I love watching the opening of a polynya in satellite data. This is North Water at the NW tip of Greenland expanding over 6 days. You can see the wind is to the SW and it is both pushing the mobile sea ice away from the fast ice of Nares Strait (the strait is named for George Nares), and the growth of new sea ice.
This is the location of North Water. It is a famous polynya and important for the local wildlife and first peoples.
The image below from the 14 May 2018 shows streaks of frazil ice. So what you can see is as well as the wind pushing the sea ice away from the fast ice, new sea ice is being generated.
This is a MODIS image from 2004, but it's too good not to post here.
I'm giving a talk tonight for the South Georgia Association called Giant Icebergs and South Georgia, so I'm wandering through a lot of these images at the moment.
South Georgia is a small island approximately 190 x 30 km within the Antarctic Circumpolar Current in the South Atlantic. It has a continental shelf that extends more than 50 km from the coast with average depth ~200 m, although there are deeper submarine canyons.
The Weddell Sea polynya is an area of open water that sometimes appears in the Weddell Sea over a relatively shallow region called Maud Rise.
In the latest satellite imagery from the DMSP satellite you can see the lower concentration sea ice as the darker blue colour. If you look at the MODIS imagery for the same date you can clear see black which indicates open water in the pack ice.
The sea ice around Antarctic is currently still at an historic low. As usual I think it is good to look at a geographic perspective on the sea ice distribution. This is the sea ice concentration 22 January 2017 compared with the 1989-1993 mean on the 22 January.
RED shades = less sea ice than the 1989-93 mean on 22 January.
BLUE shades = more sea ice than the 1989-93 mean on 22 January.
The Amundsen Sea has very low sea ice
Probably for me the most striking feature is the extremely low sea ice concentration from Pine Island Bay through to the Ronne Ice Shelf - this is the Amundsen Sea. We are not going to see much more retreat of of the sea ice in this sector as it has already melted. I think it will stay open water until the freeze up begins some around the end of February. It would have been a great year to do ship based oceanography along that coast. I wonder if their could be an impact on ice shelf melt here. It is possible but as you can see from this article - it is water away from the surface and a few hundred metres deep that is in contact with the glacial ice in the Amundsen Sea Embayment, Overall this has to be a result of the recent El Nino, and is a follow on from the polynya events we saw hear in the late winter.
The Bellingshausen Sea has very relatively high sea ice
In contrast you can see it would not be a good year to be working in the Bellingshausen Sea.
The Weddell Sea ice is at this stage in the summer is compressed against the Antarctic Peninsula. This means that there is heavier sea ice to the close to the Peninsula, and much lower sea ice than expected in the rest of the Weddell Sea. If you look at the MODIS Terra Image you can pick out a very sharp sea ice edge.
Shackleton would have been in trouble this summer if he was heading to Elephant Island.
Towards the annual Antarctic sea ice extent minimum.
We expect the sea ice to reach a minimum towards the end of February. Clearly there are places where there is no more sea ice to melt. Where sea ice is present, it is all down to winds over the next month. If they change and move the pack towards open water then - just as we have seen in the Arctic, the concentration could fall much lower. If the winds continue as they have then we could expect the extent fall to slowly as the seasonal melt continues.
Overall it is still to be likely a record breaking year in the Antarctic sea ice extent record.
I was asked “what is an easy way to get a satellite image into Google Earth?”. Once I explained how I do it I thought it may be of interest to others. NASA have provided a really excellent web interface to some of their visual data called Worldview.
The Worldview description puts into perspective how good it is.
The Worldview tool from NASA's EOSDIS provides the capability to interactively browse global, full-resolution satellite imagery and then download the underlying data. Most of the 200+ available products are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks "right now"
More than 200 data products within three hours…
Open worldview and this is the screen you are greeted with. It is easy to use. The key regions are the projection / copy / link tool in the yellow square on the right, the date control in the yellow box on the bottom of the browser screen and the layers control in the yellow box on the left.
I do recommend following the tour to find your way around the data sets.
If you click the layers button (red on the left) this is just a part of the choice of real time data you can easily access.
So you select the data you want to see, and then you can zoom in and easily download areas of interest. For some reason I always seem to find my way at this view
This movie I made shows how you can get imagery from Worldview easily into Google Earth.
I hope you find this useful. It's easy to spend a lot of time looking at this data.
The Prince Gustav Channel was covered by an ice shelf which collapsed in the 1990's, and for many years it was possible to sail a ship around James Ross Island.
Recently it has been covered with sea ice frozen to the land - we call this fast ice, and it's usually only a few metres thick of frozen sea water - rather than hundreds of metres thick snow derived ice shelf.
Recent images from the TERRA satellite show that this fast sea ice is finally breaking out.
It'll soon be possible to circumnavigate James Ross Island once more.
This map shows the location of the channel.
Now it has started I wonder how long it will take to finally clear. Or more fun, I wonder if tour ships will be able to get around the island?
My previous posts on Amundsen Sea Polynya and their development showed ~37,600 km2 of open water in front of the ice shelves. It is very early spring in Antarctica at this time of the year and it’s still cold.
That means sea ice can still grow.
This is the Dotson Getz polynya on 9 October 2016. It has a perimeter of ~800 km and an area of ~25,500 km2.
I put together the satellite data from 9-12 October 2016 and it shows extremely rapid sea ice growth.
It is October and it is the Arctic sea ice growing season. The MODIS imagery yesterday shows this beautiful image of sea ice on the North East Greenland coast.
The image below shows roughly where we are looking:
I noticed in a blog post last week that there was a finger of open water extending down the Western Weddell Sea. I've carried on watching this open water in the MODIS satellite data. Whilst it's been opening and closing, there is a lot of open water. It's clearly a major sea ice generating factory at the moment.
The open water is clear in the lower resolution passive microwave sea ice data too.
If you look at some model output there are air temperatures above this open water of between -10° to about -25°C.
What is really good is if you look at the temperature anomaly (i.e. the departure from the average with a 1979-2000 baseline), it is very warm over the Weddell Sea.
I think the reason it is warmer is because the Weddell Sea pack ice is looser this year. So (as you can see in the picture above) there is lots of open water. The atmosphere is being warmed by the ocean as the sea ice is being generated.
I think the Weddell Sea pack ice is more mobile this winter. This is also telling us something about the difference between sea ice extent and sea ice thickness. The sea ice extent is large and easy to measure in the Antarctic - but we don't know how thick it is.
The open water that shows up as black in the image above extends to at least as far south as the Antarctic Circle (66° 33′S). Open water along this part of the Antarctic Peninsula is unusual at any time of the year let alone the height of winter. The image below is from the National Snow and Ice Data Centre. It shows sea ice extent >15% with an outline of the typical extent for that day based on a 30-year (1981-2010) median (orange line).
You can see how unusual this observation is, and I wrote a general post Antarctic Sea Ice Extent a while ago.
The open water is also very clear in the MODIS imagery as the black wedge between the Antarctic Peninsula, and the sea ice of the Weddell Sea.
In my previous post I pointed at weather systems as likely being responsible. Now to me it looks like a large system is pushing the whole Weddell Sea sea ice to the east and away from Antarctic Peninsula.
There is always some open water in the pack ice at any time of the year, but it's clear that their is a pathway south right now. I imagine it will close soon and wouldn't be keen to be on a ship in that open water heading south.
What is interesting is the heat transfer from the ocean to the atmosphere that far south at this time of the year will be huge. This is what I wrote about that heat loss for the Arctic.