Barrow Battered By Big Waves

August 27, 2015WavesBarrow, Floods, GWCABBWSC, O-Buoy, Waves, WaveWatchJim Hunt

The first big waves of 2015 have been battering the town of Barrow, Alaska today and they’ve already broken through the coastal defences. Firstly take a look at the view from the Barrow webcam during a less damaging storm on September 4th last year:

Now take a look at the view from the same camera earlier today, and play “spot the difference” with me:

The cause of the flooding that is all too visible is a cyclone that’s been whirling around in the Chukchi Sea for a while, and here is a WaveWatch III “hindcast” of what the resultant winds have created in the way of waves. Firstly the “significant wave height”:

and now the “peak period”:

which reveal a swell 4 to 5 metres high with a period of 10 seconds heading directly towards Barrow Beach. According to the Alaska Dispatch News:

Huge, wind-whipped waves crashed onto the shore at Barrow on Thursday, forcing the closure of a nearby road. Westerly winds were gusting up to 50 miles an hour, pushing waves up to the top of the beach and causing some erosion, the National Weather Service said.

The service has issued a coastal flood warning for Barrow until Friday morning, along with a high surf advisory for the western part of the North Slope and a gale warning for much of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

The big surf and flooding, which has covered a road that runs between the ocean and Barrow’s lagoon, is “not terribly unusual” at this time of the year, said Ryan Metzger, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Fairbanks. Fall is a stormy season, and the timing — right around the annual minimum sea ice extent — allows the surf to build and reach shore.

Photograph by Brittni Driver via Alaska Dispatch News

Just in case it’s not obvious from all the pictures, the respective advisory messages point out that:

A COASTAL FLOOD WARNING MEANS THAT RISING SEA WATER THAT CAUSES FLOODING IS EXPECTED. COASTAL RESIDENTS IN THE WARNED AREA SHOULD BE ALERT FOR RISING WATER…AND TAKE ACTIONS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY.

A HIGH SURF ADVISORY MEANS THAT LOCALIZED BEACH EROSION IS EXPECTED. PRECAUTIONS SHOULD BE TAKEN TO PROTECT PROPERTY.

If you’re now wondering what might happen to other areas of the north coast of Alaska in similar circumstances, but with no bulldozer in attendance, here’s an example from Cape Halkett:

According to to the United States’ Climate Resilience Toolkit:

Thawing permafrost causes coastline collapse on Alaska’s North Slope, which is no longer kept frozen and protected from fall storms by sea ice—the ice now forms later in the season.

Away from the coast swell from the same cyclone has also been affecting the sea ice north of Barrow, and here’s what a webcam bobbing about on a buoy north of the Chukchi Sea showed as the winds started to build yesterday:

O-Buoy 12 has now tipped over and then ceased transmitting. This is the last picture received, in the early hours of August 27th when the wind speed had reached 13 m/s and the buoy had been moving at over 5 m/s:

Once upon a time O-Buoy 12 was sat on the same ice floe as ice mass balance buoy 2014G, which has also been free floating for a while. Here’s what it reveals about the temperature of the sea water on August 26th 2015 at 77.56 N, 163.86 W:

Somewhere in the vicinity of -0.7 °C.

[Edit on 30/08/2015]

O-Buoy 12 has made no further transmissions, and therefore seems to have succumbed to the storm. In addition IMB buoys 2014F and 2013F stopped transmitting on the 26th and 27th of August respectively. Ice mass balance buoy 2014G has survived however, and reports two successive record daily distances travelled:

25.6 km on August 26th, followed by 36.3 km on the 27th. After a brief dip during the cyclone water temperature is still around -0.7 °C.

Presumably as a result of the cyclone JAXA Arctic sea ice extent has taken a tumble over the last few days. It has stabilised this morning slightly above 2007 levels:

Here is the current AMSR2 Arctic sea ice concentration map from the University of Hamburg, revealing a large potential fetch across the East Siberian, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas should any further cyclones occur in the area over the next few weeks:

AMSR2 Arctic sea ice concentration on August 29th from the University of Hamburg

Hence the conditions now exist for an even more damaging swell to be generated before the 2015 minimum Arctic sea ice extent is reached.

