First
off, the areal minimum is presently on the way to surpassing the
areal minimum of 2007. secondly the Areal maximum during the winter
was toward the high part of the range. Thus there is simply a lot
less ice out there. Again this conforms to the expected changes.
Way
more important, we now have a good number for the decadal decline in
the sea ice itself. It is thirteen percent. What we lack is a
determination on how it may be calculated and it is also suggestive
of misleading ideas. Thirteen percent loss since 1970 means a
twenty five percent decadal loss at present which is pretty close to
reality for the past decade. An awful lot of old sea ice is now gone
and what is left is been ground up a lot slower been located
disadvantageously.
The
right combination of winds similar to 2007 could largely clear the
Arctic now.
As
posted in the past, this decline appears due to an increase in warm
waters been injected into the Arctic from the Gulf Stream. This same
phenomena is also inducing a warmer northern Hemisphere. It is
noteworthy that we have a counter trend in the Antarctic. For this
reason I look to current flows for decadal climate drivers and
millennial climate drivers.
Current State of the Sea Ice Cover
State
of the Sea Ice Cover
J. C. Comiso, C. L.
Parkinson, T. Markus, D. J. Cavalieri and R. Gersten
The sea ice cover is
one of the key components of the climate system. It has been a
focus of attention in recent years, largely because of a strong
decrease in the Arctic sea ice cover and modeling results that
indicate that global warming could be amplified in the region by a
factor of about 3 to 5 times on account of ice-albedo feedback. This
results from the high reflectivity (albedo) of the sea ice compared
to ice-free waters. A satellite-based data record starting in late
1978 shows that indeed rapid changes have been occurring in the
Arctic, where the perennial ice cover has been declining at the rate
of about 13% per decade and the ice cover as a whole has been
declining at the lesser rate of about 5% per decade. In the
Antarctic, the trend is opposite to that in the Arctic, with the sea
ice cover increasing at about 1 to 2 % per decade. This is
despite unusual warming in the Antarctic Peninsula region and
declines in the sea ice cover in the Amundsen/Bellingshausen Seas of
about 6% per decade. In the Arctic, a slight recovery in the sea
ice cover has been observed in 2008 and 2009, following a major
decline of the ice in 2007, while in the Antarctic, the sea ice cover
was more extensive than normal in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Shown
below are up-to-date satellite observations of the sea ice covers of
both the Arctic and the Antarctic, along with comparisons with the
historical satellite record of more than 30 years. The plots and
color coded maps are chosen to provide information about the current
state of the sea ice cover and how the most current daily data
available compare with the record lows and record highs for the same
date during the satellite era
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