Wednesday October 15, 2008, 6:45 pm
Here are the facts.

Arctic sea ice now 28.7% higher than this date last year - still rallying
15 10 2008

10/14/2008 7,064,219 square kilometers

10/14/2007 5,487,656 square kilometers

A difference of: 1,576,563 square kilometers, now in fairness, 2008 was a leap year, so to avoid that criticism, the value of 6,857,188 square kilometers can be used which is the 10/13/08 value, for a difference of 1,369,532 sq km. Still not too shabby at 24.9 %. The one day gain between 10/13/08 and 10/14/08 of 3.8% is also quite impressive.

You can download the source data in an Excel file at the IARC-JAXA website, which plots satellite derived sea-ice extent:Watch the red line as it progresses. So far we are back to above 2005 levels, and 28.7% (or 24.9% depending on how you want to look at it) ahead of last year at this time. That’s quite a jump, basically a 3x gain, since the minimum of 9% over 2007 set on September 16th. Read about that here.

Go nature!

There is no mention of this on the National Snow and Ice Data Center sea ice news webpage, which has been trumpeting every loss and low for the past two years…not a peep. You’d think this would be big news. Perhaps the embarrassment of not having an ice free north pole in 2008, which was sparked by press comments made by Dr. Mark Serreze there and speculation on their own website, has made them unresponsive in this case.

From May 5th, 2008:

“Taken together, an assessment of the available evidence, detailed below, points to another extreme September sea ice minimum. Could the North Pole be ice free this melt season? Given that this region is currently covered with first-year ice, that seems quite possible. “

See the original story here: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/050508.html

What I like about the IARC-JAXA website is that they simply report the data, they don’t try to interpret it, editorialize it, or make press releases on it. They just present the data. Here is their top-down pole view:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/data/200810/P1AME20081014IC0.png

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/15/arctic-sea-ice-now-287-higher-than-this-date-last-year-still-climbing/

Thursday October 16, 2008, 2:33 am
Thick, Old Arctic Ice Nearly Gone-Larry O'Hanlon, Discovery News
Jan. 18, 2008 -- A new study using satellite measurements of Arctic sea ice have revealed that thinner ice that's only two or three years old now accounts for 58 percent of the ice cover -- up from 35 percent in the mid-1980s.

Meanwhile, ice older than nine years had all but disappeared by 2007.

The extinction of the older, thicker ice is effectively melting away the Arctic Ocean's hedge against complete summer meltdowns, say researchers.

"The thinning is consistent with long-term warming," said ice researcher James Maslanik of the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Maslanik is the lead author of a paper reporting the thinning ice published in the latest issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The key difference in the new study from those done in the past is that the researchers were able, for the first time, to distinguish and measure different thicknesses of perennial ice -- that's ice which survives summer melts to grow thicker for multiple winters.

The result is that the researchers can better calculate the sea ice volume in addition to how much area the sea ice is covering.

Both are critical numbers for deciphering how the Arctic Ocean is responding to global warming.

"In our study, in the maps, there are a couple of places where the ice thickness has increased," said Maslanik, "but it doesn't balance out with the losses."
The thinner ice that's now dominating the Arctic is more vulnerable to ridging -- the crumpling into ridged rafts of ice -- or melting. Either way you get more open water which can absorb summer sunlight and warm up the Arctic even further.

The key to the new sea ice measurements is data from the laser altimeter onboard NASA's Ice, Cloud and Elevation Satellite (ICE-Sat). Using the altimeter data to measure the different heights of ice floating above the water, the researchers could distinguish between older, thicker perennial ice and younger, thinner perennial ice.

They then applied the new information to almost three decades of data from satellite imagery and drifting buoys, which had been used to estimate ice age. The result was a record of differently-aged perennial ice volumes going back to the early 1980s.

"They had a remarkably high correlation of age and ICE-Sat observation," commented ice researcher Ron Lindsay of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Even better, the changes Maslanik's team sees over the decades seem to mesh with models over the same period, Lindsay told Discovery News.

Thursday October 16, 2008, 9:03 am

When it is known that the Arctic warms every 65-80 years, it would only be expected that old ice will go at some time.

The Earth is not static and lamenting the disappearance of old ice would seem to be misplaced concern. After two hundred years of retreat, glaciers are growing again in Alaska.
A perfectly natural occurence , periodic warming, has been pathologized for profit.

Cold Pacific Brings Dramatic Cooling to Northwestern North America

By Craig Medred, Anchorage Daily News

Two hundred years of glacial shrinkage in Alaska, and then came the winter and summer of 2007-2008. Unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by unusually chill temperatures in June, July and August. “In mid-June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound,” said U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia. “On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface of the Taku Glacier in late July. At Bering Glacier, a landslide I am studying, located at about 1,500 feet elevation, did not become snow free until early August.

“In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years.” Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too. “It’s been a long time on most glaciers where they’ve actually had positive mass balance,” Molnia said. That’s the way a scientist says the glaciers got thicker in the middle.

Cold temperatures set several new record lows this weekend, including a low of 22 Saturday in downtown Pendleton, Oregon that broke a 118 year-old record of 24. Record lows started falling Thursday with a new low of 20 for Meacham, four degrees cooler than the previous record from 2006, according to information from the Web site for the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Pendleton.

In northern California, a record cold snap in Mendocino County over the weekend caused little damage to wine grapes but chilled the hearts of farmers who already have suffered huge losses this year. “It’s just one more thing on top of one more thing. You kind of hold your breath,” said Potter Valley wine grape grower Bill Pauli. Temperatures dropped to 31 degrees in the Ukiah Valley on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, the coldest Oct. 12 morning since record keeping began in Ukiah in 1893, said Troy Nicolini, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Eureka. The previous record was 34 degrees in 1916.

Farmers in Redwood Valley and other cooler regions in Mendocino County reported temperatures as low as 27 degrees. An estimated 30 percent to 50 percent of that county’s wine grape crop had yet to be harvested when the frost hit, killing the tops of unprotected vines and effectively freezing the ripening process.
http://www.icecap.us/


Isn't it rather like recycling?

Friday October 17, 2008, 6:07 pm
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/
GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
Global Temperature Trends: 2007 Summation

The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. 2007 tied 1998, which had leapt a remarkable 0.2°C above the prior record with the help of the "El Niño of the century". The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean is in the cool phase of its natural El Niño-La Niña cycle.