Robertscribbler puts his money where his mouth is.
Arctic Sea Ice is Falling off a Cliff and it May Not Survive The Summer
Near
zero sea ice by the end of melt season. The dreaded Blue Ocean Event.
Something that appears more and more likely to happen during 2016
with each passing day.
2
May, 2016
These
are the kinds of climate-wrecking phase changes in the Arctic people
have been worrying about since sea ice extent, area, and volume
achieved gut-wrenching plunges during 2007 and 2012. Plunges that
were far faster than sea ice melt rates predicted by model runs and
by the then scientific consensus on how the Arctic Ocean ice would
respond to human-forced warming this Century. For back during the
first decade of the the 21st Century the mainstream scientific view
was that Arctic sea ice would be about in the range that it is today
by around 2070 or 2080. And that we wouldn’t be contemplating the
possibility of zero or near zero sea ice until the end of this
Century.
But
the amazing ability of an unconscionable fossil fuel emission to
rapidly transform our world for the worst appears now to outweigh
that cautious science. For during 2016, the Arctic is experiencing a
record warm year like never before. Average
temperatures over the region have been hitting unprecedented ranges.
Temperatures that — when one who understands the sensitive nature
of the Arctic looks at them — inspires feelings of dislocation and
disbelief. For our Arctic sea ice coverage has been consistently in
record low ranges throughout Winter, it has been following a
steepening curve of loss since April, and it now appears to have
started to fall off a cliff. Severe losses that are likely to both
impact the Jet Stream and extreme weather formation in the Northern
Hemisphere throughout the Spring and Summer of 2016.
Melting
more than Two Weeks Faster than the Early 2000s
Since
April 27th, according to a record of sea ice extent provided by JAXA,
daily rates of sea ice loss have been in the range of 75,000 square
kilometers for every 24 hour period. That’s 300,000 square
kilometers of sea ice, or an area the size of New Mexico, lost in
just four days. Only during 2015 have we ever seen such similarly
rapid rates of loss for this time of year.
(We’ve
never seen early season sea ice losses like this before. Severe sea
ice losses of this variety can help to generate strong ridges and
extreme heatwaves like the one we now see affecting India and
Southeast Asia. Image source: JAXA.)
However,
this excessive rate of loss is occurring across an Arctic region that
features dramatically less ice (exceeding the 2015 mark for the same
day by about 360,000 square kilometers) than any other comparable
year for the same day. In essence, extent melt is now more than a
week ahead of any other previous year. It is two and half weeks ahead
of melt rates during the 2000s. And this year’s rate of decline is
steepening.
Current
melt rates, if maintained throughout summer, would wipe out
practically all the ice. And, worryingly, this is a distinct
possibility given the severely weakened state of the ice, the large
areas of dark, open water available to absorb the sun’s rays as
Summer progresses, and given the fact that Arctic heat is continuing
in extreme record warm ranges. Furthermore, melt rates tend to
seasonally steepen starting by mid June. So rapidly ramping rates of
loss seen now, at the end of April and through to the start of May,
may see further acceleration as more and more direct sunlight keeps
falling on already large exposed areas of dark, heat-absorbing water.
Huge
Holes in the Beaufort
All
throughout the Arctic Basin, these sunlight-absorbing regions take up
far more area than is typical. The Bering has melted very early.
Baffin Bay is greatly withdrawn from typical years. Hudson Bay is
starting to break up. The Barents and Greenland seas feature far more
open water than is typical. However, there is no region showing more
dramatic early season losses than the Beaufort.
(This
Beaufort sea has never looked so bad off so early in the year. High
amplitude waves in the Jet Stream continue to deliver record warmth,
warm, wet winds, and record sea ice melt to this region of the
Arctic. For reference, bottom of frame in this image is around 600
miles. The wispy threads you see in the image is cloud cover, the
sections of solid white are snow and ice. And the blue you see is the
open waters of the Arctic Ocean. Open water gap size in the widest
sections is now more than 150 miles. Image source: LANCE-MODIS.)
There,
ice continues to rapidly recede away from the Arctic Ocean shores of
the Mackenzie Delta and the Canadian Archipelago — where a large
gap has opened up in the sea ice. Now ranging from 70-150 miles in
width, this area of open water consistently sees surface temperatures
warm enough to melt sea ice (above 28 F or about -2 C).
This
great body of open water the size of a sea in itself has now created
a new early season edge zone for the ice. A place where a kind of
mini-dipole can emerge between the more rapidly warming water
surfaces and the cooler, reflective ice. Such a zone will tend to be
a magnet for storms. And a low pressure system is expected to ride up
an extreme bulge in the Jet Stream over Alaska and Canada and on into
this Arctic zone over the next few days. Storms of this kind tend to
hasten melt and break up of ice in the edge zones by generating
waves, by pulling in warmer airs from the south, or by dropping
liquid precipitation along the melting ice edge. And the fact that
this kind of dynamic is setting up in the Beaufort in early May is
nothing short of extraordinary.
Arctic
Heat Like We’ve Never Seen Before
Further
to the north, high pressure is expected to continue to dominate over
the next seven days. This will generate further compaction of the
already weak ice even as it allows more and more sunlight to fall
over that greatly thinned white veil.
(The
Arctic is now so warm that this graph is now too small to capture the
excession of extreme heat in the region. Freezing degree days are now
more than 1,000 less than during a typical year and the already much
warmer than normal 1980 to 2000 period. Image source:CIRES.)
Temperatures
for the Arctic are expected to range between 2.5 and 3.5 C above
average over the next seven days. Very warm conditions that will
continue to hammer freezing degree day totals that have now exceeded
an unprecedented -1000 since the start of the year in the High Arctic
region above the 80 degree North Latitude Line. In layman’s terms,
the less freezing degree days the Arctic experiences, the closer it
is to melting. And losing 1000 freezing degree days is like removing
the coldest month of Winter entirely from the heat balance equation
in this highest Latitude region of the Northern Hemisphere.
From
just about every indicator, we find that the Arctic sea ice is being
hit by heat like never before. And the disturbing precipitous early
season losses we now see in combination with the excessive, extreme
warmth and melt accelerating weather patterns are likely to continue
to reinforce a trend of record losses. Such low sea ice measures will
also tend to wrench weather patterns around the globe — providing
zones for extreme heatwaves and droughts along the ridge lines and
related warm wind invasions of the Arctic that will tend to develop
all while generating risk of record precipitation events in the
trough zones. To this point, the North American West is again setting
up for just such a zonal heatwave pattern. Extreme heat building up
in India and Southeast Asia also appears to be following a similar
northward advance.
Links:
Hat
tip to DT Lange
Sarc.
Hat tip to Exxon Mobile (For its failure to report scientific
findings on the impacts of climate change, and for its never-ending
political and media campaign aimed at preventing effective climate
change mitigation policy over the past 40+ years)
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