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...scientists studying the health of Arctic sea ice, satellite observations are absolutely essential for providing the big picture. It was satellites that revealed in September 2007 a record minimum ice coverage in the region - the result of a massive summer melt. And it was satellites that showed in 2008 and 2009 the modest recovery of late-summer Arctic ice that suggested to some that the specter of a totally ice-free polar ocean might be somewhat less imminent than feared...
...short, as Barber and his colleagues explain in a recent paper in Geophysical Review Letters, the analysis of what the satellites were seeing was wrong. Some of what satellites identified as thick, melt-resistant multiyear ice turned out to be, in Barber's words, "full of holes, like Swiss cheese. We haven't seen this sort of thing before." (Read "Arctic Mystery: Identifying the Great Blob of Alaska...
...findings add another wrinkle to a problem climate scientists have been warning about since the record melt of 2007: after each summer meltback, the Arctic Ocean refreezes completely in winter. The problem is that much of that refreezing creates a relatively thin layer of so-called first-year ice. "It's weaker than thick, multiyear ice," says University of Colorado scientist James Maslanik, "and less resistant to melting...
...scientists feared the record-thin Arctic ice cover might melt away. But it didn't, because of unusually favorable ocean currents and weather patterns. "Early in the 2009 season it looked like we might be on the way to a record melt," says Julienne Stroeve, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, in Boulder, Colo., "but then winds spread the ice out, so the overall coverage ended up being greater than in 2007." Without those winds, in other words, 2009 might have set a new record for open water. But as it happened, ice cover...
...Stroeve, "based on what 'typical' ice looked like at that time. We know there are errors with the measurements." The weakness in multiyear ice also suggests that if the unfavorable winds and currents that caused the 2007 meltback should recur, the Arctic Ocean could undergo another especially dramatic summer melt. Not just the first-year ice might go, but also some of the "rotten" multiyear ice that Barber encountered...