I know, it’s just the weather. But this year, it appears that arctic ice will return to normal levels. From the story:
Barring an about face by nature or adjustments, it appears that for the first time since 2001, Arctic Sea ice will hit the “normal” line as defined by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for this time of year.
NSIDC puts out an article about once a month called the Sea Ice News. It generally highlights any bad news they can find about the disappearance of Arctic ice. Last month’s news led with this sentence.
In February, Arctic sea ice extent continued to track below the average, and near the levels observed for February 2007.
But March brought good news for the Polar Bears, and bad news for the Catlin Expedition and any others looking for bad news. Instead of ice extent declining through March like it usually does, it continued to increase through the month and is now at the high (so far) for the year. If it keeps this trend unabated, in a day or two it will likely cross the “normal” line.
According to one theory, the earlier lower levels and the current normal levels were not caused by significant warming or cooling, but wind patterns:
WUWT asked NSIDC scientist Dr. Walt Meir about this event to which he responded via email:
It’s a good question about the last time we’ve been above average. It was May 2001. April-May is the period when you’re starting to get into the peak of the melt season for the regions outside of the Arctic Ocean (Bering Sea, Hudson Bay) and the extent tends to have lower variability compared to other parts of the year as that thinner ice tends to go about the same time of year due to the solar heating. Even last year, we came fairly close to the average in early May.
He also mused about a cause:
Basically, it is due primarily to a lot more ice in the Bering Sea, as is evident in the images. The Bering ice is controlled largely by local winds, temperatures are not as important (though of course it still need to be at or at least near freezing to have ice an area for any length of time). We’ve seen a lot of northerly winds this winter in the Bering, particularly the last couple of weeks.
As we’ve been saying on WUWT for quite some time, wind seems to be a more powerful factor in recent sea ice declines than temperature. Recent studies agree. See: Winds are Dominant Cause of Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheet Losses and also NASA Sees Arctic Ocean Circulation Do an About-Face.
This certainly doesn’t disprove that we are warming, or even more, that we have now entered a cooling trend. But I think it does provide another reason to reject hysteria.
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