I woke up this morning and saw this when looking at the surface winds in the actic — admittedly an obscure for a person who lives at 28o north latitude to do.
That looked like a pretty big storm, and as I went to research it I found the fodder for my title, since this storm seems a little early. The general consensus is that it is too early for a major cyclone to do much damage to the ice. But the penultimate paragraph hold a bit of warning:
Storm or no, it’s been a weird, bad year for Arctic sea ice so far. After limping along all winter, Bering sea ice was basically gone by May, months ahead of schedule. Even before this storm, sea ice around Svalbard was looking more like it should in September. Overall, Arctic sea ice extent for May was at its second-lowest on record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s latest monthly sea ice report released on June 6.
In some ways the weather patterns in the arctic seem to have had the same advance for some of the things I even see shifting here in Florida. I have two non-native trees in the back yard that used to take until mid May to have leaves; one of them starts to leave in early March now. The arctic has warmed up twice as fast as the rest of the globe.
Nothing in nature is “monotonic” — a fancy math term for “always trending in the same way”. Also nothing in nature is really “linear” — the simple straight line relationships that we are taught in science and engineer up to grad school, when they tell you “well, that stuff was good practice...”. Maybe not that bad…I lurk over at the Arctic Sea Ice forum (DK member Fish Out of Water often contributes there), and the over winter condition of the ice was no secret. Contrary to what many think (especially “conservatives”) the people who contribute and read these discussions are not hoping for a catastrophic drop in ice — just aware that it could happen really just about any time.
So far this season,from my causal reading, it seems that “melt-ponding” is more noticeable than the previous several years. This is the melting of snow that covers the sea ice (a distinction that many, especially in my adopted home in Florida, find hard to grasp) and makes transient ponds that soften the underlying ice and perhaps make it more susceptible to melting later in the summer.
So the ice had a pretty interesting (read: difficult) winter, and there are large areas of very young ice. The older the ice gets, the thicker it gets, so this new ice is pretty thin. The dismissal of the effect of this storm is a little premature in my opinion. If the ice conditions resemble those of 20 years ago? Yeah, sure - a June storm wouldn't affect all the 3-5 year old ice out there much. But now a lot of that area is covered by thinner 1-3 year old ice...not only thinner, but probably more flexible and prone to flex in the wind.
Ah whatever — it's a grand experiment without a control. We only depend on the planet to survive. No biggie folks!/s
As for the “somewhat alarmist sounding article” I grabbed the story picture, it does serve to illustrate that this past winter was the 3rd one in a row where winter “wasn’t quite right”, so no matter what type of weather happens north of 75oN, the ice is not going to fare well.