Is the Northwest Passage Open Yet?

August 14, 2015ConcentrationAventura, Bremen Uni, CIS, Concentration, MASIE, Necton, NSIDC, NWP, Salty KissesJim Hunt

People keep on posing that question just at the moment. Here’s a typical example from the Arctic Sea Ice Blog this morning:

Albeit not ‘officially’ declared as such, the daily Uni-Bremen chart shows Amundsen’s route is cleared and free now.

Here’s an extract from the “Daily Uni-Bremen chart” referred to, with an apparently “ice free” section of the southern route through the Northwest Passage highlighted:

As we’ve been discussing here recently, the automated passive microwave based satellite Arctic sea ice concentration products can miss ice that’s visible to the naked human eye. Here’s some pictures from the Great White Con Northwest Passage page:

NASA Worldview “false-color” image of the Northwest Passage on August 13th 2015, derived from bands 7, 2 and 1 of the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite

The Canadian Ice Service sea ice concentration chart for the Queen Maud Gulf on August 13th 2015

Here’s an extract from the NSIDC’s Multisensor Analyzed Sea Ice Extent (MASIE) product (currently for August 12th 2015):

and here’s an extract from an answer I gave to a similar question on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum earlier this morning:

The Canadian Ice Service still have 4-6/10 ice within a whisker of the coast. Would you fancy your chances in amongst that and a bit of a breeze?

The CIS definition of “navigable” is “a criteria of less than 60% ice cover over all sections of the Northwest Passage”. See:

http://ec.gc.ca/glaces-ice/default.asp?lang=En&n=765F63E4-1

and the inset map at:

The answer to the question posed in the title to this article is therefore currently NO, the Northwest Passage is not open yet, both officially from the CIS and unofficially from any mariner with a sense of self preservation in charge of any vessel that isn’t “ice hardened”. In all the circumstances that answer might change quite quickly though!

[Edit 18/09/15]

The Canadian Ice Service have finally published a close up map of the Parry Channel that doesn’t say “No Analysis”. Here it is:

There’s still a (narrow!) green path into McClure Strait, so I reckon we can at long last confidently declare the main Northwest Passage to be OPEN!

Arctic Sea Ice Approaching Normal?

August 11, 2015ExtentAl Gore, Extent, Steven GoddardJim Hunt

According to “Steve Goddard” it is! Hot off the presses over at “Real Science” we are told that:

DMI hasn’t updated their 30% concentration map for 10 days, but their 15% concentration map is just about at the 1979-2000 mean.

Ocean and Ice Services | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut

The melt season has essentially stopped, with very cold air across the Beaufort Sea

[Image redacted – It shows Canada and one corner of the Beaufort Sea]

The usual criminals in the press (Guardian, New York Times, etc.) and government agencies will of course not mention this, because reality and science wrecks their agenda.

Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014

I have to admit Steve’s confusing language confused me briefly. The Arctic sea ice concentration and ice type maps from the OSISAF on which the Danish Meteorological Institute base their extent graphs have been updating normally, but I eventually discovered what “Steve”/Tony was on about. On close inspection although the date at the bottom has been updating the 2015 curve on DMI’s 30% threshold Arctic sea ice extent graph currently seems to be stuck on August 2nd:

I’ve informed DMI of the problem, but when it might be fixed remains to be seen, since as the DMI web site puts it:

The old plot can still be viewed here for a while.

and as I was just informed they don’t have any resources allocated to keep the “deprecated” 30% service running.

Meanwhile back in real world in the Arctic, DMI temperatures north of 80 degrees are above “normal”:

GFS temperature anomalies look like this:

and JAXA 15% threshold Arctic sea ice extent has been dropping at nearly 100,000 km² per day for the last few days:

Mail Makes 1000% Arctic Mistake

July 29, 2015SatireDaily Mail, IPSOJim Hunt

We officially complained last week about some egregious errors in a “Daily Mail Comment“. In particular:

The northern ice-cap… is NOT bigger than at any time for decades.

