New satellite observations confirm a University of Washington analysis that for the past three years has produced widely quoted estimates of Arctic sea-ice volume. Findings based on observations from a European Space Agency satellite, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, show that the Arctic has lost more than a third of summer sea-ice volume since a decade ago, when a U.S. satellite collected similar data. Combining the UW model and the new satellite observations suggests the summer minimum in Arctic sea ice is one-fifth of what it was in 1980, when the model begins.
“Other people had argued that 75 to 80 percent ice volume loss was too aggressive,” said co-author Axel Schweiger, a polar scientist in the UW Applied Physics Laboratory. “What this new paper shows is that our ice loss estimates may have been too conservative, and that the recent decline is possibly more rapid.”
The system developed at the UW provides a 34-year monthly picture of what’s happening to the total volume of Arctic sea ice. The Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System, or PIOMAS, combines weather records, sea-surface temperature and satellite pictures of ice coverage to compute ice volume. It then verifies the results with actual thickness measurements from individual moorings or submarines that cruise below the ice.
“Because the ice is so variable, you don’t get a full picture of it from any of those observations,” Schweiger said. “So this model is the only way to reconstruct a time series that spans multiple decades.”...
Monthly sea ice volume anomalies from 1979 to the present calculated using the University of Washington system. Graph from the University of Washington website
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