As usual, I've learned a little more about the science, thanks to the unintentional prodding of others. The reports from the SHEBA experiment have been especially enlightening. Here was one I found the other day:
Richter-Menge, J. A., S. L. McNutt, J. E. Overland, and R. Kwok, Relating arctic pack ice stress and deformation under winter conditions, J. Geophys. Res., 107(C10), 8040, doi: 10.1029/2000JC000477, 2002. The authors present a discussion of the stress and motion measurements taken during SHEBA. One small point of interest to me was their map of the track of the ship while stationed at the ice floe. They began at (roughly) 75.8N, 144W, as seen in their Figure 2. This area was chosen because it was within the "Perennial Ice Zone" as it was called at the time. At roughly the minimum extent so far observed, say 21 September 2005, that location was covered by heavy ice, as seen here: http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsredata/asi_daygrid_swath/l1a/n6250/2005/sep/asi-n6250-20050921-v5_nic.png That year, the majority of high latitude open water was on the Russian side. This year, with perhaps 6 more weeks of melting to be expected, what do we see (besides lots of nice colors)? http://iup.physik.uni-bremen.de:8084/amsr/arctic_AMSRE_nic.png It appears to me like the original SHEBA site will be open water this year. And, from Robert Grumbine's NCEP animation, there looks to be a prominent flow of sea-ice thru the Fram Strait into the Greenland Sea. These flows have been shown to continue into the winter months. http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/seaice/nh.html I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there's another salinity anomaly in the Greenland Sea later this year and into next year. E. S. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