In an official response we were told:

I therefore cannot see that Clause 1(ii) of the Editors’ Code has been breached in any way.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Independent Press Standards Organisation’s Editors’ Code of Practice here are Clauses 1(i-ii)

i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.

ii) A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and – where appropriate – an apology published. In cases involving the Regulator, prominence should be agreed with the Regulator in advance.

Without telling us, or as far as I can tell any of their other readers apart from one other complainant, the Daily Mail have changed the wording of the online version of the editorial comment in question. Can you spot the difference? We’ve given you some help!

Online version of the Daily Mail's "Climate change and an inconvenient truth" editorial comment captured on July 24th 2015 — Online version of the Daily Mail’s “Climate change and an inconvenient truth” editorial comment captured on July 24th 2015

The Daily Mail evidently have trouble doing basic mathematics, so it seems necessary to point out that one decade is ten years. That is a factor of ten. Using the Mail’s preferred units that makes this a 1000% mistake!

More from us on a variety of other Mail mathematical mistakes shortly. At this juncture however, we cannot help but wonder whether IPSO considers that taking no action whatsoever to rectify a print article that contains an admitted error of at least 1000% satisfies Clause 1(ii) of their Editors’ Code? Here’s clause 2:

A fair opportunity for reply to inaccuracies must be given when reasonably called for.

We hereby call on the Daily Mail to provide us with a fair opportunity to reply to this egregious inaccuracy and a number of others in the same article.

An Open Letter to the Reader’s Editor of the Daily Mail

July 29, 2015VolumeDaily Mail, Guardian, IPSO, Peter Wadhams, Rachel Tilling, VolumeJim Hunt

Thank you for your prompt reply, and my apologies for my slightly sluggish one. As you can tell from my details below I have a “day job” to attend to, and if you’ve clicked the links I sent in my original complaint you’ll realise I’ve also been very busy following up on some other allegedly inaccurate articles in the Daily Mail and a number of other Great British newspapers. See for example:

https://greatWhiteCon.info/2015/07/professor-peter-wadhams-complaint-to-ipso/

Gettting back to this complaint, I have just posted my initial reply online here:

https://greatWhiteCon.info/2015/07/mail-makes-1000-arctic-mistake/

Reiterating the main point:

We hereby call on the Daily Mail to provide us with a fair opportunity to reply to this egregious inaccuracy and a number of others in the same article.

Despite your “I therefore cannot see that Clause 1(ii) of the Editors’ Code has been breached in any way.” below, and apart from your admittedly at least 1000% timescale error, the Guardian article linked to highlights a number of other gross inaccuracies in last week’s “Daily Mail Comment” concerning Arctic sea ice volume. I fail to see how “Putting the Arctic sea ice volume record straight” for the unfortunate readers of that editorial can be achieved without prominently displaying to your print readers the Arctic sea ice volume graph extracted from Rachel Tilling’s recent academic paper:

and in addition showing your online readers the “Arctic ice cube” video together with a link to it in print.

I shall have much more to say to you on that topic in the near future but I’m theoretically “on holiday” for a week from tomorrow, so it may well not arrive in your inbox until after my return.

Best wishes,

Jim Hunt

Arctic Sea Ice Volume for Dummies

July 28, 2015VolumeDaily Mail, Dana Nuccitelli, Guardian, IPCC, VolumeJim Hunt

Dana Nuccitelli has just published an article in the Guardian entitled:

The Daily Mail and Telegraph get it wrong on Arctic sea ice, again

Not only does Dana kindly link to our recent efforts to educate the Daily Mail’s leader writer about the Arctic facts of life. He also does a much better job of explaining the issues than a previous Guardian article about Arctic sea ice volume which we were recently somewhat critical of. This therefore seems like the perfect time to provide an “Arctic Sea Ice Volume 101” lesson for Daily Mail leader writers and their wholly independent “legal eagles”.

