Monday, May 17, 2010

Arctic Ice




















This is not something that I have blogged on previously, but new information has come to my attention suggesting that arctic summer sea ice may be gone even before Canberra's water. The above graph is from here: http://psc.apl.washington.edu/ArcticSeaiceVolume/IceVolume.php

This graph shows the daily ice volume anomaly. At present, we are heading for record low ice volume by the end of this year's northern summer.

Compare the above graph with this image:












This second graph is from here: http://freshnor.dmi.dk/handout_freshnor.pdf

The second graph only uses data up until 2004. However, even given that, it is projecting the end of summer arctic sea ice by sometime this decade. The observations in the first graph not only confirm the projection based on the 2004 data but suggest that things have started to get worse. With the median projection is that summer sea ice will be gone by around 2014, it is getting more and more probable that it will disappear in the next two or three years.

For clarification, the two graphs have a different scale: 10^3 kilometres cubed for the first one and 10^4 kilometres cubed for the second one.

I should also add that personally my bet is for around 2014, even with the new data. Solar maximum will be somewhere around that time and that increases the likelihood of something bad happening.

And an interesting link on daily temperatures in the Arctic.

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php

And the link to the historical data for sea ice area and extent used by the nsidc:

ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135

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