Arctic Sea Ice Conditions, Part II: June 4, 2009

by Tenney Naumer, June 4, 2009
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UPDATE: OK, I panicked for nothing. The Cryosphere Today site is not including the land snow and ice coverage like it did last year and many prior years. If someone can point me to a site where these data are available, I would appreciate it. Nevertheless, the Arctic sea ice is set to go with the first good puff of warm air.

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This morning, I had a bit of a shock when I looked at the Cryosphere Today's web page. This year, I have not been looking at it. I had forgotten that although the sea ice display was not up to the level I wanted, I had also been using the year-to-year comparison graphics to observe the land snow and ice coverage in northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia.

First, let's look at a comparison of June 1, 2007, and June 1, 2008. If you click here or on the graphic, it will expand to full screen. For the link, click here.


We can see that even though 2007 was considered to be warmer than 2008, still, in 2008, we can see that the land snow and ice coverage was a bit less.

We know that in the Northern Hemisphere, for the winter of 2008-2009, temperatures were lower than average, especially in the northeastern region of the Canadian archipelago. But, a quick look at the graphic below shows that, even so, the snow and ice coverage in the Arctic was far lower than last year's. People, this means that the albedo is now significantly different, and with regard to both the land and the sea.

Here is the Cryosphere Today graphic for June 2, 2009 (click on the graphic to get the full page view):

If this isn't a scary sight, I don't know what is.
Link to the Cryosphere Today: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

Back in late 2007 and all of 2008, I kept commenting in Andrew Revkin's New York Times blog, Dot Earth, about the incredible change in the patterns of global water vapor circulation. It was possible to actually see that most hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific were not reaching land and instead were being sucked up to the Arctic, thus transferring their heat and energy to the Arctic air and waters. At the time, I found it odd that I seemed to be the only person mentioning this, but nowadays, there are plenty of papers being published that mention a poleward diversion of storm tracks. [To read some of them, click here or here.]

However, when the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) flipped, and cold ocean waters surfaced along the coast of Alaska and west to Siberia, this region of colder sea surface temperatures seemed to cut off the entrance of warmer Pacific waters, forming a type of barrier in front of the Bering Strait. Below is the graphic for sea surface temperature anomalies for October 30, 2008, showing how the PDO in the northern Pacific had cold waters barricading the Bering Strait.


I think we can see this effect in the higher concentration of sea ice inside the Arctic Sea near northern Alaska and eastern Siberia. Of course, that ice is so thin now that it may just be that prevailing winds and currents are causing it to pile up there.

But, look what is going on at the other end of the Arctic Sea between northeastern Greenland, Svalbard, and the Siberian coast. Yikes! No PDO to prevent warm waters from flowing in, and they are flowing in, based on observing the water vapor satellite images (ok, so what I am saying is that the winds that push the water vapor around the planet also strongly influence sea surface temperatures).

Even worse is what is going on with the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) along the southwestern coast of Greenland, especially near the Jakobshavn Glacier. But, that is grist for another post.