Arctic Ice: How Does It Influence Our Weather?

[jethro]

So where in the globe has had a much larger sea level rise? Tuvalu doesn't count - it's sinking and would have the same problems even if global sea levels fell. And storm waters in New York are utterly irrelevant too, unless you can show that there would have been less water if sea levels were 1mm lower.

Would now be good time to start dusting off me ol' dinghy?

I reckon you'll be ok with just the water wings for now.

[knocker]

I'm not sure where the figure being used came from.

https://sites.google.com/site/marclimategraphs/

Why New york were thinking of a barrier. They definately are now.

North American Atlantic hotspot of accelerated rate sea-level rise

http://www.earthtimes.org/climate/sea-level-rise-hotspot-north-east-america-atlantic-ocean/2057/

[Gray-Wolf]

The 10" that they accrued over the past century might have had a tad to do with it j'?

We are only just past the period where thermal expansion has been overtaken by 'melt' and most of that from Greenland (pre- 2010's mega melt) so I would not like to guess how much the situation has now altered?

When you look at the surface area of the oceans 1mm is an awful lot of water J'.

[stewfox]

No real evidence. I find that incredible as there is loads of it. Just take this year. It's fine dismissing AGW but to ignore empirical evidence makes the discussion rather pointless.

In late July, NASA announced that satellites had detected signs of melting across virtually the entire surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet in mid-July, even at the two-mile-high summit of the ice cap—a first for the satellite record and a historically rare occurrence based on ice core data.

I was talking about sea level rise not the odd 1 or 2 day high melt across Greenland this summer which although unusal was short lived and has happened before.

We all saw books printed in 2003 showing how Florida would look with 100ft or 200ft sea level rises cira 2025 and 2050. We are at present a few mm above 1900 although the actual figure will vary according to your source.

Edited November 2, 2012 by stewfox

[knocker]

I was talking about sea level rise not the odd 1 or 2 day high melt across Greenland this summer which although unusal was short lived and has happened before.

We all saw books printed in 2003 showing how Florida would look with 100ft or 200ft sea level rises cira 2025 and 2050. We are at present a few mm above 1900 although the actual figure will vary according to your source.

You assume too much. I didn't see the books. I'm afraid I haven't got your grasp of the subject. And when you say it's happened before, when?

Standardized melting index (SMI) for the period 1979 - 2012. the years between 1979 and 2011 use the full length season (May through September) where 2012 uses only the available period May through August 8th. Note that 2012 value is much higher than any of the previous years, despite the shorter period.

http://www.greenlandmelting.com/

Edited November 2, 2012 by knocker

[stewfox]

You assume too much. I didn't see the books. I'm afraid I haven't got your grasp of the subject.

NO worries, see 6 metres picture and the comment below

--------------------------------

---You may be wondering why all these scientists are so convinced that Florida will flood. Sea levels are predicted to rise because global warming is currently melting the Arctic sea ice, Antarctic ice shelves, and the Greenland ice sheet. If any one of these melts, it could cause catastrophic problems for Florida and the world. The Arctic sea ice has been steadily declining in recent years

.--------------------------------------

Who is going to tell them the Artic sea ice melt doesnt affect sea levels ??? The rest are largely 'predicted' but going off topic.

[Interitus]

And storm waters in New York are utterly irrelevant too, unless you can show that there would have been less water if sea levels were 1mm lower.

Undoubtedly New York would have faced some flooding from Sandy regardless, but the local long term sea level increase of 2.77mm/year (http://tidesandcurre...The Battery, NY) may have contributed a half or more of the extra surge of 13.88 feet over the previous record height of 11.2 feet in 1821.

[BornFromTheVoid]

Decided to do a little analysis yesterday. Statistics are far from being my forté, so anyone with some experience in statistics feel free to point out mistakes or areas for improvement.

Anywho, I thought I'd take a look at the October 500hPa geopotential heights for the region of the NE US, SE Canada and towards Greenland. So 45-70 lat and 280-325 long for the years 1948-2012, using the NCEP Reanalysis data here

http://www.esrl.noaa.../timeseries1.pl

I choose October, as it's the time when hurricane Sandy hit, and the 500hPa geo heights as they represent the general upper level flow in the area (ridges and troughs) which had an effect on the unusual path Sandy.

To try and detect any pattern in the heights change, I used a 5 year trailing average. Anyway, this is a graph of that...

