An alarming crackup has begun at the foot of Antarctica’s vulnerable Thwaites Glacier, whose meltwater is already responsible for about 4% of global sea level rise. An ice sheet the size of Florida, Thwaites ends its slide into the ocean as a floating ledge of ice 45 kilometers wide. But now, this ice shelf, riven by newly detected fissures on its surface and underside, is likely to break apart in the next 5 years or so, scientists reported today at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
The most dramatic sign of impending failure is a set of diagonal fractures that nearly span the entire shelf. Last month, satellites spotted accelerating movement of ice along the fractures, says Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University, Corvallis, who is part of a multiyear expedition studying the glacier. The shelf is a bit like a windshield with a series of slowly opening cracks, she says. “You’re like, I should get a new windshield. And one day, bang—there are a million other cracks there.”
Here’s an image from the AGU abstract to illustrate the “cracks” Erin referred to:
Image: Christian Wild, Oregon State University
Once the ice shelf shatters, large sections of the glacier now restrained by it are likely to speed up, says Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a leader of the Thwaites expedition. In a worst case, this part of Thwaites could triple in speed, increasing the glacier’s contribution to global sea level in the short term to 5%, Pettit says.
Here is the AGU press conference that caused all the excitement:
Not a lot of people know that our headline for today (apart from the terminating question mark) has been shamelessly plagiarised from Paul Homewood’s latest Arctic article. This will give you a flavour of Paul’s purple prose:
Electroverse have uncovered some blatant data tampering by DMI:
“It would appear that the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) may have taken a leaf out of NASA’s ‘data-fudging 101‘.
Sometime between late-Nov and early-Dec this year, the DMI’s Arctic Sea Ice Volume chart experienced a mysterious ‘vanishing’ of ice — this is revealed by a direct comparison of the Nov 18th and the Dec 8th charts below.”
I am able to corroborate their findings. In September I took this screenshot of DMI sea ice thickness. Note that the black line for this year was close to the 2018 line, and above 2017 for Sep 20th:
But the new version shows this year well below those two years:
There is no other way to describe this than blatant fraud. The changes do not appear to have been even documented, and the old data is not archived, being simply “replaced”. These should surely be very basic scientific requirements.
Neither does there appear to have been any public announcement by DMI about the fact or the justifications for what amounts to a significant change.
What this episode means is that DMI can no longer be trusted to produce honest, reliable data. It also raises the question of whether similar tampering has been carried out in previous years, without anybody being aware. After all, it is only by pure accident that it has been spotted this time.
Even fewer people know that my helpful explanatory comment is currently invisible to Paul’s band of merry (mostly) men:
Should anyone contrive to click on the invisible link this what they would see just below the DMI’s recent Tweet:
Quite predictably Tony Heller has also jumped on the self same bandwagon, claiming in an article entitled “Rapidly Disappearing Arctic Ice” that:
On December 4, DMI showed Arctic sea ice volume above the 2004-2013 average:
Quite predictably, the data disappeared for three days, and now that it has returned, DMI has massively reduced the amount of sea ice in the Arctic. Much of the thick ice off the coast of Siberia has disappeared:
In normal circumstances I would of course point out the error of his ways to Tony via Twitter. However:
Here is the DMI’s explanation for the recent change in their Arctic sea ice thickness/volume visualisations, as shown on their “Polar Portal” web site:
New graphics December 7, 2021
We have improved the DMI operational ocean and sea-ice model HYCOM-CICE with higher horizontal resolution and updated HYCOM and CICE code. In particular, the sea ice code has been greatly improved with meltponds, sea-ice salinity, improved thermodynamics and much more. The freshwater discharge from Greenland has also been greatly improved using freshwater product from GEUS, which especially improves the coastal ocean currents and thus the ice transport nearshore Greenland. The model has been running continuously since September 1990. Therefore, we have by December 07, 2021 updated the graphics of sea-ice thickness and volume using the new and improved data on Polarportal and ocean.dmi.dk.
The improved model setup has led to higher variability as well as less abrupt melting during the melt season, which gives a shift of approximately half a month for the time of minimum ice volume. The trend between the years is almost unchanged. Thereby, a year with a large sea-ice volume in the old setup also has a large volume in the new setup, and similar for years with low sea-ice volume.
