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.
As daylight has returned to Antarctica it is straightforward to pick out polynya forming on the edge of the Antarctic continent.
This one by the Stange Ice Shelf and Rydberg Peninsula caught my eye. It is a latent heat polynya formed as the winds push the sea ice away from the land to reveal the ocean that appears black beneath.
The wispy trails of grey which appear in the black are new sea ice forming as frazil ice.
This is the location of the peninsula.
I visited that area in 2007 and took this picture. You can a thin skim of young nilas ice in front of the ice shelf, and sea smoke too.
The polynya over Maud Rise was visible in a beautiful clear MODIS image on 25 September. It is currently ~40,000 km2 of open water in the middle of the Antarctic winter sea ice. This will be some impressive heat loss.
This is the polynya in the SMMI Data for the same day.
A while back I calculated the heat loss through 2,000 km2 of open water in the Arctic as being ~600 GW. This is about 20 times as much open water…
As I said then, the heat loss is making the surface waters denser, so they sink away from the surface
Quick post on the Maud Polynya in the Weddell Sea that I wrote about last week. This is the sea ice data 17 September 2017, and the polynya is both clear and large.
An enlargement of the polynya shows that it is practically open water.
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.
Approaching the middle of May and well into the Arctic sea ice retreat we can see that the sea ice extent (area of ocean with at least 15% sea ice) is still well below the mean over the satellite record.
I like a geographic perspective, so this is the mean sea ice extent 1989-93 on 13 May, the sea ice extent 13 May 2017, and the difference between the two data sets. Reds imply less sea ice than the mean 1989-93, and blues an increased sea ice extent.
There appears to be a general trend of the Arctic sea ice edge retreating between the two data sets, but I think this is in places meteorological - that is the winds are compressing the sea ice. I think this because there is a lot of blue (i.e. more sea ice than the 89-93 mean) just north of the sea ice edge.
The Bering Sea appears relatively sea ice free at this time.
On the North West of Greenland you can also see that the North Water Polynya has opened up.
When you zoom in you can see the open water.
North Water is a very famous whale habitat and as the light increases we may see a plankton bloom here.
The polynya I saw forming in early February is still clear, and very large in the Southern Weddell Sea. At the moment it is more than than 80,000 km2, although there is clearly a lot of young sea ice covering a large part of the polynya.
In my original post I said this was likely formed by winds from the Ronne Ice Shelf.
Well Dr Stef Lhermitte (Delft) has put together the most amazing movie showing the development of the polynya over January and February. It shows satellite sea ice data with winds from the ECMWF overlain.
You can clearly see the winds pushing the sea ice away from the ice shelf as time progresses.
It is just as @StefLhermitte said in his tweet yesterday:
I noticed yesterday that a polynya had formed in front of the Ronne Ice Shelf over the last 2 weeks.
In that image it is about 27,000 km2 in area.
I mapped the opening of the polynya from MODIS imagery over the last two weeks. There is cloud in the images but the opening of the polynya is fairly clear.
On 31 January 2017 there is no open water, but then over the 16 day period it opens to the ~27,000 km2 in area. If you're eagle eyed you can see that there is thin frazil ice forming in the open water in front of the ice shelf at the end of the sequence.
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.
You can see that the polynya in the centre of the picture can be seen from the very beginning. This is forming in front of the Dotson Ice Shelf - and from the scale bar you can see it is big. This polynya really starts to develop as open water around 5 October 2016.
The coastal polynya on the northern land boundary appear in mid September - and develop throughout the record.
The image below was in my previous post and it shows the three polynya from a MODIS image on 9 October 2016.
Next diversion will be a area of open water / time plot.