Let’s take things one small step at a time shall we. The Daily Mail leader last week starts by saying:

In a major report last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave a grave assessment of how man-made global warming was rapidly destroying the Arctic ice cap.

Steadily increasing temperatures had made the pack ice contract by up to 12 per cent between 1979 and 2012, leading to rising sea levels which threatened to swamp coastal regions – not to mention endangering stranded polar bears.

By the middle of the century ‘a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean’ was likely for a large part of the year, the report predicted.

The Mail’s leader writer isn’t very specific about which of the numerous IPCC reports they are referring to , but the Mail’s legal eagle tells us that:

This item was written on the basis of… the 2014 synthesis report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – arguably the definitive authority on the subject.

This is a quote from that IPCC report (p4 notes). ‘The annual mean Arctic sea-ice extent decreased over the period 1979 to 2012, with a rate that was very likely in the range 3.5 to 4.1% per decade.’

Given that there are over three decades between 1979 and 2012, the shrinkage of the ice-cap couldn’t have been more than 12 per cent.

This is the first of many “misunderstandings” in the Daily Mail’s leader and their legal eagles response. Here is an extract from Section B.3 “Cryosphere” on page 9 of the IPCC AR5 Working Group 1 Summary for Policy Makers:

The annual mean Arctic sea ice extent decreased over the period 1979 to 2012 with a rate that was very likely in the range 3.5 to 4.1% per decade (range of 0.45 to 0.51 million km2 per decade), and very likely in the range 9.4 to 13.6% per decade (range of 0.73 to 1.07 million km2 per decade) for the summer sea ice minimum (perennial sea ice).

As you can see, the Mail’s “definitive authority on the subject” subject says that “for the summer sea ice minimum” Arctic sea ice extent in fact decreased by more like 12% per DECADE.

Moving on the next paragraph in the Daily Mail’s leader, we are told that:

How interesting then, that the latest analysis of 88million measurements from the European Space Agency’s Cryosat satellite show the northern ice-cap INCREASED by a staggering 41 per cent in 2013 and, despite a modest shortage last year, is bigger than at any time for decades.

whilst the Mail’s legal eagle explains to us that:

This item was written on the basis of a UCL report that formed this story: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3168504/Arctic-sea-ice-boosted-cool-summer-2013-study-reveals.html

That story states that:

Researchers used 88 million measurements of sea ice thickness recorded by the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 mission between 2010 and 2014.

The results showed that there was a 14 per cent reduction in the volume of summertime Arctic sea ice between 2010 and 2012 – but the volume of ice jumped by 41 per cent in 2013, relative to the previous year, when the summer was five per cent cooler than the previous year.

Notice that in this article the author is talking about “summertime Arctic sea ice volume” and not “mean Arctic sea ice extent”. Let’s see if instead of trying to compare apples with oranges like the Mail’s leader writer we can in fact compare like with like shall we?

Firstly let us recall (if we can) from our school days that Volume = Area x Thickness. Next returning to the IPCC AR5 WG1 report we need to turn to the technical summary of their full report where in the TS.2.5.3 “Sea Ice” section on page 40 we can read that:

There is high confidence that the average winter sea ice thickness within the Arctic Basin decreased between 1980 and 2008. The average decrease was likely between 1.3 m and 2.3 m. High confidence in this assessment is based on observations from multiple sources: submarine, electromagnetic probes and satellite altimetry; and is consistent
with the decline in multi-year and perennial ice extent.

Now unfortunately for our purposes this decline in thickness is not expressed as a percentage and is in winter rather than summer. Nevertheless it should be readily apparent to all and sundry by now that the thickness of Arctic sea ice has been declining at the same time as its extensiveness. Moving on to page 136 in section 1.3.4.3 “Ice” of the full IPCC WG1 report we find:

There has been a trend of decreasing Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent since 1978, with the summer of 2012 being the lowest in recorded history (see Section 4.2 for details). The 2012 minimum sea ice extent was 49% below the 1979 to 2000 average and 18% below the previous record from 2007. The amount of multi-year sea ice has been reduced, i.e., the sea ice has been thinning and thus the ice volume is reduced.

