Mother Nature just took the thawing hamburger of the Arctic and broke it into chunks.

[Junkdrawer]

Dinner will be ahead of schedule, and guess who is on the menu?

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color mosaic image on Aug. 6, 2012. The center of the storm at that date was located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.

The storm had an unusually low central pressure area. Paul A. Newman, chief scientist for Atmospheric Sciences at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., estimates that there have only been about eight storms of similar strength during the month of August in the last 34 years of satellite records. “It’s an uncommon event, especially because it’s occurring in the summer. Polar lows are more usual in the winter,” Newman said.

Arctic storms such as this one can have a large impact on the sea ice, causing it to melt rapidly through many mechanisms, such as tearing off large swaths of ice and pushing them to warmer sites, churning the ice and making it slushier, or lifting warmer waters from the depths of the Arctic Ocean.

“It seems that this storm has detached a large chunk of ice from the main sea ice pack. This could lead to a more serious decay of the summertime ice cover than would have been the case otherwise, even perhaps leading to a new Arctic sea ice minimum,” said Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist with NASA Goddard. “Decades ago, a storm of the same magnitude would have been less likely to have as large an impact on the sea ice, because at that time the ice cover was thicker and more expansive.”

...

http://phys.org/news/2012-08-summer-storm-arctic.html

It's really hard to overstate the significance of this event. You see, an ice free arctic could well result in the kind of extreme droughts and heating seen in our breadbasket becoming a permanent weather feature of the planet. The heartland of the USA becomes the new Sahara.

Many arctic scientists are running around with their hair on fire. And that was before this event. See:

...

The Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG) is comprised of renowned concerned scientists, engineers and citizens headquartered in London, England. They are alerting the world to rapid retreating Arctic sea ice and its dire consequences including the staggering projection in 2015 of the total and potentially irreversible collapse of the remaining Arctic sea ice volume. Most of the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free for six months of the year by 2020 if sea ice trends continue. AMEG has a plan to cool the Arctic but more about that later.

Of immediate concern is the plight of farmers across both the United States and Great Britain.

As the Arctic sea ice retreats and the Arctic warms, there is a dramatic effect on the weather, due to its disruption of jet streams. As the jet stream loops farther to the north over western United States about two thirds of the nation is currently enveloped in the worst drought in over a half century. Insurers are already expecting to double last year's record $10B in payouts. But vegetable farmers across drought-stricken America don't take insurance to cover them in case of drought or flooding. So this year has been particularly brutal on them. In addition, the extreme summer heat has dissuaded shoppers from visiting Farmer's Markets across the nation; attendance are off by as much as 50 percent.

A warming Arctic has caused the jet stream to meander south of the U.K. and eastern Europe resulting in abnormally cold and wet weather with flooding in many places. It has punished the farmers, badly. The lack of sunshine and waterlogged soil in Britain has decimated homegrown U.K. vegetables. Peas, usually available year round, are being flown in from Guatemala, carrots from South Africa, beans from Kenya, onions from New Zealand and Argentina and Vivaldi potatoes from Israel. And the price of U.K. fruit is set to soar as the worst summer heavy rains in 30 years prevented honeybees from pollinating apples, pears and plums. Moreover, U.K. honey is now in short supply and its price has substantially increased.

....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-reese-halter/missing-sea-ice-ameg-and-_b_1753994.html

If you want to listen in on scientists puzzling over the significance of all this, go here:

http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/further-detachment.html

[dipsydoodle]

1. Similar happened 4 years ago

doubtless aside from other times.

