NCAR Arctic Ice Study - "Single Unusually Clear Summer Can Now Have A Dramatic Impact" - IRDE

[hatrack]

The shrinking expanse of Arctic sea ice is increasingly vulnerable to summer sunshine. Unusually sunny weather contributed to last summer's record loss of Arctic ice, while similar weather conditions in past summers did not appear to have comparable impacts, new research concludes.

"The relative importance of solar radiation in the summer is changing," says Jennifer Kay of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., who is lead author of the study. "The amount of sunshine reaching the Arctic is increasingly influential, as there is less ice to reflect it back into space," she says.

The findings by Kay and colleagues at NCAR and Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins indicate that the presence or absence of clouds now has greater implications for sea ice loss. "A single unusually clear summer can now have a dramatic impact," Kay says. A report on the new results will be published tomorrow 22 April 2008 in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Last summer's loss of Arctic sea ice set a modern-day record, with the ice extent shrinking in September to a minimum of about 4.1 million square kilometers (1.6 million square miles). That was 43 percent less ice coverage than in 1979, when accurate satellite observations began.

EDIT

http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/geowissenschaften/bericht-108369.html

[n2doc]

1. We're headed for an all time clusterf**k

Maybe if Hillary gets to obliterate Iran the resulting nuclear winter will bring back the ice! See, a good side to everything...

[XemaSab]

2. Wierd

I would have guessed that you would get more cloud formation off of open water or a warmer nearby land surface than you would off of ice, making the system a little more self-regulating.

Or maybe we're heading towards a new steady state. :scared:

[phantom power]

3. Dropping your #$!@#$! albedo by 80% will do that.

:eyes: