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There seems to be a lot more land snow/ice in the 2014 picture. I am assuming that is what the white bits signify …
Isn’t snow land based ice looking to become a glacier? if so there is much more artic ice coverage today than 19 years ago despite President Richard Millhouse Obama’s prevarications to the contrary.
They say:
Am I to assume the white over land is snow? If it is funny I though April was the warmest ever?
Not here in PA it wasn’t, lol
Mark it is thin, rotten first year snow 😉
Don’t forget the thin, rotten first year ice in Lake Superior .
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2641861/Ice-weather-Sunbathers-flock-banks-Lake-Superior-despite-FROZEN.html
That story links to this one
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2643344/Horror-SWAT-team-throw-stun-grenade-toddlers-CRIB-drugs-raid-leaving-coma-severe-burns.html
Any bets the parents are stuck with the baby’s hospital bill and the cops that tossed a grenade into the baby’s crib get off scott-free?
Someone correct me if I am wrong on this, but I think that showing the snow cover over the land is not a function that the older ice maps include. In other words, just because the 1995 maps do not show any snow covered land, that does not mean that there was no snow there — only that in 1995 they only charted the ice.
Yes, you are correct. See my later comment.
It’s a life spiral. And a travesty.
To be fair May is not a good month to make a comparison, better to take it at minima or maxima.
There is a very large polynia off the coast of Siberia at present which is interesting. Those pesky icebreakers 🙂
Andy
To be fair, every month is just as interesting as every other month.
Andy, this is the month you should compare. You never compare the extremes, they are too unstable
From the actual Cryosphere Today website:
“Historic snow cover data not displayed on these images. Sea ice concentrations less than 30% are not displayed in these images. Snow cover data is displayed only for most recent dates.”
Good reading, but if you look at the 1995 image, it shows white on Greenland and some of the islands of the Canadian archipelago, and that’s not sea ice. It would be good to have a fuller account of the change in method.
I did wonder about that.
There appears to be less “snow” on Greenland 1995, but unless you know precisely what the methodology is, you can’t be sure.
Probably better to ignore the snow altogether.
They’ve always shown Greenland and the archipelago as white because those areas are covered year-round by snow, so they just had it colored that way from the beginning. The variable areas are where the comparisons need to be made.
-Scott
I looked at this a few years ago, noticing in 2004-5 they changed the image by adding ‘snow’. I thought they also seemed to change the shoreline, making the basin larger by ~400K sq km as seen as a step function circa 2005 in the arctic sea ice anomaly by CT.: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
I overlaid 1980 ‘land’ shoreline over the 2008 ‘snow’ shoreline to depict the difference. I did a pixel count at the time, haven’t a clue where my notes are, but white, new ice area coincidentally started at the step function mentioned above.
http://i44.tinypic.com/330u63t.jpg
They changed their eye-altitude in 2008 in response to an error I wrote about in The Register. As a result, the area of ice is now smaller in their maps than it used to be.
Meanwhile in Netherlands May 29th coldest ever recorded. (1901)
http://www.telegraaf.nl/teleweer/22680775/__Koudste_29_mei_ooit_gemeten__.html
This maximum temperature incidentally was at night and on May 27, 1954 it was 29.2 degrees.
Yes, there is MUCH more snow and ice on land than 17 years ago! It is definitely colder.
“Historic snow cover data not displayed on these images. Sea ice concentrations less than 30% are not displayed in these images. Snow cover data is displayed only for most recent dates.”
To add to what I said, the earlier image also appears to show some snow on the Canadian west coast, Norway or Finland, and some of the Russian islands.
It’s good to track ice in these discussions because unless the physics of ice changes you get a consistent measurement over the years. It’s not perfect–there could be large weather pattern changes–but you don’t adjust ice. (Although you could fake it.)
Let’s hope we get the some good positive anomalies in the second semester as in 1995,
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
In fact 1995 is considered as the year when the AMO flipped to its positive phase,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1b/Amo_timeseries_1856-present.svg/672px-Amo_timeseries_1856-present.svg.png
and it could flip back into negative phase soon, in approximate synchronicity with the present recovery of the Arctic ice.
What about all the before and after pictures I see of Glaciers??
That has been occurring for 20,000 years
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/42734540