Spring is here – Will Arctic ice remain for my daughter?

It’s really difficult to pin down a forecast these days. I guess that’s just the way spring is. But I do notice the high temperatures are creeping ever higher. It may not actually happen, but the high for Friday is forecast to get to 16C! I’d be ok with that. 🙂

We should stay relatively dry this week.

There looks to be a chance that after Easter we might get a little more cold weather but we will have to wait to see how serious that is.

Arctic melt season begins

The Arctic has reached the top of its annual arc and melting is about to begin in earnest. There is again a lot of chatter about the state of the Arctic and whether or not it is at the brink of melting completely in September. This years freezing season was dominated by talk about what seem to be unusually large cracks in the ice extending right into the heart of the very small remaining sections of old and thick ice north of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA).

Check out the image below it shows an animation of the ice for the past 4 years. It starts January 1 and advances ten days.

What you are looking for is where the blue box starts. Notice that region no longer has a deeper white ice colour. This is an area of traditional strength that shields the thick multi year ice north of the CAA from summer melt. That strength has now disappeared, and the last frame of the animation shows the 2013 box with a huge crack. That is the crack everyone has been watching.

$ice fracture$

Final Cracks

And here is more strange effects from events in the Arctic… The same bordering-on-extreme high pressure area that is causing the ice to fracture and spread so early is making Europe and the Eastern US and Canada shiver.

That is not your typical fair weather area of High pressure, either. Some computer models have been projecting that, sometime during the next couple of days, the Greenland High could come close to setting the mark for the highest atmospheric pressure ever recorded.

The blocking pattern has helped direct cold air into the lower 48 states as well as parts of Europe, while the Arctic has been experiencing dramatically warmer-than-average conditions, particularly along the west coast of Greenland and in northeastern Canada. Blocking patterns are often associated with extreme weather events, from heat waves like the one that occurred last March, to historic cold air outbreaks and blizzards.

The Arctic appears to be on a clear path. We all relate to things in our own way. So this image struck me a few days ago. It is ice volume (thickness and area).

I’ve boxed the region where it really started to change for the worse… This was the last time perhaps that one could have called its state, ‘normal’. This happens to be around 1995… The year I graduated from ADSS.

My daughter will graduate in 2022. Will there even be ice in the Arctic the September after she graduates? What world is she walking into?