Tag Archives: sea level rise

Unprecedented: Melting Before Our Eyes

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The volume of Arctic sea ice is reducing faster than the area of sea ice, further speeding the arctic death spiral.

WHO:  Seymour W. Laxon, Katharine A. Giles, Andy L. Ridout, Duncan J. Wingham, Rosemary Willatt, Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, London, UK
Robert Cullen, Malcolm Davidson, European Space Agency, Noordwijk, The Netherlands
Ron Kwok, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA.
Axel Schweiger, Jinlun Zhang, Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
Christian Haas, Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering, York University, Toronto, Canada.
Stefan Hendricks, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany
Richard Krishfield, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA
Nathan Kurtz,School of Computer, Math, and Natural Sciences, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Sinead Farrell, Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, Maryland, USA.

WHAT: Measuring the volume of polar ice melt

WHEN: February 2013 (online pre-published version)

WHERE: American Geophysical Union, 2013, doi: 10.1002/grl.50193

TITLE:  CryoSat-2 estimates of Arctic sea ice thickness and volume (subs req.)

Much has been written about the Arctic Death Spiral of sea ice melting each spring and summer, with many researchers attempting to model and predict exactly how fast the sea ice is melting and when we will get the horrifying reality of an ice-free summer Arctic.

But is it just melting at the edges? Or is the thickness, and therefore the volume of sea ice being reduced as well? That’s what these researchers set out to try and find out using satellite data from CryoSat-2 (Science with satellites!).

The researchers used satellite radar altimeter measurements of sea ice thickness, and then compared their results with measured in-situ data as well as other Arctic sea ice models.

A loss of volume in Arctic sea ice is a signifier of changes in the heat exchange between the ice, ocean and atmosphere, and most global climate models predict a decrease in sea ice volume of 3.4% per decade which is larger than the predicted 2.4% per decade of sea ice area.

Sea ice area minimum from September 2012 (image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

Sea ice area minimum from September 2012 (image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

The researchers ran their numbers for ice volume in winter 2010/11 and winter 2011/12, and then used the recorded data sets to check the accuracy of their satellites (calibration for my fellow science nerds).

The most striking thing they found was a much greater loss of ice thickness in the north of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago. Additionally, they found that the first year ice was thinner in autumn, which made it harder to catch up to average thickness during the winter, and made greater melting easier in summer.

Interestingly, they found that there was additional ice growth in winter between 2010-12 (7,500km3) compared to 2003-08 (5,000km3), which makes for an extra 36cm of ice growth in the winter. Unfortunately the increased summer melt is much greater than the extra growth, so it’s not adding to the overall thickness of the sea ice.

For the period of 2010-12 the satellite measured rate of decline in autumn sea ice was 60% greater than the predicted decline using PIOMAS (Panarctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System). Most researchers when seeing results like that might hope that there’s an error, however when measured against the recorded data, the CryoSat-2 data was within 0.1 metres of accuracy. So while astounding, the 60% greater than expected loss of sea ice thickness is pretty spot on.

The researchers think that lower ice thickness at the end of winter in February and March could be contributing to the scarily low September minimums in the arctic death spiral, but the greatest risk here is that the ever increasing melt rate of ice in the arctic could take the climate beyond a tipping point where climate change is both irreversible and uncontrollable in a way we are unable to adapt to.

Visualisation of reduction in arctic sea ice thickness (from Andy Lee Robinson, via ClimateProgress)

Visualisation of reduction in arctic sea ice thickness (from Andy Lee Robinson, via ClimateProgress)

So as usual, my remedy for all of this is: stop burning carbon.

IPCC vs Reality: Who Got it Right?

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How did the projections from the IPCC 3rd and 4th reports match up against recorded temps for the last decade?

