bluewave

Warmest melt season resulted in the second lowest minimum sea ice extent and a new record low in the Central Arctic.

It will be fun to see what the convergence of the rapid software improvements and miniaturization look like. Smartphones have taken the lead on computational photography. While DSLR and mirrorless still appeal to many who like the larger sensor size and lens selections. Maybe the smartphone and mirrorless tech will merge in the coming decade or two. The gap is already narrowing.

Excellent points from Rclab and Liberty Bell. I remember the old days of photography when I would do all my own black and white darkroom printing after taking the photos. Switching over to digital allowed me to do more extensive color post processing. Smartphones really opened up the world of photography to many more people. There are some great photographers now who do much of their work on a iPhone or Android. But a dedicated bunch are still working on DSLR and mirrorless cameras. The old saying is the best camera is the one that you have with you.

New lowest extent record for the Central Arctic.

https://www.njherald.com/news/20200909/summer-2020-was-second-hottest-on-record-in-new-jersey New Jersey experienced its second-hottest summer on record, continuing a long-term warming trend in the Garden State and across the planet that has seen sea levels rise and extreme weather become more common. The average temperature statewide soared to 75.3 degrees from June through August, ranking only behind 2010′s record-setting heat, according to a report released Tuesday by Rutgers University. Climate change is being felt increasingly in New Jersey, with the 10 hottest summers having all occurred since 1999, including seven since 2010, said David Robinson, the state climatologist and author of the report. A full list is below. “It’s indicative of what we’re seeing in other seasons in New Jersey, what we’re seeing nationally and what we’re seeing globally,” Robinson said. “It’s just another sign that climate change is here.” This summer’s milestone was not much of a surprise considering that July was the hottest month ever recorded in New Jersey. August 2020 was tied for the sixth-warmest August on record, and June was the 10th-warmest it’s been since record-keeping began in 1895.

50 years is not cherry picking. It represents the time of most rapid global warming as emissions have increased. The actual charts with trend lines are available at the NCDC site. New Jersey is one of the sates that you posted and summers have been warming at 0.3° F decade since 1895. This year was the 2nd warmest summer on record in NJ. Notice how many of the top 10 warmest summers have occurred in recent years. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/statewide/time-series/28/tavg/3/8/1895-2020?trend=true&trend_base=10&begtrendyear=1895&endtrendyear=2020 201006 - 201008 75.7°F 126 202006 - 202008 75.3°F 125 201606 - 201608 74.9°F 124 200506 - 200508 74.8°F 123 201106 - 201108 74.6°F 122 201806 - 201808 74.4°F 121 201906 - 201908 74.4°F 121 199906 - 199908 74.3°F 119 201206 - 201208 74.2°F 118 200206 - 200208 74.0°F 117

It will be interesting to see how much longer this continues before it gets overpowered by warming. But how does agriculture cause increased rainfall and decreased temperatures? The team suspects it has to do with photosynthesis, which leads to more water vapor in the air. When a plant’s pores, called stomata, open to allow carbon dioxide to enter, they simultaneously allow water to escape. This increases the amount of water going into the atmosphere and returning as rainfall. The cycle may continue as that rainwater eventually moves back into the atmosphere and causes more rainfall downwind from the original agricultural area. Rong Fu, a climate scientist at UC Los Angeles, agrees with the team’s assessment. She also thinks that though human influence might be “greater than we realize,” this regional climate change is probably caused by many factors, including increased irrigation in the region. “This squares with a lot of other evidence,” says Peter Huybers, a climate scientist at Harvard University, who calls the new study convincing. But he warns that such benefits may not last if greenhouse gas emissions eventually overpower the mitigating effect of agriculture. Alter agrees, and says it’s unlikely that the large increases in U.S. crop production during the 20th century will continue. Other scientists have voiced concern that agricultural production could soon be reaching its limit in many parts of the world. “Food production is arguably what we’re more concerned about with climate change,” Mueller says. And understanding how agriculture and climate will continue to affect one another is crucial for developing projections for both climate and agricultural yields. “It’s not just greenhouse gasses that we need to be thinking about. While the cooling effect of irrigation mitigates global climate change on the regional scale, climate models suggest that regional warming attributed to the global trend will eventually overcome the magnitude of mitigation offered by irrigated agriculture. Farmers, who are partially buffered for now from more extreme heat, would quickly face increasing stress in that scenario. “Farmers in irrigated regions may experience more abrupt temperature increases that will cause them to have to adapt more quickly than other groups who are already coping with a warming climate,” says Kucharik. “It’s that timeframe in which people have time to adapt that concerns me.” The current study is the first to definitively link irrigation in the Midwest U.S. to an altered regional climate. These results could improve weather and climate forecasts, help farmers plan better, and, the researchers hope, better prepare agricultural areas to deal with a warming climate when the irrigation effect is washed out. “Irrigation is a land use with effects on climate in the Midwest, and we need to account for this in our climate models,” says Nocco.

