European Precipitation and Sea Ice Loss

James Screen has released a lot of important papers on Arctic sea ice loss and the atmosphere, he's done it again, in "Influence of Arctic sea ice on European summer precipitation.", not paywalled.

I'm particularly excited about this because it goes some way to supporting something I've been going on about for two years now. I should point out at the outset - it is very unlikely that Dr Screen is aware of my persistent blogging on this subject!

Winter warming and sea ice thinning.

Arctic Amplification is the tendency of the Arctic region to warm more than the global average with Global Warming. While it is an effect initially seen in modelling studies it has been recently found to be emerging from natural variability. I have used PIOMAS gridded sea ice thickness data and NCEP/NCAR atmospheric temperature data to examine the connection between sea ice thinning and winter warming.

Mid Monthly Miscellenea: October.

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...

Siberian and Greenland geopotential height anomalies

Early last year I wrote a post on Eurasian snow cover, link, I've revisited this as part of my continuing attempt to explain the Greenland centred summer pattern.

Francis/Vavrus and the slower jetstream.

I've previously mentioned the Francis/Vavrus paper linking mid latitude persistent weather to Arctic Amplification, copy here, but haven't properly blogged on it. However I have drawn the paper in as a possible factor in the behaviour of blocking activity in a previous post. But the conclusions drawn there are not central to that post, merely an aside.

I say this because I'm pretty sure that the Francis/Vavrus paper is wrong in doubt. EDIT - amended in light of reading Dr Francis's response in the WP - see comments. 

Echoes from 1981.

I should be cracking on trying to get to grips with the atmosphere, but it's proving as difficult as I'd feared. So I've given up for the moment, dug out my debit card, and hit Amazon. The only thing I've purchased that's germane to this blog is Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren, in which Hansen refers to a 1981 paper: Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. Scanned PDF here.

2013 Sea Ice Prediction Review

I have previously made two predictions, one early in the season, one late. Both were in terms of CT Area, and as CT Area is now clearly past the minimum the time has come to evaluate my predictions.