I always thought that “skeptical” folk didn’t much care for the output of “climate models” but I guess I must have been mistaken?
[Edit – December 13th]
Needless to say my comment at NALOPKT is still invisible this evening. However credit where credit is due. Tony Heller has at least not censored my comments on his blog. Earlier today Watts Up With That referred to both the Heller and Homewood DMIGate2 articles. Do you suppose the following helpful comment of mine will ever see the light of day at WUWT?
Watch this space for more #DMIGate2 news as and when we receive it!
Christmas is coming. Santa’s secret summer swimming pool has frozen over. The time has come for a new monthly Arctic update.
The JAXA/ADS/ViSHOP web site is undergoing maintenance for a week, so let’s start the festive season with a look at high resolution AMSR2 area and extent:
After a brief hiatus in early November both metrics are once again tracking within, but near the upper bound of the last 10 years.
Next let’s take a look at the latest AWI CryoSat-2/SMOS thickness map:
together with the anomaly map from the Finnish Meteorological Institute:
Still thinner than usual in the so called “last ice area” north of Greenland and Ellesmere Island, and thicker than usual on the Siberian side of the Arctic, particularly in the Chukchi Sea.
Finally, for the moment at least, here’s the latest CryoSat-2/SMOS volume graph:
Unlike the previous metrics, this particular one is close to the middle of the pack.
Sea ice extent increased at a faster than average pace through November and by the end of the month, extent was just within the interdecile range. Extent was above average in the Bering Sea, but Hudson Bay remained unusually ice free through the month.
The November 2021 monthly average extent was 9.77 million square kilometers (3.77 million square miles), which ranked tenth lowest in the satellite record. The 2021 extent was 930,000 million square kilometers (359,000 million square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 long-term average. Extent was higher than average in the Bering Sea, but is extremely low in Hudson Bay.
Air temperatures at the 925 millibar level (about 2,500 feet above the surface) were well above average north of the Canadian Archipelago, by as much as 6 degrees Celsius. Conversely, temperatures over southwest Alaska and the eastern sector of the Bering Sea were as much as 6 degrees Celsius below average:
The sea level pressure pattern for November featured widespread low pressure over the Atlantic side of the Arctic and extending into the Barents and Kara Seas, paired with a moderately strong Beaufort Sea High. Strong low pressure over the Gulf of Alaska resulted in a circulation pattern in the eastern Bering Sea that brought cold air from the north. This pattern was favorable for sea ice growth, and can explain the above average ice extent in the region:
[Edit – December 7th]
Since the start of December high resolution AMSR2 extent has been flatlining:
Sea ice area has even declined slightly over the past few days:
Here too is an animation created by Uniquorn on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum using AWI ASMR2 data to reveal ice movement through the Nares Strait during December:
[Edit – December 9th]
The JAXA/ADS/ViSHOP web site is down again, so let’s take another look at high resolution AMSR2 area and extent:
It seems that the “brief hiatus” is over, and extent is now in a “statistical tie” with 2018/19 at 4th lowest for the date amongst recent year.
[Edit – December 13th]
The PIOMAS Arctic sea ice volume data for November 2021 has been released:
Average Arctic sea ice volume in November 2021 was 7,830 km3. This value is the 7th lowest on record for November, about 1600 km3 above the record set in 2016. Monthly ice volume was 61% below the maximum in 1979 and 45% below the mean value for 1979-2020. Average November 2021 ice volume was about one sigma above the 1979-2020 trend line. October saw relative rapid ice growth for recent years bringing the mean ice thickness (above 15 cm thickness) above the recent low values:
The ice thickness anomaly map for November 2021 relative to 2011-2020 continues to show anomalies divided into positive and a negative halves with areas of positive anomalies increasing since the two prior months. Negative anomalies stretching from North of Greenland and along the Canadian Archipelago across the Eastern Arctic into the Barents Sea. Areas North of Greenland again feature very low ice thickness as in prior years (see our recent paper). Positive anomalies are notable in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas due to advection of thicker older ice into the areas during the previous winter (See recent paper on this). The Alaskan summer has also been relatively cold contributing to unusually thick ice in this area:
CryoSat-2 ice thickness shows a similar picture sea ice thickness anomalies but with the maxima slightly displaced which maybe due to temporal sampling of the composite:
The JAXA web site is still down, so here’s another set of high resolution AMSR2 graphs:
[Edit – December 14th]
NOAA have just released their 2021 Arctic Report Card. Here’s the introductory video:
“Everybody knows [the Arctic] is a canary when it comes to climate change,” says Peter Jacobs, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who presented the work on 13 December at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. “Yet we’re misreporting it by a factor of two. Which is just bananas.”
