Alastair McDonald wrote:
"Col" wrote in message
...

"Bernard Burton" wrote in message
...

This afternoon's noaa images of the Iceland area show the drift/pack ice

is

now within 60km if the northwest tip of Iceland (Nord Cap). The East
Greenland ice is probably near its maximum area about now.
The area can be seen from an altitude of 845 km in:
http://www.btinternet.com/~wokingham...2-f-grn-e.html


I have been looking at this:
http://129.13.102.67/wz/pics/brack5.gif
over the past few days and have noticed that the extent of ice is larger
than I can ever recall seeing it over the past few years at least, even
allowing for the fact that we are now at the max ice time of year.

I believe that even in the good old days before global warming it was
very rare for there to be ice all the way from Greenland to Iceland and yet
now we are not too far off that.

Is there anything significant in this I wonder, have things been much
colder than average up there this year?


It may be due to warmth rather than cold. Weather and climate can play
strange tricks. For instance more snow can be the result of warming
because it needs water vapour and cold to form, and water vapour is
the result of warm seas. Here, there could be more ice flowing out of
the Arctic because the ice there is thinner due to global warming.
Thinner ice will break up more easily, and also flow faster in surface
currents.


Although I tried to pour cold water on your suggestion of breaks in the
main area of Arctic ice a few weeks ago, Alastair, I've seen that there
was indeed broken ice running NE from Svalbard. What puzzled me was the
perfect curvature of the breaks, with the inner curve running through
87N 90E and ending at 83N 180. As the roughly parallel bands ended in
the (then) open water to the north of Svalbard, I suspect that there was
icebreaker activity in the area. I've seen evidence of this in
previous years but only during the summer.

I'm also puzzled by some grey areas of ice which are interpreted as low
concentrations. For example, the fast ice to the east of the Lena delta
is consistently grey, but with some whiter strips. This ice has been
immobile for the winter and, given its location, must be several feet
thick. Could it be that the ice is just a bit mucky?

Getting back to the Greenland ice, although there's quite a lot in the
Iceland area, it's nowhere near as extensive off E Greenland as a whole
as in the late sixties. In a normal year, the ice extends along the
whole coast, extending a hundred miles along the SW coast. Now there's
little or no ice south of 65N. In heavy ice years the ice north of 70N
extends SE of Jan Mayen and, north of 72N, can reach 10E.

As to the cause of the situation in the Iceland area, it is a
long-standing belief that the worst ice seasons are caused by persistent
SW winds in the area. Even if we didn't have the evidence of the
evidence of the anomalous high pressure in mid-Atlantic, we could assume
the presence of these winds from the lack of ice south of 65N.

For most of February, the ice in the Barents Sea has been at its lowest
since satellite information has been available. At one time, Novaya
Zemlya was almost completely surrounded by open water. It is only after
the northerlies of the last couple of weeks moving the ice a hundred
miles south that conditions have approached normal in the west of the
area, though there is still little ice in the east.

Labrador and Newfoundland ice conditions seem to me to be below normal
whilst the Davis Strait seems close to a record low.

I don't have charts of normal ice conditions in the Pacific but the ice
in the Sea of Okhotsk looks a lot less than what I remember in the
sixties and early seventies.

Graham