Meltfactor.org

The following provides detail to a story run by NOAA entitled Greenland Ice Sheet Getting Darker…

Freshly fallen snow under clear skies reflects 84% (albedo= 0.84) of the sunlight falling on it (Konzelmann and Ohmura, 1995). This reflectivity progressively reduces during the sunlit (warm) season as a consequence of ice grain growth, resulting in a self-amplifying albedo decrease, a positive feedback. Another amplifier; the complete melting of the winter snow accumulation on glaciers, sea ice, and the low elevations of ice sheets exposes darker underlying solid ice. The albedo of low-impurity snow-free glacier ice is in the range of 30% to 60% (Cuffey and Paterson, 2010). Where wind-blown-in and microbiological impurities accumulate near the glacier ice surface (Bøggild et al. 2010), the ice sheet albedo may be extremely low (20%) (Cuffey and Paterson, 2010). Thus, summer albedo variability exceeds 50% over parts of the ice sheet where a snow layer ablates by mid-summer, exposing an impurity-rich ice surface (Wientjes and Oerlemans, 2010), resulting in absorbed sunlight being the largest source of energy for melting during summer and explaining most of the inter-annual variability in melt totals (van den Broeke et al. 2008, 2011).

The photo below shows how dark the ice sheet surface can become in the lowest ~1000 m elevation in the “ablation area” after the winter snow melts away and leaves behind an impurity-rich surface. This dark area is where the albedo feedback with melting is strongest.

12 August 2005, 8 PM local time, I took this photo from a helicopter flying over the ice sheet surface at ~1500 feet altitude. This is how much darker the Greenland ablation area is than a fresh snow surface that blankets it in wintertime. Along much of the southwestern ice sheet at the lowest 1000 m in elevation, impurities concentrate near the surface and produce this dark surface. Not all of the ice sheet is this dark, only the lower ~1/3 of the elevation profile of the ice sheet is. However, as melting increases on the ice sheet, so does the area exposed that is this dark.

Satellite observations from the NASA Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)  indicate a significant Greenland ice sheet albedo decline (-5.6±0.7%) in the June-August period over the 12 melt seasons spanning 2000-2011. According to linear regression, the ablation area albedo declined from 71.5% in 2000 to 63.2% in 2011 (time correlation = -0.805, 1-p=0.999). The change (-8.3%) is more than two times the absolute albedo RMS error (3.1%). Over the accumulation area, the highly linear (time correlation = -0.927, 1-p>0.999) decline from 81.7% to 76.6% over the same period also exceeds the absolute albedo RMS error.

Greenland ice sheet average reflectivity or albedo (multiply by 100 to get % units) for 12 summer (June-August) periods.

Because of extreme 2010 melt and little snow accumulation during the melt season (Tedesco at al., 2011) and afterward, the ice sheet albedo remained more than two standard deviations below the 2000-2011 average in October. Like year 2010, 2011 albedos are more than 1 standard deviation below the 2000-2011 average.

Year 2011 albedo (multiply by 100 to get % units) over the Greenland ice sheet is the lowest observed in the 12 years since MODIS observations began day 65 year 2000. 11-day running median Greenland ice sheet albedo from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) MOD10A1 data. The dashed line represents the 2000-2011 daily average.

Darkening of the ice sheet in the 12 summers between 2000 and 2011 permitted the ice sheet to absorb an extra 172 quintillion joules of energy, nearly 2 times the annual energy consumption of the United States (about 94 quintillion joules in 2009).

This decline is not only over the lowest elevations, but occurs high on the ice sheet where melting is limited.

The greatest changes in reflectivity (or albedo, multiply by 100 to get % units) are found where a relatively dark surface of impurity rich "glacier ice" emerges once the snow cover melts. It's natural for snow cover to melt away at the lowest elevations of a glacier or ice sheet. However, the period of time over which the ice sheet surface is bare has increased significantly since year 2000 when these observations become available.

A significant albedo decline of 4.6±0.6% in the 2000-2011 period from a year 2000 value of 83.0% is observed for the accumulation area, where warming surface temperatures are enhancing snow grain metamorphosis.