Following the IPCC’s instructions let’s now move on to page of section 4.2.2.4 “Arctic Sea Ice Thickness and Volume”, where we read that:

For the Arctic, there are several techniques available for estimating the thickness distribution of sea ice. Combined data sets of draft and thickness from submarine sonars, satellite altimetry and airborne electromagnetic sensing provide broadly consistent and strong evidence of decrease in Arctic sea ice thickness in recent years.

That’s followed by many paragraphs of learned discussion, but still no statement of Arctic wide volume decline in percentage terms to keep the Mail’s legal eagle happy.

Professor Peter Wadhams’ Complaint to IPSO

July 27, 2015PoliticsBen Webster, Daily Mail, Guardian, IPSO, Jessica Carsten, John Vidal, Peter Wadhams, Telegraph, TimesJim Hunt

Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University has just written to the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organisation about recent articles that “ha[ve] substantially damaged my reputation for scientific integrity, and I believe that this was the deliberate intention”. Here is the text of his complaint.

The writer of this article, Ben Webster, phoned me up cold in my office at Cambridge University on Thursday 23 July, saying that he was writing a piece on the retreat of sea ice in the Arctic, and whether it was increasing or not. We discussed the scientific data, then he asked who else was working in this field in the UK, in order to contact them. I mentioned that there are not many others in this field, since three of the leading figures died within a short space of time in accidents in 2013. He asked for further details.

I asked that this be completely off the record because of (a) the sensibilities of relatives of the deceased (Prof Laxon’s partner was particularly upset by the subsequent publication),
(b) my own scientific reputation (I did not want to be made out to be a crazy person),
(c) the fact that these deaths were investigated and were very clearly simply an extraordinary coincidence.

He raised the question of whether they were murdered. I agreed that for a short time I thought that they were, since I had had the experience of being run off the road at the same time by a lorry, but that it was very clear afterwards that the three deaths were individually explainable accidents.

I did not make any of the statements enclosed in quotation marks by the reporter. Webster promised that this was in confidence and that if he wanted to use it he would contact me first. The next thing I saw was the article plastered over Saturday’s “Times”. He had clearly done some research in procuring photographs, but did not bother to contact me, and broke his promise of confidentiality.

The publication, subsequently picked up by the Sunday Telegraph and Mail on Sunday, has substantially damaged my reputation for scientific integrity, and I believe that this was the deliberate intention.

Here are our edited highlights of the story so far:

Inside the BBC’s Arctic Sea Ice Science

July 24, 2015VolumeAdam Rutherford, BBC, CPOM, CryoSat-2, Inside Science, PIOMAS, Rachel Tilling, Radio 4, VolumeJim Hunt

I’m sure we’ll get stuck into to some real science eventually, but for the moment we’re still taking a long, hard look at mainstream media coverage of the latest learned journal article on Arctic sea ice to be misinterpreted by the media. Compared to some others one might mention the report on the BBC web site about the new CPOM paper in Nature Geoscience entitled “Increased Arctic sea ice volume after anomalously low melting in 2013” was relatively accurate. Entitled “Arctic ice ‘grew by a third’ after cool summer in 2013“, it said that:

Researchers say the growth continued in 2014 and more than compensated for losses recorded in the three previous years.

The scientists involved believe changes in summer temperatures have greater impacts on ice than thought.

But they say 2013 was a one-off and that climate change will continue to shrink the ice in the decades ahead.

The Arctic region has warmed more than most other parts of the planet over the past 30 years.

Satellite observations have documented a decrease of around 40% in the extent of sea ice cover in the Arctic since 1980.

and

The researchers used 88 million measurements of sea ice thickness from Cryosat and found that between 2010 and 2012, the volume of sea ice went down by 14%.

They published their initial findings at the end of 2013 – but have now refined and updated them to include data from 2014 as well.

