Arctic warming: scientists alarmed by 'crazy' temperature rises

Winter temperatures are soaring in the Arctic for the fourth winter in a row. 

The heat, accompanied by moist air, is entering the Arctic not only through the sector of the North Atlantic Ocean that lies between Greenland and Europe, as it has done in previous years, but is also coming from the North Pacific through the Bering Strait. 

“We have seen winter warming events before, but they’re becoming more frequent and more intense,” said Alek Petty, a sea ice researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Scientists are waiting to see how much this heat wave will impact the wintertime sea ice maximum extent, which has been shrinking in the past decades and has hit record lows each of the past three years.

The sea ice levels are already at record lows or near-record lows in several areas of the Arctic.

Another exceptional event this winter is the opening up of the sea ice cover north of Greenland, releasing heat from the ocean to the atmosphere and making the sea ice more vulnerable to further melting.

“This is a region where we have the thickest multi-year sea ice and expect it to not be mobile, to be resilient,” Petty said.

“But now this ice is moving pretty quickly, pushed by strong southerly winds and probably affected by the warm temperatures, too.”

From The Guardian by Jonathan Watts

An alarming heatwave in the sunless winter Arctic is causing blizzards in Europe and forcing scientists to reconsider even their most pessimistic forecasts of climate change.

Although it could yet prove to be a freak event, the primary concern is that global warming is eroding the polar vortex, the powerful winds that once insulated the frozen north.

 Daily 2 m surface air temperature for the Arctic averaged above 80°N.

Individual years from 1958-2017 are shown by the sequential blue/purple to yellow lines.

2018 is indicated by the red line.

ERA40 has been applied for the 1958-2002 climatology (white line), while the operational ECMWF is used for the current year.

This figure is modified from the Danish Meteorological Institute

courtesy of Zachary Labe

The north pole gets no sunlight until March, but an influx of warm air has pushed temperatures in Siberia up by as much as 35C above historical averages this month.
Greenland has already experienced 61 hours above freezing in 2018 - more than three times as many hours as in any previous year.

Seasoned observers have described what is happening as “crazy,” “weird,” and “simply shocking”.
“This is an anomaly among anomalies.
It is far enough outside the historical range that it is worrying – it is a suggestion that there are further surprises in store as we continue to poke the angry beast that is our climate,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.
“The Arctic has always been regarded as a bellwether because of the vicious circle that amplify human-caused warming in that particular region.
And it is sending out a clear warning.”

Although most of the media headlines in recent days have focused on Europe’s unusually cold weather in a jolly tone, the concern is that this is not so much a reassuring return to winters as normal, but rather a displacement of what ought to be happening farther north.

Annual average 2-m temperature anomalies in the Arctic (67°N+) for various reanalysis data sets.

Anomalies are calculated from a 1981-2010 baseline.
courtesy of Zachary Labe

At the world’s most northerly land weather station - Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland – recent temperatures have been, at times, warmer than London and Zurich, which are thousands of miles to the south.
Although the recent peak of 6.1C on Sunday was not quite a record, but on the previous two occasions (2011 and 2017) the highs lasted just a few hours before returning closer to the historical average.
Last week there were 10 days above freezing for at least part of the day at this weather station, just 440 miles from the north pole.

“Spikes in temperature are part of the normal weather patterns – what has been unusual about this event is that it has persisted for so long and that it has been so warm,” said Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute.
“Going back to the late 1950s at least we have never seen such high temperatures in the high Arctic.”

 NASA satellite imagery shows a strong storm near Greenland on Feb. 23
that drew a major pulse of warm air into the Arctic.

The cause and significance of this sharp uptick are now under scrutiny.
Temperatures often fluctuate in the Arctic due to the strength or weakness of the polar vortex, the circle of winds – including the jetstream – that help to deflect warmer air masses and keep the region cool.
As this natural force field fluctuates, there have been many previous temperature spikes, which make historical charts of Arctic winter weather resemble an electrocardiogram.

But the heat peaks are becoming more frequent and lasting longer – never more so than this year.
“In 50 years of Arctic reconstructions, the current warming event is both the most intense and one of the longest-lived warming events ever observed during winter,” said Robert Rohde, lead scientist of Berkeley Earth, a non-profit organisation dedicated to climate science.

