NASA says: “There are many different factors that influence the sea ice. We’re measuring them to determine which were most important to melting ice this summer.” Where does that leave so-called ‘state-of-the-art’ climate models? They’re only going to be measuring seasonal factors, not longer-term cycles for example, but it’s at least an attempt to look harder at the whole topic.
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It’s not just rising air and water temperatures influencing the decades-long decline of Arctic sea ice, says NASA (via Phys.org).
Clouds, aerosols, even the bumps and dips on the ice itself can play a role.
To explore how these factors interact and impact sea ice melting, NASA is flying two aircraft equipped with scientific instruments over the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland this summer.
The first flights of the field campaign, called ARCSIX (Arctic Radiation Cloud Aerosol Surface Interaction Experiment), successfully began taking measurements on May 28.
“The ARCSIX mission aims to measure the evolution of the sea ice pack over the course of an entire summer,” said Patrick Taylor, deputy science lead with the campaign from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
“There are many different factors that influence the sea ice. We’re measuring them to determine which were most important to melting ice this summer.”
On a completely clear day over smooth sea ice, most sunlight would reflect back into the atmosphere, which is one way that sea ice cools the planet. But when the ice has ridges or darker melt ponds—or is dotted with pollutants—it can change the equation, increasing the amount of ice melt.
In the atmosphere, cloudy conditions and drifting aerosols also impact the rate of melt.
“An important goal of ARCSIX is to better understand the surface radiation budget—the energy interacting with the ice and the atmosphere,” said Rachel Tilling, a campaign scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
. . .
The aircraft will fly coordinated routes to take measurements of the atmosphere above ice in three-dimensional space, said Sebastian Schmidt, the mission’s science lead with the University of Colorado Boulder.
“The area off the northern coast of Greenland can be considered the last bastion of multi-year sea ice, as the Arctic transitions to a seasonally ice-free ocean,” Schmidt said. “By observing here, we will gain insight into cloud-aerosol-sea ice-interaction processes of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Arctic—all while improving satellite-based remote sensing by comparing what we’re seeing with the airborne and satellite instruments.”
Full article here.
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Image: Arctic sea ice [credit: Geoscience Daily]
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Someday, maybe, they will begin to understand sea ice.
Sea ice is formed and thawed mostly underneath.
The warm tropical currents thaw sea ice underneath. When land ice is pushed into the turbulent warm tropical salt-water currents, the thawing ice chills the water to sub freezing temperatures that promote the forming of more sea ice layers underneath the ice in the exclusion zone where the salt is excluded and fresh water can form new layers.
When sufficient land ice is pushed into the ocean currents sea ice grows, when insufficient land ice is pushed into the ocean currents sea ice thaws
grows.This is the thermostat controlled ice machine that causes alternating warm and cold time periods in the polar regions. When there is not enough ice pushed into the oceans, sea ice is removed and it snows more until there is too much land ice. When there is too much land ice pushed into the oceans, sea ice is formed and the evaporation and snowfall is prevented and the land ice depletes until not enough ice is pushed into the oceans and then the cycle repeats. Polar ice core records do tell us this.
I wrote:
When sufficient land ice is pushed into the ocean currents sea ice grows, when insufficient land ice is pushed into the ocean currents sea ice grows.
I meant to write and I should have written:
When sufficient land ice is pushed into the ocean currents, sea ice grows, when insufficient land ice is pushed into the ocean currents, sea ice thaws.
Alternating warmer and colder cycles in Polar Regions are necessary, normal, self-correcting, this is a stable longer term dynamic cycle. A stable static state is not possible, the land ice flows into the oceans too slowly to support a static condition. In warmer times the snow falls on top of the old ice and it takes a long time for enough weight and volume and ice flow to push enough ice into the ocean. In colder times, it does not snow enough to maintain the ice on land and it takes a long time for the ice to deplete and slow the ice pushed into the ocean. Periodic loss of sea ice is absolutely necessary to maintain the land ice. Look at ice core records, the oldest ice in ice core records is in thinner layers because much ice has been returned to the oceans, chilling the oceans by thawing at sub-freezing temperatures and chilling the climate system.
The initial surface sea ice may depend somewhat on the solar in and atmosphere temperatures, but after the surface sea ice is formed, the growth of sea ice underneath depends more on the water temperature underneath. Thick sea ice grows and thaws underneath, depending on the chilling of salt water by land ice pushed into the ocean.
Turbulent salt-water and ice can be chilled enough to freeze ice cream and it is chilled enough to form new sea ice layers under thick sea ice. Remove or reduce the land ice pushed in and the salt-water currents remove sea ice layers.
This promotes natural, normal, necessary, self-correcting, alternating warmer and colder climate periods.