ORH_wxman

We have a very compact ice pack right now. The area numbers are on the higher side at the moment while extent is running lower. I expect this will produce a decent slowdown in extent loss fairly soon. Here's how other years compare to 2018's area right now: 2017: -187k 2016: -528k 2015: -354k 2014: +358k 2013: +314k 2012: -927k 2011: -490k 2010: -67k 2009: +238k 2008: +11k 2007: -612k You can see the in the post-2007 context, the only years noticeably ahead of 2018's area are the lower melt years of 2009, 2013, and 2014. Extent is already low though, so it is likely we will finish at least in the bottom 6 or 7 in extent...it remains to be seen if we can crack the top 5 at the end. I think it will be hard to go lower than 2012, 2016, 2015, 2011, and 2007....but it's possible if we keep the ice pack really compact like we did in 2015.

The winter of 2007-2008 was a big deal too...not just the 2007 melt season. At the end of 2007, the arctic still had a lot of MYI leftover, but a huge portion of it got exported in the winter. If it had been recycled back into the Beaufort gyre, then it's possible we would have reverted a little more to years like 2005. Still low, but not wiping out the pacific side almost every year. It would have eventually been wiped out with some of those years like 2011 and 2012, but who knows how the progression would have looked with more MYI...the temp profiles may have been different. Hard to say for sure. The first year ice doesn't get thick enough now in the Chukchi to protect the beaufort gyre from warmer waters. We started to see a recovery in the gyre with the very cold 2013 and 2014 seasons combined with decent winter patterns of lower export, but then 2015 had an epic July dipole that wiped out the MYI over there. I think the only way we'd get back to anything that looks like a pre-2007 year would be to have an anomalously cold winter up there combined with a cold melt season....but that type of sustained cold is nearly impossible to come by in the arctic...we only seem to be able to get it maybe 1-2 months at a time. Of course, a big volcanic eruption may do the trick too...the arctic tends to cool more rapidly than anywhere else from aerosols.

I wouldn't take the DMI volume data too seriously. PIOMAS has a better track record and more data. PIOMAS in mid-July had us neck and neck with 2013/2010/2016...above 2012, 2011, and 2017 and well below 2014. 2016 got destroyed from here on out so I won't be surprised if we are above that year by now since the last PIOMAS update....but I'm pretty sure we won't finish near 2014.

I still think the ice there has weakened quite a bit though...there's still some yellows mixed in there. But that area will def be crucial to how low 2018 goes. There isn't going to be much melt in the solid purple areas of the CAB since that region has seen very little melt ponding so it's going to come down to the "ESS arm". The central CAB was actually getting snow fairly recently....unlike 2015 where it was getting crushed by an epic high pressure all July. This is why I think it will be tough to get into a top 5 extent year.

Wow. A friv post...must mean something exciting is happening in melt season. All joking aside, I still appreciate the friv analysis...he even gets sh*t at neven's forum for not being alarmist enough. But i I agree with friv here...this is pretty impressive in the ESS. It's going to melt down far...more than what we thought possible even a few days ago. This is probably a combo of weak ice growth there and some intense warmth that happened early in July which wiped out the snow cover on the ice. The snow cover on the ice is an underrated aspect...esp in FYI. We may challenge a top 5 here...I think top 3 is still out of reach but a top 5 is possible. Esp in area. I think a top 3 in extent will be hard. 2015 compacted a lot and we would need to see big compaction again. Esp since the CAA is still pretty icy compared to the low years.

I wouldn't take the thickness map from dmi seriously...that area melts out almost every year. You could probably thicken it with some compression if everything was perfect but I'm quite skeptical it's real in an area that big.