The question now is whether this signals a weakening or collapse of the polar vortex, the circle of strong winds that keep the Arctic cold by deflecting other air masses.
The vortex depends on the temperature difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes, but that gap is shrinking because the pole is warming faster than anywhere on Earth.
While average temperatures have increased by about 1C, the warming at the pole – closer to 3C – is melting the ice mass.
According to Nasa, Arctic sea ice is now declining at a rate of 13.2% per decade, leaving more open water and higher temperatures.

GFS model analysis of temperature difference from normal (in Celsius) on Sunday over the Arctic.

The temperature is above freezing at the North Pole.

(University of Maine Climate Re-analyzer)

GFS model analysis of temperatures (in Celsius) on Sunday over the Arctic.

(University of Maine Climate Re-analyzer)

Some scientists speak of a hypothesis known as “warm Arctic, cold continents” as the polar vortex becomes less stable - sucking in more warm air and expelling more cold fronts, such as those currently being experienced in the UK and northern Europe.
Rohde notes that this theory remains controversial and is not evident in all climate models, but this year’s temperature patterns have been consistent with that forecast.
Longer term, Rohde expects more variation.
“As we rapidly warm the Arctic, we can expect that future years will bring us even more examples of unprecedented weather.”

Jesper Theilgaard, a meteorologist with 40 years’ experience and founder of website Climate Dissemination, said the recent trends are outside previous warming events.
“No doubt these warming events bring trouble to the people and the nature.
Shifting rain and snow – melt and frost make the surface icy and therefore difficult for animals to find anything to eat.
Living conditions in such shifting weather types are very difficult.”

Others caution that it is premature to see this as a major shift away from forecasts.
“The current excursions of 20C or more above average experienced in the Arctic are almost certainly mostly due to natural variability,” said Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth.
“While they have been boosted by the underlying warming trend, we don’t have any strong evidence that the factors driving short-term Arctic variability will increase in a warming world.
If anything, climate models suggest the opposite is true, that high-latitude winters will be slightly less variable as the world warms.”

Although it is too soon to know whether overall projections for Arctic warming should be changed, the recent temperatures add to uncertainty and raises the possibility of knock-on effects accelerating climate change.

“This is too short-term an excursion to say whether or not it changes the overall projections for Arctic warming,” says Mann.
“But it suggests that we may be underestimating the tendency for short-term extreme warming events in the Arctic.
And those initial warming events can trigger even greater warming because of the ‘feedback loops’ associated with the melting of ice and the potential release of methane (a very strong greenhouse gas).”

Links :

• WashingtonPost : Europe is so cold now that the Arctic appears to be a warm escape / North Pole surges above freezing in the dead of winter, stunning scientists
• Business Insider : This is the scientific reason Europe is incredibly cold and snowy this week
• SMH : 'Really extreme' global weather event leaves scientists aghast
• GeoGarage blog : 'Extraordinarily hot' Arctic temperatures alarm ... 

A cartographic history : depth contours in nautical charts (1939 vs 2018)

In 1939, Coast Survey published its first chart with a new focus on depth contours.
The new depth curves helped navigators of that era locate the position of their vessels by comparing a line of echo soundings with the charted depth contours.
Publisher:     US C&GS Coast & Geodetic Survey (1939)
Image: 5101a-03-1939  / Scale: 1:232702

In 1844, the United States Coast Survey published its first official nautical chart.

It was the result of an immense amount of manual topographic and hydrographic surveying, manual drafting, manual engraving on copper printing plates, and manual intaglio printing (using black ink from copper plates).

In 1939, the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (C&GS) published its first nautical chart that included isobaths as the primary representation of the seafloor rather than individual depth soundings.

Data for the isobaths were collected by a recording echo sounder, while topographic revision was performed from aerial photographs.

The production process included manual and mechanical scribing on wet-plate glass negatives; additional chart compilation using photography to merge in standard elements; photographic transfer to aluminum lithographic printing plates; and printing in multiple colors on a powered rotary offset press.

