Web Extra: Summer 2007 polar sea ice animation

Wed, October 17, 2007 
Posted in Alaska News, Web Extras

The scientific community has been abuzz with news of the dramatic sea ice retreat witnessed during the northern hemisphere summer in 2007. APRN has run several stories related to polar sea ice retreat and the expected climate, wildlife and cultural changes (linked below). But since a picture is worth 1,000 public radio words, here’s visual documentation of the polar sea ice retreat this year, accompanied by an announcement released by a research arm at the University of Washington.

You can read the full UW announcement and get links to other APRN stories after the jump. And be sure to watch the 42-second animation all the way through — it starts off slowly but accelerates toward the end.

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM PSC, APL at UW:
Given the interest in the rapid retreat of arctic sea ice in summer 2007, the Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory at University of Washington announces the online availability of a new movie that shows both model-simulated ice thickness and satellite-observed ice extent from June to September 2007.

The movie is part of the NSF-funded project, Projections of an Ice-Diminished Arctic Ocean: Retrospection and Future Projection, which aims to (1) examine the historical evolution of the arctic ice-ocean system to understand the large-scale changes that have occurred in seaice and the upper Arctic Ocean, and (2) project a diminished arctic sea-ice cover under multiple warming scenarios to understand key linkages among atmospheric forcing, sea-ice processes, and oceanic processes in an ice-diminished Arctic Ocean and the adjacent seas. The development of the model, the Pan-Arctic ice-ocean modeling and assimilation system, has also been supported by NASA.

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Comments

3 Comments to “Web Extra: Summer 2007 polar sea ice animation”

  1. mpb on October 17, 2007 at 9:43 am

    I’m envious you got your map to embed in a player. I had to discombobulate and link a single image to the Washington site. It is fascinating to watch all the changes at once instead of in real time that the satellite version projects (which is scary enough to watch day by day).

    I want someone to overlay the ice retreat projections to the endemic malaria map (centred in YK Delta). The melt is dramatic but the implications for emerging diseases and lifeways changes are irreversible.
    Where is Bethel… 2040

  2. WayUpNorthInAlaska on October 17, 2007 at 11:27 am

    It would be interesting to see this map for other years. I used to live in Barrow, and the summer is slow to reach the Arctic (frequently there still are icebergs near shore in late June). This map could just be showing a natural summer progression.

    That said, some of you may remember the Great Whale Rescue of 1988, when the temperature dropped to minus-38 in October and the ice closed in and trapped a few gray whales. I was in Barrow for the 10th anniversary of the Great Whale Rescue and the temperature was plus-30 in October, a difference of almost 70 degrees for the same dates 10 years apart. There are other signs of warming, such as more storm action and more erosion.

    Being able to compare the same data for different years would give us a better indication of what’s really happening than watching a three-month excerpt that was taken during a time when the seasons naturally get warmer and ice melts.

  3. John Proffitt on October 17, 2007 at 3:33 pm

    WayUpNorthInAlaska — If you’d like to see longer-term polar ice data, there are examples available online. For example, follow the link noted above…

    http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/IDAO/

    …and you can find some other images and more movies/animations. One in particular shows ice coverage running from 1979 through 2003, which is available here…

    http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/IDAO/retro.html

    Beyond that, you can easily do a web search to find more data and examples.

     

    visit reporter Libby Casey's blog - Radio Icebox

     

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