While the trend is very clear, which is consistent with the sea ice loss idea, there also appeared to be quite a distinct periodicity within the data, which for me immediately signalled a solar relationship.

So that was the next step, and I added in the annual sunspot data I had, which only goes up to 2011, and here that is.

They seemed a little out of sync, so applying a 3 year lag to the solar data...

It seems a good relationship between the mid 50s and the mid 90s, and a correlation between the two from 1958-1994 is 0.54, which is quite impressive for the 37 years. That correlation drops off from 52-94 (0.45), but drops to practically nothing when including the years since 1994, which indicates that something has over-ridden that relationship.

Plotting the 5 year mean sea ice minima (inverted scale) and the 5 year geopotential height charts shows this

That gives a correlation of -0.59, which is very strong, but is most likely down to the trend in both data sets, which in this case is important as the upward trend in the 500hPa geopotential height since the mid 90s matters here, so I don't think de-trending in necessary.

This October had the 4th highest geopotential height level, despite being at a period of very low solar activity, especially when looking at the lagged graph.

So overall, I think the strength of upper level ridging from the north east US towards Greenland was largely influenced by solar activity up to the mid nineties, when it would appear that the sea ice loss began to over-ride the relationship. I think that solar still plays a role but that the terrestrial factors are now playing a bigger role.

Looking at the 3 year lagged solar and geo height chart, we'd really expect the heights to have been quite low this October, but instead it was the 4th highest in the series, which really shows that something has changed.

Nothing definitive can be determined from this of course, but I think it's interesting nonetheless...

[songster]

It's easy to "see" cycles that aren't really there, particularly when averaging across windows. A single year's "spike" will get smeared out over 5 years of the trailing average. That then looks like a half-cycle of length 5 (i.e. a 10-year periodicity). Have you tried (eg) a Fourier analysis on the original data to see whether there really is a periodic signal? You could also try correlating (detrended) residuals with ENSO in case it's simply related to that.

[BornFromTheVoid]

It was only a short bit, I didn't have time to consider other possible drivers like the AMO, PDO etc.

ENSO showed no correlations, tried a couple of different time spans, such as May-Oct and Aug-Oct. Averaging the years did nothing either.

Haven't set up the analysis tool pack yet for fourier, will do soon enough though...

[pottyprof]

So that was the next step, and I added in the annual sunspot data I had, which only goes up to 2011, and here that is.

Thanks for the detail Sam. Some interesting points there. I'm just wondering if you could do a similar thing with the Solar flux rather than spots?

[BornFromTheVoid]

Thanks for the detail Sam. Some interesting points there. I'm just wondering if you could do a similar thing with the Solar flux rather than spots?

If you can find a solar flux data set that goes back few decades then I'll give it a try, but ain't got the time to go looking for one myself at the moment. UV levels would be interesting to try too.

[Gray-Wolf]

If you can find a solar flux data set that goes back few decades then I'll give it a try, but ain't got the time to go looking for one myself at the moment. UV levels would be interesting to try too.

Esp. with our impacts on the ozone ongoing and the possibility of methane in the strat adding to those woes?

Again it would appear that the minimal impacts of solar variation can be greatly impacted by our terrestrial pollution be it sulphates, GHG's or particulates.

Just been helping eldest with a Pinatubo homework and she had a question about sulphates. She was very quick to ask about sulphates from pollution and if the impacts were similar in nature to the sulphates from that event?

What do you say to a 12yr old???

[laserguy]

What do you say to a 12yr old???

The same as I say to my 10yr old - AGW is cobblers and when the 'teachers' start prattling on about it and wasting valuable education time,he's to let me know right away.

[pottyprof]

If you can find a solar flux data set that goes back few decades then I'll give it a try, but ain't got the time to go looking for one myself at the moment. UV levels would be interesting to try too.

This one goes back to 1947. Monthly adjusted figures.

ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SOLAR_RADIO/FLUX/Penticton_Adjusted/monthly/MONTHLY.ADJ

I'll try and find a UV one later.

Edit. It looks like some of the UV data sets use the 10.7 as part of a proxy. Whether it matters or not is anyone's guess I suppose? Most of the real UV data has been collected in shortish lived experiments until about 2000. I'll have another look around after some kip. There must be a usable dataset spanning a few decades somewhere.

Edited November 5, 2012 by pottyprof

[VillagePlank]

Decided to do a little analysis yesterday. Statistics are far from being my forté, so anyone with some experience in statistics feel free to point out mistakes or areas for improvement.