Jacob’s co-authors include researchers who oversee several influential global temperature records, and they noted the faster Arctic warming as they prepared to release the global temperature average for 2020. NASA’s internal peer reviewer challenged the higher figure, suggesting the scientific literature didn’t support it. But the researchers have found the four times ratio holds in record sets from both NASA (3.9) and the United Kingdom’s Met Office (4.1), and they hope to soon include the Berkeley Earth record. (Their work also has company: In July, a team at the Finnish Meteorological Institute posted a preprint also arguing for the four times figure.)
The researchers found Arctic warming has been underestimated for a couple of reasons. One is climate scientists’ tendency to chop each hemisphere into thirds and label the area above 60°N as the “Arctic”—an area that would include, for example, most of Scandinavia. But the true definition of the Arctic is defined by Earth’s tilt. And, as has been known for centuries, the Arctic Circle is a line starting at 66.6°N. When researchers lump in the lower latitudes, “you’re diluting the amount of Arctic warming you’re getting,” Jacobs says. “That is not a trivial thing.”
The other difference is the choice of time periods over which the warming rate is calculated. Jacobs and his colleagues focused on the past 30 years, when a linear warming trend emerged for the Arctic. Analyses that look at longer term trends see less divergence between the Arctic and the world.
[Edit – December 23rd]
Here is the latest CryoSat-2/SMOS volume graph, now including some reanalysed data which seems to have come in slightly higher than the earlier “near real time” numbers:
Plus the AWI thickness map:
Further discussion of the divergence between volume and extent continues in the new New Year 2022 thread:
An article by Andy West on the topic of “Public ClimateBall” has now been posted on both Judith Curry’s Climate Etc. and WUWT. Here’s a brief extract from the introduction:
Climate blogger ‘Willard’ has put significant efforts into a large taxonomy of skeptical challenges (the ‘Bingo Matrix’ or ‘Contrarian Matrix’) and brief rejoinders to same. Along with the very useful characterization of especially the rhetoric aspects of the conflicted skeptic / mainstream climate-change blogosphere, as an engagement not based primarily upon rational argument leading where it will, but one with different rules, a kind of ritual or game: ClimateBall™. Everything herein is my own view of ClimateBall, and what it points to.
Which got me thinking about my own experience of playing “the great game”. Checking Twitter for my assorted “plays” over the years, most of them seem to be missing! Hence my Agatha Christie inspired title for today.
They’re not actually “missing” of course, if you know the URLs in advance. However for some strange reason many of them do seem to be missing from Twitter search results. Since Christmas is already less than a month away let’s have a little festive fun shall we? How many “tweets” of mine tagged with the #ClimateBall hashtag can you find that were posted between January 1st 2021 and November 28th 2021? To give you the vaguest of red herring style clues, here’s the most recent one at the time of writing:
Answers on a virtual postcard please, in the space provided for that purpose below. Please also include a brief description of your search methodology.
You may or may not be a fan of the likes of Brian Eno, Neil Gaiman and Kim Stanley Robinson but I thought I should point out to the assembled throng that attending this event live, albeit remotely, was the highlight of my recent COP26 experience:
https://youtu.be/PAtq2_nsjKo?t=341
Just as we need climate scientists to present the facts, we need the arts and culture to help us think and feel and talk about the climate crisis at all levels. The conversation needs scientists – but it urgently needs artists too. Science discovers, Art digests. Art and culture tell us stories about other possible worlds, lives, and ways of being. A novel or a film invites us to experience an imaginary world and see how we feel about it. Culture is where our minds go to experiment, to try out new feelings.
As Brian Eno put it whilst I was live Tweeting the 5×15 event:
It seems that Neil Gaiman was in Scotland for the recording of the second series of Good Omens. What is more not only did he retweet my Eno quote above but also my introduction to the event as well. What a nice man!
