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.

ASCAT January 2014

An extremely useful tool for winter sea ice watching is ASCAT, the advanced scatterometer. I think it's worth looking at some years of ASCAT for the same day as this is instructive concerning current sea ice state.

Thinner Ice in Beaufort and Beaufort Breakups.

Last February I posted about a break up of sea ice that occurred in the Beaufort Sea, now another break up has happened over the last week. It demands a post, but one looking at the bigger picture, indeed were I to try to go over what has happened in the last week the result would read surprisingly similar to my post of February 2013.

I'm still not totally convinced this is unusual, but there is reason from the scientific literature to expect more sea ice break ups in the Beaufort Sea.

Autumn 2013

Now that PIOMAS data is out and a New Year has begun, it's worth going over some of the data regards sea ice, what I had intended to be my first post before the atmosphere going bonkers derailed my train of thought.

The Atmosphere Goes Bonkers!

For my first post of the new year I can only start looking at the atmosphere, despite PIOMAS gridded data being out. I have to start here because the atmosphere is going nuts. Here in the UK we've been hammered by a succession of storms from an Atlantic synoptic pattern that keeps defaulting to basin wide monster low pressures. Now over in the States there's a monster of an Arctic Breakout.

New PIOMAS Gridded Data: November 2013

New PIOMAS gridded data (effective thickness fields) has been released up to November, hat-tip to Wipneus for letting me know. So I've interrupted my blogging holiday to post on the new data which gives a great view of 2013 from the point of view of PIOMAS.

The regional PIOMAS derived data I have previously released, and which is used throughout this post, has now been updated through to November 2013, it is available in CSV files here. Thickness calculations have not been updated for 2013 because they need concentration which has not been released.

Once again, thanks to Dr Jinlun Zhang and colleagues at the Polar Science Centre for making the gridded PIOMAS data publicly available.

Go on, say something outrageous...

I've been having problems with the Tang et al paper about summer mid latitude impacts of sea ice loss. Basically I've been so focused on sea ice that I've a stack of papers I need to re-read on atmospheric impacts, and every time I've tried to 'put pen to paper' regarding Tang et al I find myself needing to re-read several other papers. Unfortunately I've already started to wind down for a Christmas break from work and blogging, so I find that I haven't the motivation.

So I've decided that the final post of 2013 will be a look at percentage open water formation, and a clarification of what I think is a tipping point revealed by the PIOMAS data. Regular readers may already have grasped what I've been getting at before, but now is the time to stop hinting (i.e. 'non-linear') and say exactly what I mean.

EDIT 23/7/14 - after months of consideration and 2014 April data, I have concluded that the effect outlined here will be countered by winter ice growth. More here.