Making Some Sense of the Melting Arctic

When deciding what I want to blog about, gathering research, or when just in the mood to read about weather and climate, I often find myself gravitating toward other weather blogs. I tend to read blogs posted on weather sites such as Accuweather, Wunderground, and ClimateCentral. These sites have blogs and posts written by multiple weather and climate experts.

I was exploring various blogs when I found this post by Angela Fritz, New Images of the 2013 Arctic Sea Ice Mega-Fracture. Fritz is an atmospheric scientist for Wunderground, and has a blog on the Wunderground site.

Her post on March, 29th 2013 contains some great pictures and video of a large fracture in the Arctic ice. According to Fritz this large fracture occurred because the Arctic ice is thinning and becoming a lot more fragile. Then the weather in the last two months was putting pressure on the ice from the land, pushing it into the ocean. Thicker, more stable ice wouldn't have been affected, but today's ice couldn't withstand the pressure and broke.

Andrew Freedman and Michael D. Lemonick also discuss this fracture and Arctic ice in their post Arctic Ice Hits Annual Max and it’s 6th Lowest on Record. They have one of the same animations that Fritz has in her post, and discuss the topic at length.

This article is great because it goes on to explain why the arctic is warming faster than other areas of the world. It's a feedback cycle called Arctic Amplification. The white snow and ice reflects the sun's rays back up into the air. But now, with the ice melting, the darker colored water appears and instead of reflecting the rays it absorbs them. This heats the water, which in turn melts more ice! The cycle then continues with more and more ice melting, and the warmer waters starting to affect weather all over the world.

NBC News' John Roach published a great article titled Arctic change reverberates around globe, experts say. In the article he explains how the warming air can create such cold temperatures in some areas of the world. For awhile now, I didn't really understand how we could still have such cold temperatures when the climate was warming. Last year seemed to fit with my expectations, but this past winter was pretty cold!

Roach explains that when the ocean releases this warmth into the air, it affects the jetstream.

In particular, he and colleagues hypothesize that the warming Arctic causes the jetsteam to slow down and meander like a river flowing through the plains. This, in turn, transports less warm air over the lands from the oceans.

We saw this occur this past winter, when the wind from the west slowed down and we had a very cold, very wet, winter. He also goes on to explain that the slow jetstream can cause periods of high temperatures as well. It all depends on how the jetstream dips and rises.

Well that makes a little more sense!

Angela Fritz's blog post shows us a serious fracture in the Arctic ice that recently occurred, and why it happened. Freedman and Lemonick then explain to us the vicious cycle that is causing the Arctic ice to melt. Finally, the recent article by Roach presents a theory using the jetstream to explain why we may still have some very cold trends.

I love it when blog posts and articles come together and really shine some light on what is happening with our climate and our world.