As indeed is Kim Stanley Robinson, although very sensibly he has better things to do than spend time on Twitter. Amongst a variety of other things “Stan” read an extract from his latest book, The Ministry for the Future:
We are a herd, made of individuals. We move in lines, one after another.
The land we walk over is mostly water. When we walk on water we grow frightened and hurry to return to land. Some of us lead astray the stupid, others urge fools to rash adventures.
If we follow the wrong leader we die. If we panic we die. If we stay calm we are killed. You could eat us but we are of more use to you in other ways, so you rarely do.
By our passing we render the land in ways you need more than ever before. We are caribou, we are reindeer, we are antelope, we are elephants, we are all the great herd animals of Earth, among whom you should count yourselves.
It’s not November until tomorrow, but Andy Lee Robinson has just published the 2021 edition of his long running “Arctic ice cube” video series, based on the PIOMAS volume data. Here it is for your edification:
Earth’s energy imbalance is of course a critical factor driving “global warming”. According to NASA back in June:
Researchers have found that Earth’s energy imbalance approximately doubled during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2019.
Earth’s climate is determined by a delicate balance between how much of the Sun’s radiative energy is absorbed in the atmosphere and at the surface and how much thermal infrared radiation Earth emits to space. A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up.
Scientists at NASA and NOAA compared data from two independent measurements. NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) suite of satellite sensors measure how much energy enters and leaves Earth’s system. In addition, data from a global array of ocean floats, called Argo, enable an accurate estimate of the rate at which the world’s oceans are heating up. Since approximately 90 percent of the excess energy from an energy imbalance ends up in the ocean, the overall trends of incoming and outgoing radiation should broadly agree with changes in ocean heat content.
“The two very independent ways of looking at changes in Earth’s energy imbalance are in really, really good agreement, and they’re both showing this very large trend, which gives us a lot of confidence that what we’re seeing is a real phenomenon and not just an instrumental artifact, ” said Norman Loeb, lead author for the study and principal investigator for CERES at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “The trends we found were quite alarming in a sense.”
As our regular reader(s) will no doubt already be aware, Willis Eschenbach has been singularly unhelpful when it comes to assisting 3rd parties to reproduce the results contained in his 2014 letter to the editor of PNAS on the topic of “Arctic albedo”:
Whilst we wait (in vain?) for Willis to explain himself, here is a preliminary look at some example CERES net top of the atmosphere energy flux maps for the Arctic:
June 2021 is the latest month currently available in NASA’s CERES data, and please feel to play the game of “spot the difference” in the space provided for that purpose below. Meanwhile we await the data for July and August 2021 with barely bated breath.
[Edit – November 3rd]
The CERES data for July 2021 has now been released, so first of all let’s take a look at the July net TOA flux for some selected years:
Next let’s compare this year’s peak insolation months with last year’s:
Does anything stand out yet?
[Edit – January 1st]
Here are maps of the CERES net TOA flux for August 2021 and our usual selection of other years:
It is obvious that by August the entire Arctic is radiating energy back into space. Now let’s compare August 2021 with 2020:
Whilst we’re at it let’s also take a look at how September compares to last year:
It is also obvious that the central Arctic has been radiating less energy back into space during September this year than it was in 2020.
A recent paper by Kent Moore et al. has caused something of a stir in the mainstream media recently, as well as in cryospheric circles and amongst the cryodenialista:
The area to the north of Ellesmere Island and Greenland contains the Arctic’s thickest ice and it is predicted to be the last to lose its perennial ice, thus providing an important refuge for ice-dependent species. There is however evidence that this Last Ice Area is, like the entire Arctic, undergoing rapid changes that may reduce its suitability as a refuge. During May 2020, a polynya developed to the north of Ellesmere Island in a region where there are no reports of a previous development. We use a variety of remotely sensed data as well as an atmospheric reanalysis to document the evolution and the dynamics responsible for the polynya. In particular, we argue that anomalously strong divergent winds associated with an intense and long-lived Arctic anti-cyclone contributed to the development of the polynya as well as similar previously unreported events in May 1988 and 2004.