A major innovation for the C&GS came in March 1939 with the publication of a new edition of Chart 5101, designated 5101A (U.S. Department of Commerce et al. 1940, 99; Shalowitz 1964).

It marked the beginning of a new role for bathymetric contours.

It was the first chart designed for ships that have their own echo-sounders on board.

Recording echo sounders allowed the survey to collect orders of magnitude more information about landforms at the bottom of water bodies.

Continuing to place primary responsibility for representing this information with the point data that soundings represent did not do justice to the richness of the data now available.

Instead of playing a subsidiary role to the soundings on the chart, contours could now play the same role as topographic contours, that of being the primary representation of the land surface.

This change in role can be seen in such chart editions as MH400 1938, 1942, and 1951, and E1200 1927, 1938, and 1948.

As these series progress, contours gain significant detail, while soundings either remain as they were or, as in E1200 1948, are dramatically reduced.  

( source : NOAA, a cartographic history by Jonathon L. McConnel)

 NOAA 18740 (click on the link to see the interactive map)
current nautical chart with the GeoGarage platform
overlaid on Google Maps imagery and bathymetry

The beginning of the full transition away from the last of the original techniques began in 1939 when the first chart was published that fully incorporated the possibilities for different symbology offered by the vast quantities of data created by recording echo sounders.

Charts continued to evolve after 1939, entering a new phase around 1980 based on internationally approved symbology, but the greatest changes are evident by 1939. 

Links :

• NOAA : Interpretation and Use of nautical charts (chap.6)
  

Netherlands NLHO layer update in the GeoGarage platform

26 nautical raster charts updated

see GeoGarage news

Homo erectus may have been a sailor – and able to speak

From The Guardian by Nicola Davis

A new theory suggests that Homo erectus was able to create seagoing vessels – and must have used language to sail successfully

Language was necessary for the spread of toolmaking technology, as well as for boat-building and sailing, researchers suggest.
Illustration: Alamy Stock Photo

They had bodies similar to modern humans, could make tools, and were possibly the first to cook.
Now one expert is arguing that Homo erectus might have been a mariner – complete with sailing lingo.

Homo erectus first appeared in Africa more than 1.8m years ago and is thought to be the first archaic human to leave the continent.

H. erectus fossils have turned up not only in Southern Europe, but as far afield as China and Indonesia.
Some argue that the mysterious hominid Homo floresiensis, discovered on the island of Flores, could be descended from H.erectus – although others disagree.

“Oceans were never a barrier to the travels of Erectus.
He travelled all over the world, travelled to the island of Flores, across one of the greatest ocean currents in the world,” said Daniel Everett, professor of global studies at Bentley University, and author of How Language Began.
“They sailed to the island of Crete and various other islands.
It was intentional: they needed craft and they needed to take groups of twenty or so at least to get to those places.”

While Everett is not the first to raise the controversial possibility that H. erectus might have fashioned some sort of seagoing vessel, he believes that such capabilities mean that H.erectus must also have had another skill: language.

“Erectus needed language when they were sailing to the island of Flores.
They couldn’t have simply caught a ride on a floating log because then they would have been washed out to sea when they hit the current,” said Everett, presenting his thesis at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin.
“They needed to be able to paddle. And if they paddled they needed to be able to say ‘paddle there’ or ‘don’t paddle.’ You need communication with symbols not just grunts.”

A 540 thousand year-old art object shows that prehistoric upright walkers may have had quite a bit more going on upstairs that people give them credit for.

The engraving is at least 430000 years old, meaning it was done by the long-extinct Homo erectus, said the study.

The oldest man-made markings previously .

It is unknown when language emerged among hominids; some argue that it is a feature only of our own species, Homo sapiens, which suggests a timing of no earlier than 200,000 years ago.
But Everett believes it goes back further than that.

Everett says that H. erectus would have been unable to make the same range of sounds as we do, not least because they lacked the version of a gene necessary for speech and language to develop – known as FOXP2 – found in modern humans and Neanderthals, although it is not clear whether Neanderthals had language.
But he argues that as few as two sounds are needed for a language, and that it is likely H.erectus could make more than that.

