in 2010*, and that this was followed by a new record in the CT Area data for 2011, 2012 then setting a new record by a substantial margin, the late start to the melt season in spring 2013 is highly anomalous. *Whilst this was an event first noticed in PIOMAS it was a real event in the real world, and not just an event within the PIOMAS model, link.

June Status Part 2a: Atmosphere - SLP fields.

Rather than present these graphics in an animated gif (which can't be paused), or YouTube (which has poor resolution) I thought it best to put them all on one page. Here is a sequence of NCEP/NCAR sea level pressure (SLP) fields, the 2007 to 2012 average and the previous ten years including this year (2013). Source.

Eurasian Snow Cover and Atmospheric Impacts

I've been looking again at the new summer atmospheric circulation pattern. In "The Recent Shift in Early Summer Arctic Atmospheric Circulation.", abstract, Overland et al identify the shift as an Arctic Dipole pattern. However as I have shown, and as Overland et al also state, this has wider impacts.

But is there a role for snow cover changes in driving this new pattern, and if so what is it?

End of Month Miscellenea.

First there's Dr Jennifer Francis at the Weather & Climate Summit. I was lucky enough to have a day off and stumble upon this last year. This year Dr Francis covers a lot of what was covered before, and proceeds into a narrative of Arctic impacts on the wider atmosphere. Then there's new stuff from Arctic.io.

Sea Ice Albedo Changes and the Seasonal Cycle.

I'm currently ploughing through my stack of Arctic related papers. It seems to me that in order to fully appreciate the spectacle I think the coming years will deliver, knowing the scientific literature is a pre-requisite. So over the autumn and winter I'll be making more of an effort to post commentaries on what I've been reading. One aspect of the fallout of this year is that there will be a series of papers by various researchers who've been following this year. I can't wait!

However along the way I'll be distracted from my campaign of re-reading and catching up with my 'to be read' folder by research I've not been aware of.

Like these papers...

A Sea Ice Free Arctic by 2020 (and maybe sooner).

I've had this post in varying form for the last three weeks, I've dithered over posting for one reason and another, which has turned out to be for the best. That's because I can start this post with a perfect quote from Dr Julienne Stroeve.

The acceleration of the loss of the extent of the ice is mostly because the ice has been so thin. This would explain why it has melted so much this year. By June the ice edge had pulled back to where it normally is in September... .

..The 2007 record was set when you had weather conditions which were perfect for melting. This year we didn't have those. It was mixed. So this suggests the ice has got to a point where it's so thin it doesn't matter what the weather is, it's going to melt in the summer. This could become the new normal.

Julienne Stroeve.

I've been one of what has seemed at times like a minority of one in the amateur community following the loss of Arctic sea ice. My view had been that the ice was transitioning to a new pseudo-equilibrium state, one with an ice pack composed almost entirely of young ice. I now doubt that such a pseudo-equilibrium state exists, and I anticipate a rapid transition by 2020 to a virtually sea ice free state (NSIDC Extent <1M km^2), I suspect it could be much earlier than that.

The Early Summer Arctic Dipole.

The two papers introduced in the previous post offer some ideas as to what may be causing this change in atmospheric circulation. I've no doubt we'll see a number of interesting papers getting to the root cause of the shift to repeated early summer Arctic Dipole (AD) pattern since 2007. But what is known at present and what ideas are there about the cause?

Summer Daze? The Arctic Dipole!

In my last post I updated a post from a year ago entitled Summer Daze in which I showed that a new pattern of sea level pressure anomalies has asserted itself in the wake of the sea ice crash of 2007. New research is out that examines this pattern, sheds some light on possible mechanisms behind it, and considers the implications.

Musings on Models

In 2006, a year before the massive Arctic Crash of 2007, Marika Holland, Cecilia Bitz, and Bruno Tremblay presented a paper entitled "Future abrupt reductions in the summer Arctic sea ice" to Geophysical Research Letters, it was published later the same year. In that paper (Holland et al) an examination of rapid sea-ice loss periods in models used for the IPCC's Fourth Assesment Report was carried out. Holland et al fnd that a general message from the suite of simulations is that the harder humans force the climate, the faster the sea-ice goes, an observation that for readers of this blog may seem trite.

More interesting, especially in the light of the aftermath of 2007 and the clear failure of IPCC models to reproduce the observed rate of ice loss in the Arctic, is whether the models still tell us something of value about the changes we are seeing in the Arctic.

Dr Jennifer Francis on Arctic weather impacts.

Dr Jennifer Francis recently gave an excellent lecture at the Weather and Climate Summit about the wider impacts of the loss of Arctic sea-ice. I was lucky to see it via the internet last weekend and have waited until now to discuss because the presentation has only just been posted on YouTube.  The video is 1:24 long, but is well worth viewing.