The Post 2007 Arctic Ocean September Extent

I've been very busy at work, it's audit season, so no spare time. But this weekend is down-time to rest. So I've just had a look at the Arctic Ocean sea ice data for September 2007 to 2022.

Open Water Formation Efficiency Part 4

Open Water Formation Efficiency (OWFE) is a measure of the ease with which melt season thinning of sea-ice reveals open water. In March I published a post looking at how this operates from a theoretical perspective. In this post I look at how it operates in practice in various regions of the Arctic Ocean.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.

 

The BCE Region Killzone

The BCE region is comprised of the Beaufort, Chukchi, East Siberian Seas. Due to the Beaufort Gyre it has a special role in the dynamics of Arctic sea ice.

Open Water Formation Efficiency - Part 3

Previously, 9 years ago, I produced two posts on Open Water Formation Efficiency, here and here. Now, as a bed rock to a series of posts I am going to revisit that issue. First, in this post, I outline a theoretical model to demonstrate the process involved.

PIOMAS May Volume Loss

Now that the PIOMAS main series of total volume is out I can look at what that shows about the May volume loss. This being the first part of the overall spring volume loss.

May 2016 Status

The data is now in, so here's a look at May and prospects for the coming summer.

PIOMAS April 2016

Thanks, as always, to Dr Zhang and the PIOMAS team at the Polar Science Center for making gridded PIOMAS products available to amateurs such as myself. It's early May and April PIOMAS data is out. April is the peak of volume and ice state in April is one of the primary initial conditions that sets the scene for the coming melt season.

Beaufort Cryosat February

Beaufort has already started to collapse, I will have more about that in a post to follow when I have the time tomorrow. For now, I have amended images from Meereisportal for a close look at Cryosat 2 ice thickness in Beaufort.

More commentary about the recent Cryosat 2 data is available from Neven at the Arctic Sea Ice Blog.

PIOMAS 29 February

PIOMAS data is now out. So here is a summary of the data based on the gridded data provided by the PIOMAS team. Once again thanks is due to the PIOMAS team for making this data available and up to date.

PIOMAS on 31 January

As promised in the comments of my previous post, I am going to break down the difference between January 2015 and January 2016 in terms of region and thickness.

PIOMAS Volume Loss over July

The interesting forecast addressed in my last post involving two cyclones, one being the remnants of tropical storm Molave, hasn't panned out. Such is the risk of using forecasts so far ahead. However the weather still will play a large role in the setting of the September, and it was such a remarkable forecast it was worthy of comment.

Anyway, this is a quick post to update the sea ice volume loss over July and the volume at the end of July using PIOMAS daily volume data. I have now updated all of the regional PIOMAS data available here to the most recent data available.

I also digress at the end to a outlook for the minimum September extent.

PIOMAS July 2015

PIOMAS gridded data is out, well partially.As I type the gice data and daily data hasn't been updated, but I'll proceed with what heff (grid box effective thickness) shows.

June 2015 Status

June data is now fully available, so here is my commentary on the current sea ice state and the month just passed. Sorry but this is a long post...

May 2015 Status: PIOMAS

This will be a rather short post, I will have much more to say about the June PIOMAS data. But for now, partly due to work, here's some late comments on PIOMAS May data.

The Slow Transition

Ten months ago I posted about my change of mind, from thinking that a fast crash was a very real possibility to expecting a slow transition of the Arctic sea ice to a seasonally ice free state. I have now finished the series of posts detailing my argument. I should start by clarifying; by a slow transition I do not expect the summer sea ice to last into the 2050s, I suspect that around 2030 we will see the first summer with an extent of less than 1 million km^2.

The Slow Transition: The Central Arctic

For the Arctic Ocean to become seasonally sea ice free the Central Arctic region must become sea ice free. What is happening in PIOMAS in the Central Arctic, and what is likely to happen in future?

April 2015 Status. Part 2.

Part 2 of my summary of April sea ice state focusses on ice thickness as seen in PIOMAS. So for those who have been awaiting the more detailed thickness distribution plots by region here is the detail that may help form opinions as to prospects for the coming melt season.

April 2015 Status. Part 1.

This post is the first of two blog posts examining ice state as of April 2015. April extent is very low but this has little impact on the coming season. A greater factor is thickness and the thickness distribution of the ice, and the best available tool for that is the PIOMAS sea ice reanalysis system. Due to the length of this post I will address thickness breakdown of PIOMAS data using both grid box effective thickness and the sub grid thickness distribution in a post in the next few days.

What is PIOMAS gice?

 In this post I'm going to explain a PIOMAS metric that I will be using from now on. I will also give a first look at this metric. The gridded data for the 'sub-grid thickness distribution' is contained in gice files, and I've finally started to use them.