The focus today will be on the Arctic Ocean, using close-up views having more than the usual amount of detail. This requires a bit of extra time and effort to check out, but there is good information to be gained on several fronts. A close-up view means first magnifying these images all the way up to 170% or more and then putting your eyes around 8-10 inches away from the screen. This will improve all the measurements made from color coding and further helps to define exact locations. The Temperature Anomaly and Precipitable Water maps have the greatest overall interest from a detail standpoint, while Sea Ice Extent and Average Air Temperature are currently high on the list due to some special circumstances. I have gained a better appreciation for the way delayed sea ice formation is now affecting air temperatures in this region, making the delay a greater than realized contributor to the high anomalies we keep seeing. As a result we need to make a better separation between this contribution and the one due to unusual inputs of high-altitude water vapor. Getting it right will always be a challenge if we don’t know exactly what the ice coverage was like at this date three decades ago, but we can be sure it was already much more advanced away from summer lows than it is today.
Look closely at the anomaly pattern that circles the ocean shore in a fairly narrow band from Alaska to the Laptev Sea, then widens as it crosses more open water while heading downward toward Greenland. Notice how most of the warmest parts make a good fit with the corresponding open water that we see on this next chart:
What we want to know next is the actual existing difference in air temperatures over ice-covered and ice-free areas that are in close proximity but not quite touching. That difference will presumably disappear once all the new ice has formed, as it probably had already formed at this date throughout the baseline period. A quick way to check out the temperatures will be to simply look at this next map and give it plenty of magnification:
What I see, by getting up close, is average air temperatures around minus-4 or so in the ice-free places that were most likely to have been frozen by this time in the early period, bordered by a line visibly marked at -10, and then a quick jump to measures ranging from -15 to -20 and higher. Similar numbers can be found on the Windy website, with practice, except on that map they are always current rather than daily averages. The main point is that warm anomalies ranging from 10 to possibly as much as 15 degrees are most likely now being activated in certain particular spots that have been slow to freeze over this year. The immediate impact from water vapor excesses would still have some responsibility for the daily anomalies that are reported, but just not as much as we may have once thought. I believe the extra vapor inputs remain the dominating factor of warming for all areas that are iced up.
The Precipitable Water map for today has ample evidence of continuing vapor penetration causing warm anomalies, with the strongest inputs seen coming from the direction of Scandinavia. Viewing with magnification parses out many little details, and there is one detail in particular I want to point out today just because of its very small size. Back on the first map you can see a tiny white spot in the middle of the ocean, signifying normal air that must be very cold—the temperature map shows it at about -22. On the PWat map you can see this little spot just as clearly, with a lowly reading that appears to be only 1kg. There is a similar situation close to the north shore of Greenland.
Carl