Works Cited

• Bøggild, C.E., Brandt, R.E., Brown, K.J., Warren, S.G. 2010: The ablation zone in northeast Greenland: ice types, albedos and impurities. Journal of Glaciology 56, 101-113.
• Cuffey, K. M., & Paterson, W. (2010). The physics of glaciers Elsevier, ed (Vol. 4, p. 693).
• Konzelmann, T., & Ohmura, A. (1995). Radiative Fluxes And Their Impact On The Energy-Balance Of The Greenland Ice-Sheet. Journal of Glaciology, 41(139), 490-502.
• Tedesco, M., X. Fettweis, M.R. van den Broeke, R.S.W. van de Wal , C.J.P.P. Smeets, W.J. van de Berg, M.C. Serreze and, J. E. Box, The role of albedo and accumulation in the 2010 melting record in Greenland, 2011: Environ. Res. Lett. 6 014005, doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014005.
• van den Broeke, M. R., Smeets, C. J. P. P., & van de Wal, R. S. W. (2011). The seasonal cycle and interannual variability of surface energy balance and melt in the ablation area of the west Greenland ice sheet. Cryosphere, 5(2), 377-390. doi: 10.5194/tc-5-377-2011
• van den Broeke, M. R., Smeets, P., Ettema, J., van der Veen, C., van de Wal, R. and Oerlemans, J.: Partitioning of melt energy and meltwater fluxes in the ablation area of the west Greenland ice sheet. The Cryosphere, 2(2), 179-189, 2008.
• Wientjes, I. G. M., & Oerlemans, J. (2010). An explanation for the dark region in the western melt area of the Greenland ice sheet. Cryosphere, 4(3), 261-268. doi: 10.5194/tc-4-261-2010

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by The Ohio State University Climate Water and Carbon initiative. David Decker and Russell Benson gathered and helped grid the MODIS data.

Co-authors of the paper in progress include:

• Xavier Fettweis, Department of Geography, University of Liège, Belgium
• Julienne C. Stroeve, National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Boulder, CO, USA & Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA
• Marco Tedesco, The City University of New York, New York, NY, USA
• Dorothy K. Hall, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

Follow my climate-cryosphere tweets on Twitter

A recent hot topic has been circulating cyberspace re: a Greenland ice mapping fiasco that I happily was not involved with. Yet, by coincidence of a grant application submitted in 2009 and funded this year, I am able to assist in my role as a geographer to help complete the global land ice inventory and help resolve the issue so such fiascos don’t happen.

0.25 km satellite image of the east Greenland glacierized complex going by the names: Geicke Plateau and Blosseville Coast. The satellite image comes from the NASA MODIS sensor. The image was produced by J. Box, C. Chen, and D. Decker at Byrd Polar Research Center.

NY Times reporter, Felicity Barringer writes a second NY Times article illuminating the challenges of mapping land ice, that links to a page I constructed to provide background on a this new project.

1.25 km satellite image -based classification of the East Greenland glacierized complex. The image is roughly co-registered with above image. The classification is according to a preliminary land surface classification on a coarser 1.25 km grid than the ultimate 0.25 km grid. We are in the process of producing the 0.25 km classifications and to compare these with GLIMS outlines.

A new Byrd Polar Research Center staff person Christine Chen was hired this September to begin her PhD work by advancing ice inventory work beyond the land ice classifications I made beginning in 2007. Christine is now simultaneously improving Greenland and Antarctic Peninsula land ice classifications. We will be sharing these data with the global scientific community in a fully transparent project with an independent validation effort involving colleagues in Switzerland and Boulder, CO.

Since August 2010, The Canadian Ice Service (CIS) has been tracking the largest several fragments of the 4x Manhattan Is. (290 sq. km, 112 sq mi) largest observed single iceberg calving from Greenland. The fragments pose a significant shipping and oil platform hazard. Some other fragments are grounded along Canadian Arctic islands.

A 2/3 Manhattan sized (~50 sq km, ~20 sq mi)  fragment is now ~150 km (~100 mi) off the Labrador coast at a latitude below 54 degrees. This rectangular  fragment, has side lengths of ~8 km x ~6 km (5 mi x 4 mi) and a thickness of ~30 m (~100 ft). Thus, the volume is ~1.5 cubic km  (0.36 cubic miles), or 1.5 trillion liters (400 billion gallons).

Observers aboard the Canadian Coast Guard Ann Harvey identified ~1000 harp seals resting on the ice island, 8 June 2011 . Photo: Jay Barthelotte. Courtesy of Ingrid Peterson Coastal Ocean Science, Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Fisheries and Oceans Canada

The glacier this ice island comes from discharges annually ~1.2 cubic km (Rignot and others, 2001). The year 2010 ice detachment represented several years of ice discharge from this glacier.