Updated for 9-10. 9-10....Pt Lookout....6.47.....Massapequa....5.41...Wantagh Mesonet...4.64....Amityville....4.04....Copaigue....4.05

The dust bowl was a localized rather than global event. The heat and drought were amplified by the poor land use practices which lead to the extreme soil erosion. The modern localized summer cooler high temperatures in the corn belt are also a result of farming practices. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/383102 Abstract We provide a new and more complete analysis of the origins of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, one of the most severe environmental crises in North America in the twentieth century. Severe drought and wind erosion hit the Great Plains in 1930 and lasted through 1940. There were similar droughts in the 1950s and 1970s, but no comparable level of wind erosion. We explain why. The prevalence of small farms in the 1930s limited private solutions for controlling the downwind externalities associated with wind erosion. Drifting sand from unprotected fields damaged neighboring farms. Small farmers cultivated more of their land and were less likely to invest in erosion control than larger farmers. Soil conservation districts, established by the government after 1937, helped coordinate erosion control. This “unitized” solution for collective action is similar to that used in other natural resource/environmental settings. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/america-s-corn-belt-making-its-own-weather The Great Plains of the central United States—the Corn Belt—is one of the most fertile regions on Earth, producing more than 10 billion bushels of corn each year. It’s also home to some mysterious weather: Whereas the rest of the world has warmed, the region’s summer temperatures have dropped as much as a full degree Celsius, and rainfall has increased up to 35%, the largest spike anywhere in the world. The culprit, according to a new study, isn’t greenhouse gas emissions or sea surface temperature—it’s the corn itself. https://news.wisc.edu/irrigated-farming-in-wisconsins-central-sands-cools-the-regions-climate/ New research finds that irrigated farms within Wisconsin’s vegetable-growing Central Sands region significantly cool the local climate compared to nearby rain-fed farms or forests. Irrigation dropped maximum temperatures by one to three degrees Fahrenheit on average while increasing minimum temperatures up to four degrees compared to unirrigated farms or forests. In all, irrigated farms experienced a three- to seven-degree smaller range in daily temperatures compared to other land uses. These effects persisted throughout the year.

First time since 2012 that the 5 day NSIDC extent dropped below 4 million sq km. Also the first 5 year period with 3 years below 4.2 million sq km. 9-6-20.......3.928 September 5-day date 3.387 2012-09-17 4.155 2007-09-18 4.165 2016-09-10 4.192 2019-09-18

A recent study was able to determine just how extreme the Bering wintertime sea ice low in 2018 was.

This was the warmest melt season on record. A new paper is out on the continuing Atlantification of the Arctic Ocean. This year the sea ice edge made it to 85°N on the Atlantic side. https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ Atlantification continues As discussed in a recent paper in the Journal of Climate led by colleague Igor Polyakov of the University of Alaska, the process of “Atlantification” of the Arctic Ocean, first noted in the Barents Sea, is continuing, with significant effects on the sea ice cover during the winter season in the Eastern Eurasian Basin. The relatively fresh surface layer of the Arctic Ocean is underlain by warm, salty water that is imported from the northern Atlantic Ocean. The cold fresh surface layer, because of its lower density, largely prevents the warm, salty Atlantic waters from mixing upwards. However, the underlying Atlantic water appears to have moved closer to the surface in recent years, reducing the density contrast with the water above it. Recent observations show this warm water “blob,” usually found at about 150 meters (492 feet) below the surface, has shifted within 80 meters (263 feet) of the surface. This has resulted in an increase in the upward winter ocean heat flow to the underside of the ice from typical values of 3 to 4 watts per square meter in 2007 to 2008 to greater than 10 watts per square meter from 2016 to 2018. Polyakov estimates that this is equivalent to a two-fold reduction in winter ice growth.

