Sea Ice Max Continues Downward Trend

In September 2012, the ice cap over the Arctic Ocean shrank to its lowest extent on record, about half the size of the average summertime extent from 1979 to 2000. That sea ice minimum continued a long-term trend of diminishing ice cover over the past few decades.

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Eyes to the skies as Comet PANSTARRS becomes visible during March

Luis Argerich from Buenos Aires, Argentina, captured Comet PANSTARRS in the sky above Mercedes, Argentina, on February 11, 2013. The comet shone at magnitude 4.5 to the left of an Iridium flare.

The long wait is nearly over. Northern Hemisphere skygazers haven’t seen a bright comet with a long tail since Comet Hale-Bopp graced the night sky in 1997. But if predictions hold, Comet PANSTARRS (C/2011 L4) should be a nice naked-eye object and look impressive through binoculars after sunset starting in the second week of March.

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So how can NASA tell that the Russian meteor isn't related to asteroid 2012 DA14?

So how can we tell that the Russian meteor isn't related to asteroid 2012 DA14?

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VIDEO Meteor Explosion Injures 950 In Russia, Asteroid DA14 To Brush Past Earth

A meteor streaked across the sky above Russia’s Ural Mountains on Friday morning, causing sharp explosions and injuring more than 950 people, many of them hurt by broken glass.

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WORLD FROM SPACE Four Erupting Volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula

Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula has the highest concentration of active volcanoes on Earth. Separated by only 180 kilometers (110 miles), Shiveluch, Bezymianny, Tolbachik, and Kizimen were all erupting simultaneously on January 11, 2013.

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Unusual Cold for China and Northeast Asia

Between late November 2012 and early January 2013, China recorded its lowest temperatures in 28 years. In northeastern China, air temperatures dipped to -15.3°Celsius (4.5°Fahrenheit), according to the state news agency Xinhua. Frigid temperatures and blizzards stranded air and rail passengers, killed roughly 180,000 cattle, and forced authorities to open hundreds of shelters.

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Snow Cover Extent Declines in the Arctic

Click to enlarge

In the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, snow typically covers the land surface for nine months each year. The snow serves as a reservoir of water, and a reflector of the Sun’s energy, but recent decades have witnessed significant changes in snow cover extent. 

Studies of snow cover published in Geophysical Research Letters and the Arctic Report Card: Update for 2012 found that, between 1979 and 2012, June snow cover extent decreased by 17.6 percent per decade compared to the 1979–2000 average.

The maps on this page show June snow cover extent anomalies for every third year from 1967 through 2012. Each June’s snow cover is compared to the 1971–2000 mean. Above-average extent appears in shades of blue, and below-average extent appears in shades of orange. Toward the beginning of the series, above-average extents predominate. Toward the end of the series, below-average extents predominate.

The graph shows June snow cover in millions of square kilometers from 1967 through 2012, and the overall decline in snow cover is consistent with the changes shown in the maps. The graph and maps are based on data from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab.

The snow-cover study authors, Chris Derksen and Ross Brown, found an overall decline in snow cover from 1967 through 2012, and also detected an acceleration of snow loss after the year 2003. Between June 2008 and June 2012, North America experienced three record-low snow cover extents. In Eurasia, each successive June from 2008 to 2012 set a new record for the lowest snow cover extent yet recorded for that month. 

Previous research identified a link between rising air temperatures and shrinking snow cover, so Derksen and Brown were not surprised to see an overall loss of snow, “But we were surprised at the continued broken records of June Arctic snow cover extent over the past five years,” says Brown. “Arctic spring snow cover typically fluctuates over cycles of about three to four years so you don’t expect to see sequences of decreasing snow cover persisting through these natural cycles.” 

As with sea ice, declining snow cover extent means decreasing albedo. The overall “whiteness” of an object determines how much sunlight it reflects back into space. Snow has very high albedo, reflecting up to 90 percent of the sunlight it receives. As snow cover declines, dark soils and vegetation absorb more of the Sun’s energy. The Geophysical Research Letters study pointed out that declining snow cover raises ground temperatures and increases the thickness of the active layer—the uppermost layer of permafrost that thaws each summer. When organic material in thawing permafrost decomposes, it can release methane, a potent greenhouse gas when released to the atmosphere.

Anticipating future changes in Arctic snow cover poses challenges for researchers. “Changes in fall snow cover are complicated because the longer open-water season provides additional moisture for increasing snowfall,” Brown says. “As for future snow cover, climate is strongly influenced by interannual variability over periods of five to ten years, so that time range is hard to predict. But global climate models show the rate of Arctic snow cover decline speeding up over the long term.”

 

Image by Robert Simmon, using data from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab. Caption by Michon Scott. Instrument: NOAA-17 POES

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Siberia Records First Snowfall Of Autumn/Winter 2012

Few things change the appearance of Earth’s land surfaces as readily as a layer of snow. As fall approaches in the Northern Hemisphere and spring does in the Southern Hemisphere, snow’s ability to transform the greens of vegetation and browns of rock and soil to white is on display. 

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WORLD FROM SPACE - Dudinka, Russia

Dudinka, in north central Siberia, lies deep within the Arctic Circle and is one of the northernmost towns in the world. With average annual temperatures of -15 °C (5°F) and six weeks of darkness in the winter, it is not a particularly inviting place to build a town.

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Egg-Sized Hailstones Injure 20 In Siberia

At least 20 people injured as huge hailstones pound Mezhdurechensk, Siberia, on Tuesday (14, August 2012). Over 100 cars were also damaged in the incident.