According to Johannessen, Babiker, and Miles, “there have been at least four massive (100+ km2) calving events over the past 50 years: (1) 1959–1961 (~153 km2), (2) 1991 (~168 km2), (3) 2001 (~71 km2) and (4) 2010 (~270 km2)”. The available evidence suggests a retreat to a new minimum extent.

Johannessen and others 2011 Fig. 3. "Petermann Glacier calving-front positions (+ symbol) observed between 1953 and 2010, cf. Fig. 2b–d. Positions are indicated relative to an arbitrary reference point along the longitudinal axis of the floating ice tongue. Solid line: Interannual variability of the calving-front position, 1991–2010, derived from satellite images, Dashed line: Variability of the calving front position, 1953–1991, derived from sporadic satellite and aerial observations. Red numbers denote the four largest changes in the record: (1) 1959–1961, (2) August–September 1991, (3) September 2001 and (4) August 2010."

This adds concern to the growing ice mass budget deficit of the Greenland ice sheet. As ice breaks away from the front of glaciers at a faster rate than it is replaced, the glacier flow has less resistance to flow and speed increases follow. Satellite gravity surveys indicate an accelerating mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica. The year 2010 detachment occurred in the warmest year on record for west Greenland. Yet, it is difficult to establish a cause-effect relationship with the de-glaciation of Greenland. Physical mechanisms we are aware of that contribute to abnormal ice shelf detachment include:

1. Box and Ski (2007) write “Theoretical calculations by Weertman (1973), Van der Veen (1998) and Alley and others (2005) lead to the conclusion that a water-filled crevasse has unlimited capacity, acting under gravity, to force water to the bottom surface of a glacier.” This process of hydrofracture is confirmed for the Antarctic Larsen B ice shelf disintegration which was preceded by widespread surface water ponding on the ice shelf surface. When surface air temperatures are above the melting point and are, further, above normal, more extensive hydrofracture is elementary.
2. Satellite remote sensing indicates a reduced season of solid sea ice extent and concentration in front of glaciers around Greenland. As such there is less capping of the water from atmospheric interaction from winds. Wind action on the water surface promotes water circulation that can promote increased heat exchange between the ice shelf and the ocean waters. Especially if relatively warm water is forced to circulate more than it otherwise would, against the sub-marine ice, enhanced melting would be expected. Further, the sea ice may provide mechanical stability (buttressing or glueing) to the glacier front, rift areas, and fractured areas pieces. So, melting can enhance the unglueing effects, promoting fracture propagation.

Yet, other processes such as high tides and strong wind events could also have contributed, and even been the straw that broke the glacier’s back. So, it’s not always obvious to make the link with climate warming even as nearly 100% of glaciers are in a state of retreat.

Works Cited

• Alley, R.B., T.K. Dupont, B.R. Parizek and S. Anandakrishnan. 2005. Access of surface meltwater to beds of subfreezing glaciers: preliminary insights. Ann. Glaciol., 40, 8–14.
• Box, J.E. and K. Ski, Remote sounding of Greenland supraglacial melt lakes: implications to sub-glacial hydraulics, 2007: Journal of Glaciology, 181, 257 – 265, 2007.
• Johannessen, O.M., M. Babiker, and M.W. Miles (2011) Petermann Glacier, North Greenland: massive calving in 2010 and the past half century, The Cryosphere Discuss., 5, 169–181, 2011, www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/5/169/2011/ doi:10.5194/tcd-5-169-2011.
• Rignot, E., S.P. Gogineni, I. Joughin, W. Krabil, (2001) Contribution to the glaciology of northern Greenland from satellite radar interferometry, Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 106, no. D24, Pages 34,007-34,019.
• Van der Veen, C.J. 1998. Fracture mechanics approach to penetration of surface crevasses on glaciers. Cold Reg. Sci. Technol., 27(1), 31–47.
• Velicogna, I. (2009), Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L19503, doi:10.1029/2009GL040222.
• Weertman, J. 1973. Can a water-filled crevasse reach the bottom surface of a glacier? IASH Publ. 95 (Symposium at Cambridge 1969 – Hydrology of Glaciers), 139–145.

I am visiting Greenland’s geologic survey, Asiaq. Asiaq is the name for the goddess of weather and change. Asiaq is gathering important data for assessing Greenland’s climate.

Kobbefjord, near Nuuk, Greenland

Six of us meet early at Asiaq for a van to the harbor to a boat transport to Kobbefjord. By ski we made a 7 km round trip tour to service automated micro-climatological instrumentation.

