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Antarctic sea ice minimum.

22/12/2016

For those people who have not caught up with the fact that both Poles are losing ice very quickly here is a graphic of the Antarctic ice loss. After years of increases we have had a massive loss of ice. The huge reversal in trend has caught everyone out and is extremely worrying especialy as big ice shelves have massive cracke in them and the glaciers behind them are speeding thier way to the sea.
We should get a second acceleration in sea level rise in a few short years and there is no way of reversing the trend.

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Extreme event attribution by NOAA

17/12/2016

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When we have an extreme storm people want to know whether it was caused by climate change. The answer is that all events carry an element of climate change because the atmosphere is warmer and holds more moisture but it can only be expressed as a probability not a black and white yes or no.

Here is a NOAA graphic of the calculations of the result of climate change and what would happen without it.
For the full article click here.

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Unusual Atlantic system.

5/12/2016

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For some months the warm water of the Gulf stream has been pooling off the North East American coast around Maine, possibly held back by the cold water off the South East coast of Greenland. (The remnents of which can be seen in blue).
This warm water (in yellow) seems to have started to stream across the Atlantic towards Europe. The green marker records a temperature anomally 3.5C above normal for the region.

There also appears to be a huge weather system, which covers the whole central Atlantic, drawing cold air from Baffin Bay between Newfoundland and Greenland and mixing it with warm air drawn from the warmer latitudes of the Atlantic.
This extreme mixing of high sea surface temperatures and warm and cold winds in the same system could lead to a massive storm. Its early days yet but worth watching.

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Arctic sea ice consequences.

1/12/2016

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The unusual warmth in the Arctic is causing some big problems, some of which are long term and some are short term. In the short term there is a lack of ice coverage of the ocean which means the dark ocean absorbs even more of the suns heat. The lack of long term thick ice will make for a very fast melt next summer increasing the heat absorbtion. This is better explained by Prof James Renwick in Hot Topic.

The higher temperatures in the Arctic reduce the temperature differential with the lower latittudes and this upsets the jet stream bringing the posibility of extreme weather in the lower, heavily populated, latittudes. Jennifer Francis has a good video on this.

With satellite information now available to us all, ametures like myself can look at current information and see conditions anywhere in the world. These are of course snap shots of information and real interpretation needs years of research and long term records. Nevertheless looking at the ocean surface temperature in the Labtov sea shows that the temperatue is only -0.9C and it needs -1.8C for the salty ocean to freeze. At the begining of December when the region is in almost total darkness it should be much colder and sea ice freezing very quickly. The Arctic is 10% lower in ice volume.
Will this increase the methane clatherate release from the sea bed? Or will it reduce the thermohaline circulation?.

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Bob Bingham Blog page.

Antarctic sea ice minimum.

Extreme event attribution by NOAA

Unusual Atlantic system.

Arctic sea ice consequences.

Bob Bingham

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