“They had what it took to invent language – and language is not as hard as many linguists have led us to believe.
If you have symbols in a linear order then you have a grammar,” said Everett.
“Homo erectus spoke and invented the Model T Ford of language.
We speak the Tesla form, but their Model T form was not a proto-language it was a real language.”

“Everybody talks about Homo erectus as a stupid ape-like creature, which of course describes us just as well, and yet what I want to emphasise is that Erectus was the smartest creature that had ever walked the Earth,” he said.

The theory received mixed reactions from others.
Kevin Laland, professor of behavioural and evolutionary biology at the University of St Andrews, said he agreed with Everett.
“The important thing to recognise is that language did not appear in modern form all at once, but gradually evolved from a protoculture comprising just a handful of words with little grammatical structure.
Certainly, it is highly plausible that Homo erectus had a protolinguistic capability,” he said, adding that work by his own team hinted it was possible.
“Our experiment suggests that it would have been very difficult for knowledge of how to manufacture Homo erectus’s Acheulian stone tools to spread without a simple form of language.
The study also demonstrates that stone toolmaking would had created a selection pressure favouring increased linguistic capabilities,” he said.

But others say that there is little evidence that H.
erectus was a sophisticated seafarer, let alone had a language.
“I don’t accept that, for example, [Homo] erectus must have had boats to get to Flores,” said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.
“Tsunamis could have moved early humans on rafts of vegetation.”

That said, Stringer notes that Homo heidelbergensis, another extinct relative of ours that lived between 700,000 and 300,000 years ago, might have been capable of some sort of chat.
“I think [Homo] heidelbergensis had a complex enough life to require speech, though not at the level of modern human language.
With [Homo] erectus, I’m not so sure,” said Stringer, adding that the ability of H. erectus to make and use tools is not, as some have argued, convincing evidence.
“Chimps and crows make and use tools without a human kind of language,” he said.

Google to map South Florida waterways in partnership with marine industry

Marine Industry Association of South Florida partners with Google Waterway View

From BizJournals

Tech giant Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is partnering with the Marine Industries Association of South Florida to create a water version of its popular Google Street View maps that would cover the region’s major waterways.

Not only will this create a detailed visual map covering 143 nautical miles along the Intracoastal Waterway and Biscayne Bay from the Palm Beach County line in Jupiter through Ocean Reef in Key Largo, it will provide the opportunity for nearby businesses to reach customers on their boats.

"This is an incredible opportunity to add another tool to the toolkit of the marine industry in South Florida, which employs 136,000 people and produces an annual economic impact of $11.5 billion,” said Phil Purcell, CEO and president of MIASF.
“Just as Google Street View is a valuable instrument and a trusted way for businesses to connect with customers, Waterway View has the potential to be the most exciting new resource for the boating lifestyle, connecting boaters with restaurants, marinas, fuel docks, service and sales centers, and all the other resources they may need.”

The Google Waterway View should launch as a mobile app by June when the mapping is completed. A web browser version will be available sooner.
Businesses will be able to buy a listing to be promoted on the map, or provide a 360-degree view inside their business.
MIASF will work with local businesses that want to utilize the new maps with Google.

Drivers on the roads can now use mapping programs to find gas stations or restaurants, so this service would provide the same aid to boaters.
That’s especially helpful because the waterways don’t have as many signs advertising the locations of businesses as roads do.

“Florida leads the country in boat registrations and its waterways are used by locals and tourists every day of the year,” said Google Virtual Reality partner, Jim Hilker.
"This will be a very useful platform for experienced boaters, newcomers, and tourists looking to access the many locations available to them by water.”

MarineMax and Boat Owners Warehouse are providing the boats that will transport the Google cameras through South Florida’s waterways.
In addition to the Intracoastal Waterway and Biscayne Bay, the map will cover some adjoining rivers, inlets and commercial canals.
“The goal of this initiative is to increase awareness on the waterways, said Chuck Cashman, chief revenue officer for MarineMax.
“Boaters can plan a day out on the water in advance through a visual familiarization of local boating hotspots and boating-friendly businesses.”

Links :

• Curbed Miami : Google’s creating a Street View-like program for boaters in South Florida