WHO: Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany
Grant Foster, Tempo Analytics, Garland, Maine, USA
Anny Cazenave, Laboratoire d’Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, Toulouse, France

WHAT: Comparing the projections from the IPCC 3rd report in 2001 and the IPCC 4th report in 2007 to the observed climate data to 2011

WHEN: November 2012

WHERE: Environmental Research Letters Vol 7, No. 4 (2012)

TITLE: Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011

The IPCC. It is the favourite punching bag of climate deniers and conspiracy theorists alike, who all like to claim that the reports are faulty or flawed or incorrect. So these researchers decided with the 5th Assessment Report due soon to go back to the 3rd and 4th reports, check what was in the projections and see how accurate they were on temperature rise and sea level rise. Kind of like a mid-term report card!

Five years ago, the CO2 concentration and global temperatures were closely following the projections of the IPCC 3rd report, and sea level rise was tracking along the upper limit of the uncertainty range. So where the sea level rise projections were plus or minus several millimetres a decade, the observed data was only on the plus side. How did the projections look with an extra five years of data?

The IPCC projections didn’t attempt to include the effect of solar variability, volcanic eruptions or El Niño in their temperature models because those things are random and therefore pretty impossible to predict in the future. The observed data was adjusted to remove the random variability from solar, volcanic and El Niño effects so that the researchers were comparing apples to apples when trying to assess the accuracy of the IPCC projections. For those playing at home, they used a multivariate correlation analysis (yeah, I love those too!).

The data adjustment removed the cold anomaly from the 1992/3 Mt Pinatubo eruption, and the ‘exceptionally high’ 1998 temperature maximum from the extreme El Niño event.  The observed data showed warming of 0.3oC from 1990 to 2011. The IPCC 3rd report projected 0.2-0.4oC warming to 2011 and the 4th report projected 0.3-0.5oC warming. So for temperature increases, the IPCC was pretty much spot on.

3rd report projections in blue, 4th report projections in green, observed data in red, shaded areas are the uncertainty range. (from paper)

3rd report projections in blue, 4th report projections in green, observed data in red, shaded areas are the uncertainty range. (from paper)

So what about sea level rise? The IPCC got that one wrong, but not in a way that climate deniers can celebrate – they underestimated it by 60%.

Sea level rise: measured data in red, third assessment in blue, fourth assessment in green (from paper)

Sea level rise: measured data in red, third assessment in blue, fourth assessment in green (from paper)

The IPCC best assessment was 2.0mm per year of sea level rise, and the satellite based recorded data is actually 3.2mm per year (±0.5mm error range). The researchers tried to work out if the huge difference between the projection and the recorded data was because of variability over recent decades, and decided it was unlikely because the IPCC similarly underestimated the sea level rise from 1961-2003. It was even more unlikely because the rate of sea level rise over the past 130 years has a ‘highly significant correlation with global temperature’.

This is scientist for almost identical, because those of you that read the IPCC 3rd report will remember that when the IPCC says ‘very likely’ they mean there’s a 90-99% chance it will happen. Talk about understatement.

What did the IPCC miss for sea level rise? Well firstly, it’s worth mentioning that most of the world’s scientific community didn’t expect humanity to ignore them when they warned of climate change, so their predictions were more conservative as they hoped we wouldn’t keep burning carbon at greater and greater rates as we are currently doing.

The key part though is ‘future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow’ which is scientist for big and unexpected changes, like the Arctic Death Spiral we had this summer where they found the Arctic was melting about 80 years ahead of schedule. The Arctic wasn’t supposed to be ice free in the summer from climate change until 2100, but we might get to see it as early as 2020.

What does that mean for future climate change projections? Well, it’s not pretty. So far the IPCC has been either seriously accurate (yay science!) or their worst case scenario underestimated what we’re actually doing to the planet. Which means that while the picture that the IPCC paints doesn’t look very appealing, it seems that reality could be a whole lot worse. My suggestion once again is that we stop burning carbon.

brisbane

Brisbane floods 2011 (photo: Eric Veland, flickr)