Updated for August 2020. 8....2020...EWR...10..LGA...5...BDR...3...ISP....6

I agree that the MYI loss is the big story. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2817/with-thick-ice-gone-arctic-sea-ice-changes-more-slowly/ With thick ice gone, Arctic sea ice changes more slowly The Arctic Ocean's blanket of sea ice has changed since 1958 from predominantly older, thicker ice to mostly younger, thinner ice, according to new research published by NASA scientist Ron Kwok of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. With so little thick, old ice left, the rate of decrease in ice thickness has slowed. New ice grows faster but is more vulnerable to weather and wind, so ice thickness is now more variable, rather than dominated by the effect of global warming. Working from a combination of satellite records and declassified submarine sonar data, NASA scientists have constructed a 60-year record of Arctic sea ice thickness. Right now, Arctic sea ice is the youngest and thinnest its been since we started keeping records. More than 70 percent of Arctic sea ice is now seasonal, which means it grows in the winter and melts in the summer, but doesn't last from year to year. This seasonal ice melts faster and breaks up easier, making it much more susceptible to wind and atmospheric conditions. Working from a combination of satellite records and declassified submarine sonar data, NASA scientists have constructed a 60-year record of Arctic sea ice thickness. Right now, Arctic sea ice is the youngest and thinnest its been since we started keeping records. More than 70 percent of Arctic sea ice is now seasonal, which means it grows in the winter and melts in the summer, but doesn't last from year to year. This seasonal ice melts faster and breaks up easier, making it much more susceptible to wind and atmospheric conditions. Kwok's research, published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, combined decades of declassified U.S. Navy submarine measurements with more recent data from four satellites to create the 60-year record of changes in Arctic sea ice thickness. He found that since 1958, Arctic ice cover has lost about two-thirds of its thickness, as averaged across the Arctic at the end of summer. Older ice has shrunk in area by almost 800,000 square miles (more than 2 million square kilometers). Today, 70 percent of the ice cover consists of ice that forms and melts within a single year, which scientists call seasonal ice. Sea ice of any age is frozen ocean water. However, as sea ice survives through several melt seasons, its characteristics change. Multiyear ice is thicker, stronger and rougher than seasonal ice. It is much less salty than seasonal ice; Arctic explorers used it as drinking water. Satellite sensors observe enough of these differences that scientists can use spaceborne data to distinguish between the two types of ice. Thinner, weaker seasonal ice is innately more vulnerable to weather than thick, multiyear ice. It can be pushed around more easily by wind, as happened in the summer of 2013. During that time, prevailing winds piled up the ice cover against coastlines, which made the ice cover thicker for months. The ice's vulnerability may also be demonstrated by the increased variation in Arctic sea ice thickness and extent from year to year over the last decade. In the past, sea ice rarely melted in the Arctic Ocean. Each year, some multiyear ice flowed out of the ocean into the East Greenland Sea and melted there, and some ice grew thick enough to survive the melt season and become multiyear ice. As air temperatures in the polar regions have warmed in recent decades, however, large amounts of multiyear ice now melt within the Arctic Ocean itself. Far less seasonal ice now thickens enough over the winter to survive the summer. As a result, not only is there less ice overall, but the proportions of multiyear ice to seasonal ice have also changed in favor of the young ice. Seasonal ice now grows to a depth of about six feet (two meters) in winter, and most of it melts in summer. That basic pattern is likely to continue, Kwok said. "The thickness and coverage in the Arctic are now dominated by the growth, melting and deformation of seasonal ice." The increase in seasonal ice also means record-breaking changes in ice cover such as those of the 1990s and 2000s are likely to be less common, Kwok noted. In fact, there has not been a new record sea ice minimum since 2012, despite years of warm weather in the Arctic. "We've lost so much of the thick ice that changes in thickness are going to be slower due to the different behavior of this ice type," Kwok said. Kwok used data from U.S. Navy submarine sonars from 1958 to 2000; satellite altimeters on NASA's ICESat and the European CryoSat-2, which span from 2003 to 2018; and scatterometer measurements from NASA's QuikSCAT and the European ASCAT from 1999 to 2017.

Updated for July 2020. 7....2020...EWR...5...NYC...7...LGA...1.....JFK...4...BDR....1...ISP....4

Updated for the 3.17 in Montclair, NJ with Tropical Storm Fay. 7/11/2020 8:00 AM NJ-ES-31 Montclair 0.7 N 3.17 NA | NA NA | NA NJ Essex

Updated for June 2020 6....2020...EWR..10..LGA...3...BDR...5.....ISP....5

Updated for the 3.99 at Bridgeport on July 3rd.

This record +AO pattern was more like something we saw around 1990. https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ Previous studies, led by University of Washington scientist Ignatius Rigor (e.g., Rigor et al., 2002), suggest that a positive winter phase of the Arctic Oscillation favors low sea ice extent the subsequent September. Wind patterns “flush” old, thick ice out of the Arctic Ocean through the Fram Strait and promote the production of thin ice along the Eurasian coast that is especially prone to melting out in summer. However, in recent years, this relationship has not been as clear (Stroeve et al., 2011). The potential effects this winter’s positive AO on the summer evolution of ice extent and the September 2020 minimum bears watching.

If the rate of warming since 1980 continues, then we are on track for +1.5 C of warming around 2035.

Updated for top 10 warmth in February 2020. 2....2020...EWR...6...NYC...6...LGA....8...JFK...4...BDR...5....iSP...3