Arctic advocacy sourced data

Of course this requires independent verification: Arctic News







This in turn led to this chart:

There is a false equivalency between the Arctic and Antarctic. One is surrounded by land and the other ocean. So I was about find this chart:

• Antarctica - on the left is insulated from Southern Hemisphere, warm oceans by an open band of water. This minimizes heat transfer to Antarctica compared to the Arctic.
• Arctic - on the right has land barriers that would force some fraction of the Norther Hemisphere, warm oceans into the Arctic to melt sea ice.

Sometimes wandering about looking for Arctic news reveals insights.

Bob Wilson

 

I'll make copies when I get home but here is the 'hand waving' version:

• 1-2 show May 21 and 23 weather conditions in Alaska with temperatures in the low 80s to 91F
• 3 shows how the jet stream has become more chaotic with splits and dips going down to the tropics
• 4 show temperature anomalies around the Arctic Ocean
• 5 shows the Gulf Stream with some impressive hot spots headed north

I'm sorry the 'blogspot' is inaccessible as it appears to be a rich source of satellite data converted into easy to understand graphics. You'll see once I get home and can make some snap shots. But the blogspot had a posting about methane observations.

The 6th image is a map of methane measurement sites. It was while looking at this map I noticed the band of open water that surrounds Antarctica. Other projections that did not go pole-to-pole did not trigger my pattern matching scan. So I checked at an EISA site and found someone had made strips showing the amount of land vs ocean at the different latitudes, the last chart.

So now imagine the major oceans have a hemispherical current flow that meets at the equator. So in the northern hemisphere the Atlantic and Pacific have independent, clockwise currents. In the southern hemisphere, there are another set that also run from the equator to the Antarctic:

The northern rotations hit land and that diverts, splits, and peels off the warm current waters into the gaps between the land masses. It has time to release the heat carried from the tropics. But that is not the case in Antarctica.

There is a current called "Antarctic Circumpolar" that prevents the warm waters from reaching Antarctica directly. There is no land mass to divert the stream. So Antarctica is in effect insulated from the tropical heat. This is why Antarctic and Arctic ice patterns are so divergent. But there is one Antarctica penensula that extends towards South America. That is also where we see the 'western Antarctica' ice sheets like to collapse and recent reports of record temperatures (lower 60s!)

This choke point may be leaking tropical heat to Antarctica where we can see the early effects.

Bob Wilson