Curiously the paper neglects to mention a polynya in the same region that we reported on, albeit in passing, in August 2018. Here’s an updated video of that event, with the addition at the start of a yellow arrow to highlight the part of the Arctic’s “Last Ice Area” investigated by Moore et al. and a pale blue arrow to highlight Kap Morris Jesup, the most northerly point in Greenland:
Next here’s another animation, covering the time period discussed in the paper and continuing throughout the summer of 2020:
Comparing the two animations it is obvious that the August 2018 polynya is much larger than the one in May 2020, confirmed by a quick area computation using NASA WorldView:
The introduction to the paper states that:
Flaw leads, elongated regions of open water that develop along the interface between land fast and pack ice (Barber & Massom, 2007) are common in the region. Indeed Peary’s 1909 sledding expedition to the North Pole was delayed as a result of a large flaw lead that developed north of Ellesmere Island (Peary, 1910). However, the development of a polynya in this region has not been reported previously.
To my eye the image above reveals something far too wide to be described as a “flaw lead”, but let’s delve deeper into the paper:
A perspective on the unique nature of the May 2020 event is provided by the monthly mean area of open water in the area of interest during May for the entire period of the ASI data set, 2003–2021 (Figure 2h). Typically the area of open water during May in the region is less than 160 km2. May 2020 is the only year in which the area of open water exceeds 2 standard deviations above the mean.
Perhaps the polynya in question is indeed “unique in the month of May”, in which case it would no doubt have been helpful if the abstract and/or the introduction to the paper had mentioned this subtlety. Then the plethora of erroneous statements in the media like the one recently referenced by Mark Lynas on Twitter might have been avoided?
The polynya is the first one that has been identified in this part of the Last Ice Area, according to a new study detailing the findings in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Since Mark, amongst others, seem to be suffering from the misapprehension that “The Arctic’s ‘Last Ice Area’ is cracking, just in time for COP26” here is what’s been happening in the “Last Ice Area” this year, in the run up to next month’s conference in Glasgow:
Finally, for the moment at least, are MODIS images of the May 20th 2020 polynya:
and the one on May 12th 2004:
Neither Aqua or Terra had been launched in 1988 of course, and Landsat 5 didn’t cover the north of Ellesmere Island. This is the SSM/I & SSMIS visualisation of all three May polynyas from the supplement to Moore’s paper:
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy.
It has been brought to my attention (slightly belatedly) that in the run up to COP26 David Rose is once again pontificating about Arctic sea ice on Twitter. I have been in discussion about the “recently discovered” polynya in the so called “Last Ice Area” north of Ellesmere Island for a few days. Then this morning I discovered via a heads up from “ClimateVariability” that Mark Lynas has been tweeting about it too:
My Arctic alter ego and I were of course “blocked” by David Rose on Twitter many moons ago, and he has been quite quiet about the Arctic of late. However what with one thing and another he has now resumed his controversial commentary on the High North by commenting on Mark’s missive as follows:
We’ve been following the voyage of the Canadian icebreaker CCGS Amundsen as he circumnavigated Banks Island. Now Amundsen is about to set off on the final leg of his 2021 Arctic campaign to conduct the “DarkEdge” study in northern Baffin Bay. According to the Amundsen Science web site:
7 October to 3 November – Cambridge Bay to Quebec City
During the final Leg of the 2021 Expedition, an integrated study (DarkEdge) will take place at the ice edge to study the key processes taking place during the fall-winter transition in northern Baffin Bay. The Sentinel North program will deploy an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and contribute to the Dark Edge campaign. The CCGS Amundsen will sail to Quebec City for the end of the annual expedition on November 3rd.
and according to Christian Katlein from the Alfred Wegener Institute:
The Canadian Ice Service daily charts don’t currently cover the north of Baffin Bay, so here’s the most recent weekly which provides some idea of what Amundsen will be facing over the next few weeks:
As Amundsen prepares to begin his voyage to the DarkEdge, here’s a watery sun setting over Cambridge Bay last night:
[Edit – October 11th]
Here’s the eighth video in Christian’s Sea Ice Stories series and the first from Amundsen itself, whilst moored in Cambridge Bay:
[Edit – October 12th]
Amundsen has finally located a smidgen of sea ice in Baffin Bay, at approximately 76.10 N, 77.10 W. Click to enlarge:
[Edit – October 13th]
Amundsen has managed to find some more significant sea ice, this time located at around 76.30 N, 78.70 W:
Watch this space!
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