New insights into Antarctic sea ice conditions
Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research led a new study shedding light on the upward trend in total Antarctic sea ice extent over the period of satellite observations. The overall view from climate models is that Antarctic sea ice extent should have decreased in response to the general warming of climate. This has led some scientists to suggest that the climate models are fundamentally flawed. However, an explanation for the expanding Antarctic sea ice appears to lie in the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), a natural mode of climate variability. The IPO transitioned from a positive to a negative phase in the late 1990s at the same time that the increase in total Antarctic sea ice extent accelerated. The negative IPO brought a cooling of tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures, and deepening of the Amundsen Sea Low near Antarctica. This has contributed to regional circulation changes in the Ross Sea region favoring expansion of the sea ice cover. Meehl’s study also shows that the negative phase of the IPO in coupled global climate models is characterized by patterns similar to the sea-level pressure and 850 hPa wind changes observed in all seasons near Antarctica since 2000, particularly in the Ross Sea region. Additional model experiments show that these atmospheric circulation changes are mainly driven by precipitation and convective heating anomalies related to the IPO in the equatorial eastern Pacific. They conclude that the models are not wrong, but instead can simulate the processes involved with natural climate variability that results in increased Antarctic sea ice, even when global temperatures are rising.
Reference
Meehl, G.A., J.M. Arblaster, C. Bitz, C.T.Y. Chung, and H. Teng. 2016. Antarctic sea ice expansion between 2000-2014 driven by tropical Pacific decadal climate variability. Nature Geoscience, doi:10.1038/NGEO2751.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Funny how ocean currents had an unknown impact on Antarctic ice yet they ignore ocean currents major impact on Arctic ice.
Funny how they have to resort to "models" once again to "prove" something given scientists can't prove models.
So what they say is global warming causes Arctic ice to shrink and Antarctic ice to grow.
Kinda sounds like checks and balances instead.
Plus funny how they have a serious standard deviation only based upon data since 1981 and excludes prior episodes when the northwest passage was open.
Plus even in this short period of time one would expect fluctuations.
Since 2012 all volumes have exceeded that year which is interesting to note.
Climate scientists find major flaw in global warming theory
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