Relative to the average of the period between 2010 and 2012, the scientists found that there was a 33% increase in sea ice volume in 2013, while in 2014 there was still a quarter more sea ice than there was between 2010 and 2012.

At this juncture one is forced to ask oneself the question that if there was 33% more sea ice in 2013 than there was between 2010 and 2012, but only 25% more in 2014 how it was possible that “the growth continued in 2014”?

Desperately hoping that the BBC might be able to explain this conundrum to us we avidly listened to Adam Rutherford’s interview with Rachel Tilling, the lead author of the paper in question, on BBC Radio 4’s “Inside Science” programme last night. We were also hoping that at long last there might be some quantification of what’s happened to the VOLUME of “sea ice cover in the Arctic since 1980”. Sadly all our hopes were dashed, and Adam never posed the vital questions.

You can download a recording of the broadcast from the link above. Adam’s interview with Rachel starts at 7:00 minutes. He begins by talking about:

The publication in Nature Geoscience this week of a new paper that shows that in 2013, which was a slightly cooler summer than average, Arctic ice had grown, not just a tad, but by a WHOPPING 41% on the previous year!

Rachel Tilling then begins by saying:

The thickness and the volume are actually the most important measurements we can get, because the area’s been really, really useful in giving us an overview of how the Arctic is changing, but it only really gives us half the picture.

Here’s the full picture, taken from our Arctic Sea Ice Graphs page. Since CryoSat-2 measurements only go back as far as 2010, this graph shows Arctic sea ice volume calculated by the PIOMAS model developed by the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington:

Is that WHOPPING increase in Arctic sea ice volume from 2012 to 2013 clear to you now? At 11:00 minutes into the programme Adam says:

You can see how this is going to be interpreted. You know, with 30 years of Arctic sea ice shrinking, and then suddenly it gets bigger, you’re still OK with climate change being a real thing, and global warming being a real thing?

I can see that very clearly Adam, thanks for asking, and YES is the answer to your final question. It still wasn’t clear to me whether that would be clear to Adam’s listeners however, so I posed a pertinent question on Twitter first of all:

@flimsin @icey_mark @rachel_tilling @AdamRutherford Disappointingly there was no mention of "41% of nothing" however: http://t.co/tb2KAlX2E4

— Snow White (@GreatWhiteCon) July 23, 2015

That didn’t elicit any response, so then I tried following Adam’s instructions at the end of the interview to:

Do let us know what you think – [email protected]

This is what I thought:

Hello Adam,

Further to your recent interview with Rachel Tilling, and your joint Twitter conversation with my alter ego “Snow White”, I’d like to reiterate how disappointed the two of us are that during your conversation with Rachel there was no mention of “41% of nothing”. Twitter speak for “Doesn’t anybody at the BBC have the faintest idea what Arctic sea ice volume was 30 years ago, in April and in October?”

By way of additional context see e.g.

https://greatWhiteCon.info/2015/07/an-inconvenient-truth-about-the-mails-climate-coverage/

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/07/cool-arctic-summer-brought-brief-recovery-in-2013-sea-ice-loss/

https://greatWhiteCon.info/resources/

Yours in dismay,

Jim Hunt

and this is the response I got from BBC Inside Science:

Dear Sir or Madam

Thank you very much for your email. While all emails are read – and we appreciate input from listeners – we cannot reply to each one individually. There are simply too many!

For more information about Inside Science, please go to our webpage:

Inside Science, Radio 4
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b036f7w2

For individual programmes, click on ‘Episodes’.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b036f7w2/episodes/guide

Once you have located a particular programme page, you will see a link to ‘Listen now’- on the picture of Dr. Adam Rutherford.
‘Related Links’ are found further down on the right hand side of the page.

Downloads/Podcasts of Inside Science are available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/inscience

Thanks again and do keep sending your comments in – listener feedback helps us make better programmes for you.

