Alastair wrote:

Graham,

What you are saying makes more sense to me. The cold pool of surface
water in the North Atlantic seems to be flowing out from Baffin Bay.
My idea is that it is melting Arctic sea ice and/or melting ice bergs
from a fast retreating Greenland ice sheet. Melting ice would explain
why the cold water remains on the surface rather than sinking. It is
fresh water and so does not the higher density of saline sea water.
OTOH why don't we see it coming down from the east of Greenland.

I don't think it has had anything to do with melting ice. I don't altogether
trust the anomalies I'm using but it seems to have mostly developed in situ.
In any case, a large part of the cold anomaly would appear to be over, and
even to the south of the NAD. I suspect a cold Canadian winter/spring is a
more likely candidate with colder than normal winds from that region cooling
the surface waters.

I had a similar disagreement nearly forty years ago when a record number of
icebergs were sighted over the Grand Banks in the spring and summer. The
melting of these was widely announced by other Met Office experts as being
responsible for a huge mid-Atlantic cold pool and hence the UK's cold
summer. This theory was widely published in the media. I had many doubts
about this theory and, first of all, calculated how much cooling the melting
of all the ice-bergs would have caused, making as many allowances as
possible to get the largest figure I could. The result was that the cooling
could have been no more than a tenth of what was observed, even assuming all
the ice had melted and that there had been no turbulent mixing to disperse
the melt-water. What also should have scuppered their theory, if they'd
taken the time to look at the data, was that the bulk of the cold pool was
formed before any melting occurred. Like most urban myths, their explanation
persisted.



I suspect that the features we see in Western Europe at present and
blame on global warming are caused by the melting Arctic sea ice. When
that is completely melted, there will be a new regime much like that
dreamed of by Will.

Again, I'm not too sure what's the result of melting ice and/or GW. The
problem I see is that most of the extra melting occurs within the Arctic and
the melt-water mostly stays there during the summer and I doubt that it adds
anything to cooling the Atlantic. The only thing I am sure of is that Winter
northerlies are much less cold than they used to be because of the small
area of ice off E Greenland in winter.

The other thing I'm pretty sure of is that we'll soon see another record low
amount of ice in the Arctic, probably by 2011. I also think that that will
be followed by another massive drop in ice-cover by 2015, quite probably
with open water from the Russian coastline to the North Pole.

--
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman not newsboy
"I wear the cheese. It does not wear me."