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TMT World Volcanic Activity Report 17 August 2012

Each week, The Meteo Times provides information on new and continuing volcanic activity throughout the world. The TMT World Volcanic Activity Report is filed in conjunction with the most up-to-date date from the Smithsonian Institute. This week's report features updates from Monsterrat, Guatemala, New Zealand, Indonesia, USA, Mexico, Russia, Japan, Ecuador and Colombia.

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Smoke From Russian Fires Drifts Over North America

The fires that have been plaguing Russia for months now have causing smoke to drift across the Pacific Ocean towards North America. 

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Russian Wildfires Drive Bird Species West To Ireland

A Pallid Harrier pictured at Ballyvergan Marsh, just outside Youghal in Cork, on 24 April 2011. This was the first recorded sighting of the bird on Irish shores. Photograph John Murphy.

Three successive summers of devastating wildfires across central and eastern Russia have lead to the displacement of native bird species, some of which have been spotted as far west as Ireland. 

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WORLD FROM SPACE River Outflow To The Kara Sea

When rivers flow to the sea, they usually carry sediment and dissolved organic material—dead and decaying plant material—with them. The question for many Arctic researchers is how does that flow change from season to season, and how might it accelerate as far northern latitudes grow warmer.

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Summer Cyclone Hits The Arctic

An unusually large, long-lasting, and powerful cyclone was churning over the Arctic in early August 2012. Two smaller systems merged on August 5 (Sunday) to form the storm, which at the time occupied much of the Beaufort-Chukchi Sea and Canadian Basin. On average, Arctic cyclones last about 40 hours; as of August 9, 2012 (Thursday), this storm had lasted more than five days.

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Rivers Discharge More Water Into Arctic Ocean

The Lena Delta, Landsat 2005, Alfred Wegener Institute. 

Today the three Russian rivers Lena, Ob and Yenissey discharge more water in the Arctic Ocean than they did 60 years ago. That’s the result of a study undertaken by an international team of researchers, which was published yesterday in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change. 

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Carbon Eaters Thrive On The Black Sea

This brilliant cyan pattern scattered across the surface of the Black Sea is a bloom of microscopic phytoplankton.  The multitude of single-celled algae in this image are most likely coccolithophores, one of Earth’s champions of carbon pumping.

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Researchers Develop New Tool For Observing Fire

 

For more than a decade, scientists have used data from instruments on the Terra and Aqua satellites to map the locations of wildfires burning around the globe. Now researchers have a new tool for observing fire.

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Kizimen Volcano Eruption Continues

Eastern Russia’s Kizimen is a growing stratovolcano, like Shiveluch, its neighbor to the north. 

In this natural-color satellite image, volcanic debris covers the south and east slopes of Kizimen. A plume of gas and ash rises from the summit, while wind-blown ash obscures a lava flow on the eastern flank. 

Early-season snows cover the landscape surrounding the volcano. The snow provides an easy way to date volcanic activity—any visible debris avalanches or ashfall must have occurred after the last snowfall.

The image was acquired by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite on October 26, 2011.

Further Reading

• Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team, Current Acticity of Kizimen Volcano

NASA image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using ALI data from the EO-1 Team. Caption by Robert Simmon

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Satellite Data Illustrates 2011 Sea Ice Minimum

In September 2011, sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean declined to the second-lowest extent on record. Satellite data from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) showed that the summertime ice cover narrowly avoided a new record low. 

The image above was made from observations collected by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. The map—which looks down on the North Pole—depicts sea ice extent on September 9, 2011, the date of minimum extent for the year. The animation (link below the image) shows the growth and decline of sea ice from September 2010 to September 2011.

Ice-covered areas range in color from white (highest concentration) to light blue (lowest concentration). Open water is dark blue, and land masses are gray. The yellow outline shows the median minimum ice extent for 1979–2000; that is, areas that were at least 15 percent ice-covered in at least half the years between 1979 and 2000.

Melt season in 2011 brought higher-than-average summer temperatures, but not the unusual weather conditions that contributed to the extreme melt of 2007, the record low. “Atmospheric and oceanic conditions were not as conducive to ice loss this year, but the melt still neared 2007 levels,” said Walt Meier of NSIDC. “This probably reflects loss of multi-year ice in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, as well as other factors that are making the ice more vulnerable.”

The low sea ice level in 2011 fits the pattern of decline over the past three decades, said Joey Comiso of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Since 1979, September Arctic sea ice extent has declined by 12 percent per decade.

“The sea ice is not only declining; the pace of the decline is becoming more drastic,” he noted. “The older, thicker ice is declining faster than the rest, making for a more vulnerable perennial ice cover.”

While the sea ice extent did not dip below the record, the area did drop slightly lower than 2007 levels for about ten days in early September 2011. Sea ice “area” differs from “extent” in that it equals the actual surface area covered by ice, while extent includes any area where ice covers at least 15 percent of the ocean. 

Arctic sea ice extent on September 9, 2011, was 4.33 million square kilometers (1.67 million square miles).

Averaged over the month of September, ice extent was 4.61 million square kilometers (1.78 million square miles). This places 2011 as the second lowest ice extent for both the daily minimum and the monthly average. Ice extent was 2.43 million square kilometers (938,000 square miles) below the 1979 to 2000 average. 

Climate models have suggested that the Arctic could lose almost all of its summer ice cover by 2100, but in recent years, ice extent has declined faster than the models predicted.

NASA Earth Observatory images created by Jesse Allen, using AMSR-E sea ice concentration data provided courtesy of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Caption based on text from Patrick Lynch (NASA) and Katherine Leitzell (NSIDC), edited by Michael Carlowicz. Instrument: Aqua - AMSR-E

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