Anywho, I thought I'd take a look at the October 500hPa geopotential heights for the region of the NE US, SE Canada and towards Greenland. So 45-70 lat and 280-325 long for the years 1948-2012, using the NCEP Reanalysis data here

http://www.esrl.noaa.../timeseries1.pl

I choose October, as it's the time when hurricane Sandy hit, and the 500hPa geo heights as they represent the general upper level flow in the area (ridges and troughs) which had an effect on the unusual path Sandy.

<snip>

From my own studies from quite a few years ago, it seems that the solar lag is variable and proportional to how much is already in the system.

Edited November 5, 2012 by Boar Wrinklestorm

[songster]

You do know that it's possible to fit any quasi-periodic signal to any other quasi-periodic signal if you allow for a variable lag, right?

Edited November 5, 2012 by songster

[VillagePlank]

You do know that it's possible to fit <i>any</i> quasi-periodic signal to <i>any other</i> quasi-periodic signal if you allow for a variable lag, right?

No, I didn't. Can you provide links, please?

[BornFromTheVoid]

From my own studies from quite a few years ago, it seems that the solar lag is variable and proportional to how much is already in the system.

Did you have a plausible physical mechanism for that?

[Methuselah]

Did you have a plausible physical mechanism for that?

If you heat a pot of water, by whatever means you can name, the water takes a finite amount of time to respond. IMO, no form of heat transfer can ever be instantaneous??

[VillagePlank]

I suspected that the latency was down to the oceans, but, no, I could never prove it, and I ran out of money (and the will to live) before I could complete it, unfortunately, so as far as I could ever demonstrate is that I could take the sunspot, ENSO, sea ice ,volcanic eruption time series', and convert it into the global temperature series - which is why songster's comment is interesting. The only thing that kept me at it was that I couldn't get a good fit for around the 1940s and subsequently it turned out to be an error in HadCru series which, to me, seemed kind of promising. Of course, my glaring assumption is that sunspots are an analogue to some hitherto unknown physical mechanism (it didn't work nearly quite so well with insolation data) and an ongoing hypothesis in my head is that it's something to do with magnetism, but again, could never show that to be the case.

Here's where I got to,

I even attempted to make predictions with it ...

ie that global temp anomaly (in the absence of any change in sea-ice (whoops!) volcanic activity, and in line with the then ENSO predictions) would be about zero by 2015.

Edited November 5, 2012 by Boar Wrinklestorm

[Gael_Force]

When I saw the graph in figure 4 of this paper I immediately thought of the changes in our weather patterns since 2007 and now reading the post by BW - is there any likelihood of a connection?

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/10/11/1207346109.full.pdf

[Gray-Wolf]

If i was ever try and 'unify' all my cognitions then there would be a large area for electro magnetic influences on all aspects of things.

we know for a fact it can mess with our heads if exposed to it in the correct way and we know that if you force a current to flow that any resistance to the flow will produce heat so both our abilities to think/feel and also the planetary EMF need the addition to all the workings we use to quantify them?

With magnetic field lines amassing at the poles you'd imagine a more pronounced impact from them there? Sadly we are constantly being told that the sun is ever quieter so you'd also imagine that any impact would be lessening by now? (if it is dealing with solar winds driving current flow it would have a near instant impact surely?....you don't wait that long for your bulb to light once you throw the switch do you?)

[loafer]

The exciting thing about your research, BW, is that the change over the next 3 years is dramatic enough for us to have a decent idea whether it works as a forecasting tool. I hope you are right.

[jethro]

If i was ever try and 'unify' all my cognitions then there would be a large area for electro magnetic influences on all aspects of things.

we know for a fact it can mess with our heads if exposed to it in the correct way and we know that if you force a current to flow that any resistance to the flow will produce heat so both our abilities to think/feel and also the planetary EMF need the addition to all the workings we use to quantify them?

With magnetic field lines amassing at the poles you'd imagine a more pronounced impact from them there? Sadly we are constantly being told that the sun is ever quieter so you'd also imagine that any impact would be lessening by now? (if it is dealing with solar winds driving current flow it would have a near instant impact surely?....you don't wait that long for your bulb to light once you throw the switch do you?)

You'd have to take into account the magnetic field of Earth - in recent decades this has been declining faster than at any time in recorded history. Also magnetic North has been going for quite a rapid and changing walk about; it's never a static point, but again in recent decades, it has been moving faster than usual - last seen heading off into Russia.