The impacts of increased open water in the Beaufort Sea were investigated for a summer Arctic storm in 2008 using a coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean model. The storm originated in northern Siberia and slowly moved into the Beaufort Sea along the ice edge in late July. The maximum wind associated with the storm occurred when it was located over the open water near the Beaufort Sea coast, after it had moved over the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. The coupled model system is shown to simulate the storm track, intensity, maximum wind speed and the ice cover well. The model simulations suggest that the lack of ice cover in the Beaufort Sea during the 2008 storm results in increased local surface wind and surface air temperature, compared to enhanced ice cover extents such as occurred in past decades. In addition, due to this increase of open water, the surface latent and sensible heat fluxes into the atmosphere are significantly increased. However, there were no significant impacts on the storm track. The expanded open water and the loss of the sea ice results in increases in the surface air temperature by as much as 8°C. Although the atmospheric warming mostly occurs in the boundary layer, there is increased atmospheric boundary turbulence and downward kinetic energy transport that reach to mid-levels of the troposphere and beyond. These changes result in enhanced surface winds, by as much as ∼4 m/s during the 2008 storm, compared to higher ice concentration conditions (typical of past decades). The dominant sea surface temperature response to the storm occurs over open water; storm-generated mixing in the upper ocean results in sea surface cooling of up to 2°C along the southern Beaufort Sea coastal waters. The Ekman divergence associated with the storm caused a decrease in the fresh water content in the central Beaufort Sea by about 11 cm.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011JD016985.shtml

[Junkdrawer]

2. Add large Siberian forest fires this year:

Hundreds of forest fires rage in Russia

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has ordered that more men, equipment and money be mobilised to battle hundreds of forest fires burning in the country's remote Siberian and Far Eastern districts.

Unseasonably hot weather and limited rains had pushed firefighters to the limit and they needed assistance, Medvedev said on Monday during a meeting with local officials in the city of Tomsk, about 2880 kilometres east of Moscow., the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

The worst fires were in the thinly populated Krasnoyarsk region, where blazes are expanding and cover some 1.4 million square hectares, officials said.

Also hard hit were territories in central Siberia, the Ural mountains near the Mongolian border and on the Pacific coast, a statement from Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations (MES) said.

....

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/hundreds-of-forest-fires-rage-in-russia/story-fn3dxix6-1226444255507

[Junkdrawer]

3. Google News with "Arctic Sea Ice" and this post is third on the list:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&q=arctic+sea+ice&oq=arctic+&gs_l=news-cc.1.4.43j0l10j43i400.5015.8000.0.12859.7.5.0.2.2.0.16.78.5.5.0...0.0...1ac.v-iERFbvnFE

Of course, that's much less about this post's importance and much more about a lack of mainstream news coverage.

For pity sakes guys....

[Junkdrawer]

4. This post over at Arctic Sea Ice Blog is IMPORTANT:

Rob Dekker wrote:
"The upwelling from 200-500 meter all the way to the surface, recorded simultaneously on two different ITPs (and coinciding with a known and significant storm overhead) is, as far as I can see, unprecedented in the ITP record"

Quite so. And I think this can be perhaps understood as a consequence of widely fragmented ice in the arctic.

Wind is plainly driving this ocean mixing. The current state of fragmented ice perhaps ENHANCES the ability of wind to create mixing. Due to Coriolis forces with Ekman pumping involved, any lateral movement of surface water promotes mixing with deeper waters.

When the arctic is largely a solid, immobile ice sheet, wind cannot transfer momentum to the water. In ice-free water, wind has to kick up some waves to be able to transfer momentum to the water.

But when fragmented floes are present, each irregular piece of ice acts as a sail in the wind, so the wind transfers momentum more readily to the surface. And each piece of ice, being 90 percent submerged, quite effectively transfers that momentum to the water. With winds moving in essentially a single direction in any given area, vast volumes of surface water are more readily put into motion. The difference in motion between the surface and deep water inevitably creates mixing.

It's a positive feedback mechanism, not for climate, but for destruction of sea ice. The thinner and more fragmented the ice, the more readily wind creates mixing, which makes the ice thinner and more fragmented. Until, that is, the ice is gone.

http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/arctic-summer-storm-open-thread.html?cid=6a0133f03a1e37970b0177440b63e5970d#comment-6a0133f03a1e37970b0177440b63e5970d

Basically, each of the broken pieces have 10% above water acting as sails with the below water 90% acting as stirring spoons. How much methane will be released by all this stirring is anyone's guess.

[Junkdrawer]

5. Neven's science blog has take a political turn....

Absolutely fascinating read on BOTH science and politics...

http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/08/asi-2012-update-9-stormy-weather.html#comments

BTW: Mainstream media is still AWOL

[PCIntern]

6. "it's just a cycle."

[Junkdrawer]

7. The arctic has gone ice free many time in the past, like oh, ah,...

someone jump in here and help me out....