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This guest post comes from Bill in Laurel, Maryland, who has been doing occasional posts highlighting changes in the Arctic.

Okay, now on to this week’s news.  The international study of the Arctic still goes on, despite our economic troubles.  At the North Pole in April 2010, two buoys with weather instruments were launched.  They’re currently drifting south toward an area between Greenland and Svalbard called the Fram Strait; the green and red lines in the map below show their path through 11 June. At 26 June their locations were about a third of a degree or so further south than shown in the map.

NOTE: This is an occasional series of diaries on the state of Northern Hemisphere Arctic sea ice (and other topics as warranted), written in memory of Johnny Rook, who passed away in early 2009. He was the author of the Climaticide Chronicles.

The sun is shining brightly at the North Pole buoys today, Sunday 27 June 2010.  See here.

Pictures from the two NOAA-deployed web cams near the North Pole are shown below.  Temperatures at both at the time these photos were taken were about 34°F. Note that the sunny weather noted in FishoutofWater’s diary earlier this week has given way to low overcast. A bit of melt pond water is evident in the NOAA2 graphic; nothing unusual at this point in the melt season.

NOAA1 Webcam Picture about 8 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time 26 June 2010

NOAA2 Webcam Picture about 8 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time 26 June 2010

Arctic Sea Ice Melt Since May 2010

Here are two graphics of Navy PIPS 2.0 sea ice thickness from global warming skeptic Anthony Watts, proprietor of the WattsUpWithThat weblog showing how since May 2008, the Navy PIPS 2.0 arctic sea ice model has shown that the Arctic Ocean sea ice is thickening. See in particular the area north of Siberia, which is in the upper left part of the Arctic Ocean shown on the second of the two maps.

Navy PIPS 2.0 sea ice thickness, 27 May 2008

Navy PIPS 2.0 sea ice thickness, 27 May 2010

Much of the ice in the Arctic Ocean in the PIPS 2.0 model seems to be about 3 meters thick. This would indicate that such ice would not be likely to melt during this particular melt season.  Note the red colors near shore in Siberia; that ice is supposed to be 4-5 meters thick!

I thought it might be instructive to look at the sea ice concentration map to see what’s happened to all this predicted “thick ice”.  First we’ll start with the joint International Arctic Research Center (IARC) Japan Aeronautic Exploration Agency (JAXA) sea ice concentration graphic from 28 May 2010, a day after the thickness graphic from the Navy sea ice model:

IARC-JAXA Arctic Sea Ice Concentration Map, 28 May 2010

I rotated the figure 90° for ease of comparison. Those areas near Siberia of thick ice show up as bright white, indicating total or nearly total ice coverage. The central Arctic Ocean shows up similarly.  Now let’s look at Friday’s map from the same source:

IARC-JAXA Arctic Sea Ice Concentration, 25 June 2010

There has been a rapid retreat of sea ice from the Bering (between AK and Siberia) and Davis (between Greenland and Canada) Straits, a reduction in sea ice concentrations generally in the Arctic Ocean, and the Hudson Bay ice is just about gone.  We do need to be careful in interpreting sea ice concentrations over the ice, in that melt ponds have in the past sometimes been misinterpreted as breaks in the ice.  However, advances in remote sensing by satellite over the past number of years have fixed this problem by changing the sea ice algorithm to account for surface ice melt.

Yesterday’s picture (26 June 2010) is shown below, with the areas of “thick ice” from the Navy PIPS 2.0 model highlighted. It does appear that the areas outlined have held up a little better than surrounding areas, though I don’t expect this will last. To me, of more concern is the deterioration of the ice in the central Arctic basin, where the ice was supposed to be 2-3 meters thick (the green colors in the 2010 graphic from Navy PIPS).

There unfortunately isn’t a plan view map of the sea ice thickness available from the PIOMAS sea ice model, sea ice volume time series from which is reproduced below (also see diary from FishOutOfWater a couple of days sgo).

So we don’t know where the areal discrepancies from the Navy model exist in PIOMAS.  That would be interesting to find out.  One thing certain, however, is that there clearly isn’t an increase in sea ice volume showing up in PIOMAS from May 2008 to May 2010.

What To Watch for This Summer

Finally, I annotated another arctic sea ice concentration map from “Cryosphere Today”, the excellent University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign web site on all things icy. Shown are the areas and processes to watch for the next few weeks and into summer.

Univ of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 26 June 2010 Arctic Sea Ice Concentration Annotated with Areas to Watch This Summer

I don’t believe we can declare with any certainty that there’ll be a record minimum this summer in arctic sea ice extent. There is still too much uncertainty as to what kind of wind, cloud, and temperature anomalies there’ll be this summer over the arctic. However, we are as of yesterday at the lowest arctic sea ice extent (and I believe volume as well, given how rapidly the ice is retreating and how warm it was in the arctic last winter, which reduces how thick existing ice will get) of all the years from 2002 through the present.  Stay tuned.