Paltry area losses continue...now we trail only 2009 in the post-2007 years. But we're still really close to 2013/2014. The ensembles are trying to show a change in the pattern finally as we head into August....we'll see if that happens. We've had some years where an august pattern change mattered a lot....2014 was one of them. That year was destined to be the least ice melt since 2006 before a big shift to a dipole pattern for a couple weeks in August really hammered the ESS arm of ice....and it finished just under 2013 instead. Still a lowish melt year in the post-2007 context, but it could have been even less. The ice this year is thinner than 2014, so a pattern change could matter more this season. As usual though, I'd like to see this get solidly inside of 7 days before really buying a big shift. We've seen some of these shifts in recent years get muted or they are just very transient and it flips back to the negative dipole quickly.

NSIDC area has indeed stalled the last couple days...we'll see how long that goes. But we're back to being basically a dead heat with 2013/2014.

I'm not sure if there's any connection to the persistent low pressure up in the arctic the last month or so and the SSW late in the cold season. If the AMO actually does plunge into negative territory on a multi-year scale, then we'd probably see less warm intrusion from the Atlantic. The negative phase of AMO has previously been linked to colder arctic temperatures, but it remains to be seen how much this would actually offset the underlying warming trend. There was some literature not too far back that had shown the recent arctic warming was amplified by 30-50% since the early 1990s due to the AMO shift. But with the loss of a lot of multi-year ice and the underlying warming trend, it's hard to say just how much affect a negative AMO would have.

No, 2009, 2013, and 2014 have fallen behind the melt pace of 2018...we're pretty close to 2017 right now actually. I am expecting though that we will stall pretty good since we've now almost melted out the Kara/Hudson and the pattern in the CAB is pretty good for the ice for the foreseeable future. We're way behind years like 2007 and 2012 or 2016 so there's basically zero chance to have something like a top 3 finish. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me at the moment, but I'll post them as soon as I have a chance. Based on where things stand right now, I'm expecting a result a little lower than a 2013/2014 but higher than last year. We'll see if that changes.

There's a decent amount of really low concentration ice in the Hudson and Kara right now so I expect extent loss numbers to still remain strong over the next week, but the area numbers should stall pretty good with the big reverse dipole. I'd expect then we eventually see an extent stall once Kara/Hudson melt out.

The Greenland stuff is interesting but the MB has a high error bar because they use GRACE data and there's a lot of debate on what the isostatic adjustments should be. There's some big back and forth in the literature right now about these...mostly centered on Antarctica but it does pertain to Greenland too. We know Greenland has been losing mass the past decade-plus but we just aren't quite sure on the magnitude.

I think we will speed up extent loss quickly....because look at Hudson Bay, Kara, and Baffin Bay....they have high extent for this time of the year, but they (esp Kara and Hudson) are very low concentration. So it will all go "poof" pretty soon and you'll see some big extent losses because of that. That said, for the main ice pack in the arctic basin, the weather will remain quite favorable for ice retention, so after Hudson/Baffin/Kara melt out, we will probably see another slowdown.

That means that snow is likely accumulating on the ice pack too...that's going to slow down melt further. The rest of Hudson Bay is finally going and same with Baffin and Kara so the extent loss should be decent over the next week...but I'd expect area loss to slow....we had seen a big jolt in area loss with that brief but intense torch at the end of last week.

We've been speculating on here for some time...but I can't help but think the big change in SSTA pattern in the North Atlantic south of Greenland starting in late spring of 2013 is definitely linked to the different summers we've been seeing since then. Seems like too much of a coincidence...I'm not sure how much is chicken/egg....but we do know that feedback loops will develop with persistent SSTA patterns...so if there's isnt' a very large atmospheric force to overcome the status quo, then we keep seeing a reversion back to the +NAO/+AO type pattern. I thought this year might be a little different because we saw some impressive blocking up there in March and then into spring time we saw more bouts of good blocking. We hadn't seen any sustained blocking in the cold season like we saw in March since winter of '12-'13....so it was definitely a change. But it flipped a switch again once we got near June. But that negative SSTA in the N ATL has been pretty persistent for 5 years now...maybe some brief interludes in 2016 I recall and late last summer. I remember back during the big dipole years of 2010-2012, it was bright red up in that region.