One of two ‘twin’ climate stations in Kobbefjord. The redundant stations ensure data continuity and the possibility to assess uncertainty in point measurements. In the background are visible snow accumulation and surface radiation budget instrumentation.

Mark Andrew Pernosky gathers data from a climate station.

The Kobefjord installation is part of a long term ecological observations system that includes stream flow discharge, lake level, tundra fen methane capture (and other surface carbon budget sampling), snow cover automatic cameras, and more. The systems perspective is important in trans-disciplinary research.

I’m sitting in the busy Newark airport waiting for commercial air flight to Greenland via a 2 h layover in Copenhagen. I would have preferred a direct flight with the US Air National Guard 1 week ago, but had to postpone to wait at home instead of waiting in Greenland for delayed field operations to begin.

Goals for field work include maintaining meteorological and camera equipment beside key Greenland outlet glaciers.

With some luck, I will return with some very impressive images from the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) time lapse cameras. James Balog, spokesperson and what I say “executive futurist” for EIS has loaned my a very nice lens for my camera with which to hopefully bag some very nice aerial oblique images of major Greenland glaciers, hopefully under the near-dusk ‘magic hour’ light. The images are to be used in a book James is working on that features rarely seen Greenland glacier landscapes.

Flight is boarding. I gotta run.

Wish us luck! We need it!

I below post, for the public record, my anonymous review of a new paper published in Journal of Geophysical Research.

I rank the paper: “Good” because the paper’s methods seem solid. Yet, depth with regard to examining causal factors is missing. Further, the paper’s main point, as it seems, that recent warming is not without precedent, may already be obsolete because 2010 was such an extreme melt year AND that more warming in Greenland is likely simply for Greenland to be in sync with the northern hemisphere. The paper thus, in the very least, requires a revision that includes consideration of 2010 data. Yet, consideration of causal factors of cooling and warming and treatment of the Box et al. (2009) prediction, which for 2008-2010 has been accurate, would give the paper the depth consistent with JGR’s standard.

Major Critique:

As is, the only depth of the paper is the statistical modeling, that is, the regressions to reconstruct melt area and comparison of the recent warming versus past warm episodes. There is theory to explain warming and cooling episodes in Greenland. Yet, the paper does include this important dimension. Therefore, to increase the depth or impact of the work, the paper should elaborate causal factors that explain the ups and downs in the reconstruction.

The paper may already be obsolete without considering the extreme melting in 2010. I would therefore not recommend accepting the paper without a revision that included 2010. the numerous statements throughout the paper, like that in line: 19 “We find that the recent period of high melt extent is similar in magnitude but, thus far, shorter in duration, than a period of high melt lasting from the early 1920s through the early 1960s.”

One thing different about the recent warming versus the 1920s warming is that Greenland climate continues to lag the northern hemisphere pattern… The work should therefore reflect on the prediction made in Box et al. (2009) that: simply to be in sync with the northern hemisphere pattern, Greenland climate must warm (after year 2007) by 1.0 – 1.5 C. In the years after 2007, that is, 2008-2010, this prediction has held true. And that still more warming should happen in Greenland in the coming few years is more likely than not. A major volcanic eruption, of course, see relevant literature, would cool Greenland’s climate for 1-3 years.

The pre-1840 results should be abandoned because is cannot or at least it has not been demonstrated that there sufficient sampling to compare with the subsequent complete series.

Title: A less ambiguous time frame should be included in the title than:  “A Reconstruction of Annual Greenland Ice Melt Extent Going Back to 1784” is needed…Something like: “A Reconstruction of Annual Greenland Ice Melt Extent 1784-2009”. Why? If the paper is published, some years down the line, the title would become ambiguous.

Minor Critique:

line 12 “three decades” instead of “several decades”

line 52: the following statement seems not accurate: “Such a comprehensive, annually resolved reconstruction has not previously been undertaken, and will better place current observations of melt extent in a longer-term historical perspective.” Box et al. (2009) modelle an annually resolved temperature reconstruction for the Greenland ice sheet.

line 103 define “closely match” quantitatively.

line 124 define “quite similar” quantitatively.

line 140: Does this relationship account for sub-monthly melt frequency? “Our Greenland melt reconstruction therefore focuses on the relationship between monthly average temperatures” I suspect a reduced sensitivity to melt intensity for 2 reasons: 1.) summer variability is minimal; 2.) a summer average of e.g. 0 C still includes periods above melting.

line 162: explain “the direct measure of JJA temperature subsumes the summer NAO influence.”

