8/11 Arctic Ice Update - Melt Line Pushing 83 North Throughout Barents Sea

[hatrack]

Svalbard - simply phenomenal - looks like 50% ice coverage within 30 miles of 83 North and the islands themselves are now 100% ice free for going on a month:



Franz Josef Land - About half the archipelago 100% ice-free, the remainder down to >1/10th and the melt line keeps moving north - now maybe within 20 miles of 83 North:



Chukchi Sea - melt line pushing 73 North, which is pretty advanced for this part of the Polar Ocean, given the weakness of the Black Current compared with the North Atlantic Conveyor (that's NW Alaska to the lower right, NE Siberia to the lower left, btw.)



Beaufort Sea - 100% Ice-free zone expanding northward at good clip:

[Dogmudgeon]

1. Do you have any copies from around 2000?

Most people have no context for this; even those of us who do sometimes can lose perspective until we call up a standard map of the area to better visualize it. But an ice map from five, six years ago would really drive the point home.

And is it just me, or is this year's melt far in excess of last year's? I also sometimes wonder how much Chris Szorc and Caryn Panowicz have been drinking this summer -- or, more to the point (and their health), whether they're in therapy yet.

The various ice services actually have datasets for ice going back several decades. I managed to find Canada's data files for the ice maps, but I don't have the software to generate the maps. The SW might be like Mathematica, some horrendously expensive thing that they have in universities, but that's off-limits to the groundlings. It might be a worthwhile exercise for one of the professional scientists around here to get something working and/or cadge one of their friends in geophysics to.

--p!

[hatrack]

2. Here are two sources right off the bat

To begin with, larger scale pictures and sequences, along with archival data, can be found here at the University of Illinois:

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

And of course NIC - "Archived Products" at the top of the page is where you want to go:

http://www.natice.noaa.gov/

According to what I posted yesterday from Canada.com, we're on the way to the lowest sea-ice extent ever - substantially lower than even last year and 2004, whieh, IIRC, were the prior two record years for ice minima.

Anyway, got to run at the moment - off to do more postings - but I'll check back shortly - and thanks for checking in!