Yours sincerely

Inside Science, Radio 4

Meanwhile, over on Twitter:

An Inconvenient Truth About The Mail’s Climate Coverage

July 23, 2015VolumeCPOM, CryoSat-2, Daily Mail, Damian Carrington, David Rose, Guardian, IPSO, PIOMAS, Rachel Tilling, Spectator, UCL, VolumeJim Hunt

A new paper has just been published by the CryoSat-2 team at University College London. The lead author is Rachel Tilling, a PhD student in the Centre for Polar Observation & Modelling at UCL. We’ll get on to the science in due course, but first let’s take a look at how Rachel’s paper has been reported in the Great British mainstream media. In a headline redolent of our old friends at the Mail on Sunday The [headline writer for the] Guardian’s Damian Carrington proclaims that:

Arctic sea ice volume showed strong recovery in 2013

Cooler temperatures revived sea ice levels suggesting a rapid recovery was possible if global warming was curbed, scientists say

Yesterday wasn’t a Sunday, so David Rose was writing in The Spectator instead of The Mail, asking rhetorically:

Was the global warming pause a myth?

Of course it was David! We explained that to you back in January!

The Daily Mail Group couldn’t let a juicy headline go begging just because it’s midweek, so an anonymous leader writer came up with this one:

Climate change and an inconvenient truth

The “Daily Mail Comment” continues:

In a major report last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave a grave assessment of how man-made global warming was rapidly destroying the Arctic ice cap.

Steadily increasing temperatures had made the pack ice contract by up to 12 per cent between 1979 and 2012, leading to rising sea levels which threatened to swamp coastal regions – not to mention endangering stranded polar bears.

By the middle of the century ‘a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean’ was likely for a large part of the year, the report predicted.

How interesting then, that the latest analysis of 88million measurements from the European Space Agency’s Cryosat satellite show the northern ice-cap INCREASED by a staggering 41 per cent in 2013 and, despite a modest shortage last year, is bigger than at any time for decades.

After that it prattles on about the “pause”, so for now let’s take a look at the paper that’s got the papers so excited. For some strange reason it’s title makes no mention of a “strong recovery in 2013”, instead describing:

Increased Arctic sea ice volume after anomalously low melting in 2013

Searching the paper for the word “recovery” returns zero results, so you may well be wondering what it actually does say? Here’s a pertinent, albeit brief, extract from the abstract:

Between autumn 2010 and 2012, there was a 14% reduction in Arctic sea ice volume, in keeping with the long-term decline in extent. However, we observe 33% and 25% more ice in autumn 2013 and 2014, respectively, relative to the 2010–2012 seasonal mean, which offset earlier losses. This increase was caused by the retention of thick sea ice northwest of Greenland during 2013 which, in turn, was associated with a 5% drop in the number of days on which melting occurred—conditions more typical of the late 1990s. In contrast, springtime Arctic sea ice volume has remained stable.

Let’s compare that with the Mail’s version shall we? Whilst searching the paper for the word “ice” returns lots of results a search for the word “cap” returns zero results, just like “recovery”. Any investigative journalist (or leader writer) who had investigated Wikipedia would have discovered this:

An ice cap is an ice mass that covers less than 50,000 km² of land area (usually covering a highland area). Masses of ice covering more than 50,000 km² are termed an ice sheet.

Thus the Arctic Ocean is not covered by an “ice-cap [that] INCREASED by a staggering 41 per cent in 2013” because, as it’s name suggests, it’s an ocean and not a land area. Assuming for the moment that the Mail leader writer is in actual fact referring to sea ice cover in the Arctic, then according to Rachel Tilling’s paper CryoSat-2 “observed 33% more ice in autumn 2013”. Where did the Mail’s “41%” come from then? Their patent pending hot air generator in reverse gear?

Moving on, the Mail must also have a top secret time machine hidden in the basement of Northcliffe House that will enable their leader writer to travel back and change history, because here once again is Andy Lee Robinson’s graphic visualisation of what’s really been happening to the volume of sea ice in the Arctic over the past few decades, albeit using PIOMAS sized ice cubes rather than the CryoSat-2 flavour:

Needless to say I have already lodged an official complaint about the antics of The Daily Mail’s imaginary time machine. If you would like to do as well then here is the appropriate form to fill in:

http://dailymail.co.uk/readerseditor

For any IPSO case officers (or Guardian writers) that might be watching please feel free to read all about 41% of nothing, and if you prefer graphs to moving pictures here’s one that shows Arctic sea ice volume in Spring from our PIOMAS regional volume page:

Meanwhile, over on Twitter:

View the story “Inconvenient Truths for the Daily Mail and The Spectator” on Storify

R/V Lance Encounters Another Energetic Wave Event in the Arctic

July 19, 2015WavesAGU, Feedback, Magic Seaweed, MIZ, NOAA, R/V Lance, Waves, WaveWatchJim Hunt

Today’s title is inspired by a recent paper in the AGU’s Geophysical Research Letters, entitled “In situ measurements of an energetic wave event in the Arctic marginal ice zone“, by Collins, Rogers, Marchenko and Babanin. According to Collins et al. in the abstract:

R/V Lance serendipitously encountered an energetic wave event around 77°N, 26°E on 2 May 2010. Onboard GPS records, interpreted as the surface wave signal, show the largest waves recorded in the Arctic region with ice cover. Comparing the measurements with a spectral wave model indicated three phases of interaction:

wave blocking by ice

strong attenuation of wave energy and fracturing of ice by wave forcing, and

uninhibited propagation of the peak waves and an extension of allowed waves to higher frequencies (above the peak)

Wave properties during fracturing of ice cover indicated increased groupiness. Wave-ice interaction presented binary behavior: there was zero transmission in unbroken ice and total transmission in fractured ice. The fractured ice front traveled at some fraction of the wave group speed. Findings do not motivate new dissipation schemes for wave models, though they do indicate the need for two-way, wave-ice coupling.

There’s a lot of equations and similarly technical stuff in the body of the paper which is nevertheless well worth a read even if you’re not a techie, as are the articles in the long list of references at the end. However, there aren’t any “swell forecasts” of the sort we like to put in our discussions of “waves-in-ice“, so firstly let’s fix that. Here’s some visualisations from NOAA’s WaveWatch III reanalysis for 18:00 on May 2nd 2010:

which reveal a swell with a significant height of 6 meters and a period of 11 seconds in the open ocean south of Hopen Island and Svalbard. Collins et al. concluded that:

Our results suggest that accurate wave prediction would have required coupling with an ice model which resolved scales of hours and kilometers. Implementation at such scales will no doubt be a future challenge. These are the largest known waves recorded in the Arctic with substantial ice cover present, and we expect the measurement of large-wave events to occur more frequently in the future due to the fetch wave-ice fetch feedback loop.

Now comes news that the R/V Lance has been subject to another “waves-in-ice” event, although this time it was north of Svalbard. First of all here’s a video showing an earlier stage of the Lance’s 2015 Arctic program:

Next the latest serendipitous encounter for the Lance. According to the Twitter feed of the Oceanography & Sea Ice department of the Norwegian Polar Institute on June 22nd 2015:

The sea ice floe with the N-ICE2015 research camp broke

at which time the Lance was located in the marginal ice zone northwest of Svalbard:

Now some further information (and more pictures!) has emerged via the Twitter feed of Harvey Goodwin, who says that:

When a light swell comes in the 5km sea ice floe we’d been working on broke into pieces not more than 30m [across] in an hour:

Equipment rescue[d] after sea ice breakup. Some cables cut but no equipment lost!

The WaveWatch III reanalysis for June 2015 isn’t available yet. We’ll bring you that information once it is, but for now here’s a couple of quick snapshots from the Magic Seaweed surf forecasting site:

They suggest that a smaller but longer period swell was responsible for the ice break up this time around, compared to 2010. I wonder if it will take another 5 years for this latest event to be more fully documented in the scientific literature?

The Great White Con

Putting the Arctic sea ice record straight