line 166 “winter conditions act to pre-condition summer ice melt through a snow/albedo response” certainly because of thermal erosion of heat content. “snow/albedo response” is vague and does not mention important heat content issue.

line 195: suggest “strong warming trend” instead of “strong positive trend”

line 195: “~1979-2009” instead of “The last ~30 years”

line 211: By the same token as the arguments that the recent warming is not statistically unprecedented, the following statement need be substantiated using probabilities: “several sustained periods can be identified when a greater and/or more prolonged”

line 221-223: a good point: “It is worth noting that the satellite observations of Greenland‘s total ice melt, which begin in the late 1970s, start during a time that is characterized by the lowest sustained extent of melt during the past century (Figure 2).”

line 248: remove “much”, overstatement

http://twitter.com/climate_ice

Year 2010 surface air temperature observations around west and south Greenland are unprecedented in the instrumental record. Year 2010 and year 2003 temperatures dwarf high yearly averages occurring in the 1920s and 1930s.

Warming and Cooling

Fig. 1. 170 years of annually resolved whole Greenland ice sheet averaged surface air temperature from a reconstruction driven by a statistical fusion of long term meteorological station data with calibrated regional climate data assimilation model output (Box et al. 2009). A pink circle denotes the record setting year 2010 value.The thick gray line is a 31 year two-tailed Gaussian-weighted smoothing of the annual values. As the "boxcar" gets within 15 years of the beginning and end of the series, the "tail" that runs into the end of the series is cut off and the weighting shifts accordingly.

Over the full 171 years (1840-2010) of the reconstruction, the ice sheet average surface air temperature increased 1.26 C. The warming rate was 0.74 C/century. The recent 17 year Greenland ice sheet warming rate is 30% smaller in magnitude than a 17 year period in the 1920s. The intervening 63 year period (1932 to 1992) was cooling at -0.19 C/decade. This  cooling can be attributed to a cooling phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) (e.g. Schesinger et al. 1994; Trenberth et al. 2006). Cold episodes in 1983-84 and 1991-92 enhance this cooling trend and are caused primarily by major volcanic eruptions (see Box, 2002) . West Greenland is a focus of sulfate aerosol-induced cooling (see Box et al. 2009). Another contributor to the 1932 to 1992 cooling is global dimming, that is, cooling at the surface induced by increases in atmospheric aerosols. Liepert et al (2002) estimated that there was globally a reduction of about 4% in solar radiation reaching the ground between 1961 and 1990. The Wikipedia Global Dimming article is worth reading. The recent (post-1994) warming, is attributable to: 1.) a growing absence of sulfate cooling because there has not been a major volcanic eruption since 1991; 2) recent warming phase of AMO; 3) an apparent  reversal of the global dimming trend; and 4) ongoing and intensifying anthropogenic global warming (AWG), the elephant in the room, owing to a dominance of enhanced greenhouse effect despite other anthropogenic cooling factors such as aerosols and contrails (IPCC, 2007). The primary factor responsible for the warming trend is very likely to be AWG (IPCC, 2007).

Fig. 2. Three long term Greenland meteorological station records, illustrating the long term time series of yearly-average temperatures. Triangles denote record setting values coinciding in 2010. Also interesting to note is the strong 1983-1984 El Chichon volcanic cooling (see Box 2002).

Refuting Denial

It is scientific to question if year 2010 record setting temperatures are real or due to some spurious aspect of the measurements. Former television meteorologist Anthony Watts, for one, expended quite a lot of effort to discredit apparent record setting 2010 temperatures in Nuuk, Greenland. However, Watts seems in error, as one would not expect the same pattern at other locations and in independent periods of time (Fig. 2), if the Nuuk 2010 temperatures are spurious. Rather, record high temperatures are evident at other Greenland stations in the same months, for example, in May, August, September, November, December 2010. Watts implicates the fact that the Nuuk measurements are near an airport to discredit the anomalous year 2010 values. Heat spewing from airplanes seems a valid concern and incidentally Aasiaat measurements are also from the grounds of an airport. However, the Prince Christian Sound (a.k.a. Prins Christian Sund) data are not obtained from near any airport (J. Cappelen, DMI, personal communication).

Acknowledgement

We are fortunate to have continuous temperature records from Greenland’s capital Nuuk beginning in 1866 in addition to century-plus records from other locations in Greenland (Box 2002; Vinther et al. 2006; Cappelen 2010; Box et al. 2009), providing instrumental climate records rivaling many of the longest records on Earth. I have used these data record and others available from the Danish Meteorological Institute and NASA to reconstruct Greenland ice sheet average surface air temperatures (see Box et al. 2009). I update the Box et al. (2009) reconstruction and make further analysis in this blog entry. This work is in preparation for my 7th consecutive annual Greenland entry for the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s “State of the Climate” report published each June.