Yeah this is about as massive as a vortex as you'll see in the arctic during the summer. The only variable factor working strongly against the ice over the next 2 weeks is the furnace the ESS sees over the next 2 days before the vortex takes over.

PIOMAS just came out and 2018 volume is currently 6th lowest....ahead of 2010, 2011, 2012, 2016, and 2017....slightly below 2013. These are obviously a bit different rankings than the extent/area numbers since it is also taking thickness into account...esp the multi-year ice and there is less of the thicker MYI these days.

Keep the conspiracy crap out of this thread....this is for arctic sea ice.

That's a bad look for anyone hoping we get a monstrous 2nd half melt pattern.

My prediction for final sea ice area minimum is 3.30 million sq km +/- 200k. Below is a histogram of results taking each year's melt from here on out and subtracting that amount from 2018's area on June 30th....as you can see, the highest melt from June 30th onward was in 2016 (which produces the lowest potential result). If we matched that, we would see an area minimum of 2.91 million sq km. That would be 5th lowest on record. Every other result gives us an area over 3.0 million sq km. I had previously taken the 1979-2010 average because area loss from June 30th onward had seen no trend...but recent years like 2016 and even 2017 (which had large area loss after June 30th) have put the trend line slightly negative...so I've started using the post-2007 area loss average to augment the prediction....hence the 3.30 million sq km prediction. The average of all years would produce a minimum of 3.59 million sq km...instead of just the post-2007 average of 3.30 million sq km. As for extent? Extent is much harder to predict....compaction can play a large role as we saw in 2015 when the area min was 3.1 million sq km but the extent min was down near 4.25 million sq km. The NSIDC September average is probably easier to predict. For the daily min extent on NSIDC, I'll predict a 4.75 million +/- 300k and for a monthly average, I'll predict 4.9 million +/- 300k. Knock about 200k off the daily number for the jaxa daily minimum extent since jaxa changed their algorithm back in 2014.

Keep this On topic. This isn't a politics forum.

Sea ice area is the highest value at the end of June since 2013. I'll have my prediction later for final extent and area once I crunch the numbers more...along with the histogram of possible area outcomes based on historical losses for each year since 1979. But as a prelim post, the chances of an area record low are basically zero and top 3 lowest is close to that. We just didn't get enough early melt ponding.

NSIDC area data looks to be "correcting" back to more normal numbers...we saw an increase of area of 471k after a drop of 750k yesterday...so it's a 2 day net drop of 279k which is 139k per day....much more normal for this time of the year. Still not totally sure if the data is good, but here's where we stand if it is: 2007: -412k 2008: -130k 2009: +388k 2010: -909k 2011: -579k 2012: -1.05 million 2013: +26k 2014: -141k 2015: -226k 2016: -587k 2017: -260k We're basically running neck and neck with 2013 still with two days remaining in the month.

The current SSMI/S satellite is beyond its lifespan so it needs maintenance more often now. There's no conspiracy to hide data. It wouldn't matter anyway...we have AMSR2 up there which is completely unrelated. So even if SSMI/S never came back or had "conspiracy" data, we would still easily track the ice sheet through AMSR2 to the minimum. AMSR2 is better anyway with the exception of June when the inferior SSMI/S sensor gets fooled more easily by melt ponds so it allows us to predict better...once in July and August, we start looking more at AMSR2 (which is tracked by sites like JAXA and U Bremen)

Today's data is def contaminated...it's showing a loss of 750k, lol...but yesterday's was not that weird...we've seen 250k drops before many years (not every year though)...esp when you consider that more than half of that was from the Hudson/Baffin alone which were running pretty high. Today's data is no good though, so the outage is definitely here. We'll just have to see how long it lasts. Hopefully we're back up in 2-3 days. The concentration map got all mucked up in the CAB and CAA, so it's clear they are doing something with it.