Sources

• Box, J.E., 2002: Survey of Greenland instrumental temperature records: 1873-2001, International Journal of Climatology, 22, 1829-1847. PDF
• Box, J.E., L. Yang, D.H. Browmich, L-S. Bai, 2009: Greenland ice sheet surface air temperature variability: 1840-2007, J. Climate, 22(14), 4029-4049, doi:10.1175/2009jcli2816.1. PDF
• Cappelen J., 2010: DMI Monthly Climate Data Collection 1768-2009, Denmark, The Faroe 263 Islands and Greenland Dansk Meterologisk Institut Technical report No. 10-05
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2007), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, edited by S. Solomon et al., Cambridge Univ. Press, New York.
• Liepert, B. G. (2002), Observed reductions of surface solar radiation at sites in the United States and worldwide from 1961 to 1990, Geophys. Res. Lett., 29(10), 1421, doi:10.1029/2002GL014910.
• Schlesinger, M.E. and Navin Ramankutty (1994): An oscillation in the global climate system of period 65-70 years. Nature, 367, Issue 6465, pp. 723-726, DOI: 10.1038/367723a
• Trenberth, K.E. and D.J. Shea (2006): Atlantic hurricanes and natural variability in 2005. Geophysical Research Letters 33, L12704, doi:10.1029/2006GL026894 PDF
• Vinther, B. M., K. K. Andersen, P. D. Jones, K. R. Briffa, and J. Cappelen, 2006: Extending Greenland temperature records into the late eighteenth century. J. Geophys. Res., 111, D11105,
  doi:10.1029/2005JD006810.

The anomalously cold weather is part of a new climate pattern: Arctic Warm – Continents Cold

The emerging explanation in a nutshell: because of less Arctic sea ice, there is more heat exchange between ocean and atmosphere, this is altering planetary-scale circulation patterns in ways that the cold air normally ‘bottled up’ in the Arctic is flushing out to the south. James Overland – NOAA/PMEL Seattle USA has lead most of the explanatory work I have seen. So, while the mid-latitude (especially central north Asia) is cold, the Arctic winter is a shocking up to 20 Celsius (36 Fahrenheit) ABOVE NORMAL temperature. See the daily temperature anomaly map below…

Temperature departures from normal. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01a.fnl.anim.html

The extreme cold, e.g. record low of 34 F on 24 Nov. 2010 in Oakland, CA, is leading to a false conclusion that global warming has been ‘canceled’, when in fact the Arctic is heating faster than ever. This new pattern is ‘what global warming looks like’ and why it’s always been more accurate to think in terms of ‘climate change’ instead of ‘global warming’, even though the latter, is still happening GLOBALLY AVERAGED, not regionally! 2010 has been the warmest year on record.

This same recent climate pattern seen in the above daily temperature anomalies is evident in the winter of Dec 2009 – Feb 2010. see below…

Seasonal temperature departures from normal. Note the pattern of cold continents and warm Arctic. Make plots like this here.

We cling to the hope to visit Petermann glacier this year. By 7 Sept, the only option became an alternative helicopter charter company, Air Greenland. A new charter agreement requires more time than would fit in my additional week in Greenland, time, that is to re-arrange the fuel needed to make this long lap and draw up more paperwork. Key in the delay was: there were insufficient fuel drums of a very certain kind in Qaanaaq and in Thule AFB. Air Greenland has new and more strict guidelines for fuel drums. Another complication: because we aim to re-activate the equipment and not just do a “grab” operation, we can’t just use a volunteer who is already there, a “frozen chosen” that is. We need someone familiar with the equipment and who’s judgment we can rely on, for example, whether or not to fly in marginal conditions and at great expense. We therefore plan for it to be one of us (Jason, Alun, Sam, or Richard) on this flight, some time before mid-October when the days become too short to get the flight in with light to fly by. I (Jason) am now back in the US. Needless to say, it was difficult to turn south without the data. U. Wales collaborator, Alun Hubbard has volunteered to be the man to fly on “Plan-Z”, October 2010. I have prior commitments. If not this year, then, we aim for March, 2011. The March, 2011 trip I can be on. It would probably be Jason and Alun making the March, 2011 mission.