The storm began in the middle of the night as high and low in the atmosphere coalesced into a big storm. On the day after, the winds had grown much larger than they had on the previous day. It was on a beeline for the archipelago of Svalbard, which is between Norway and the North Pole. John was very happy by that.
As part of a campaign based out of Longyearbyen, the world's northernmost town, an atmospheric dynamicist flew through the storm last week. As his Twin Otter plane shuddered through a tropical storm, flying just 15 to 30 meters above the sea surface, Methven and the crew took measurements of the ice, water, and air before returning to a bumpy landing on Svalbard. In a monthlong effort, the U.K., U.S., and French teams captured the third and strongest of the three storms.
The first airborne project to study how storms affect sea ice is part of the U.K. portion of the Thin Ice campaign. The people are going to be happy.
With data from the ice-skimming plane, a second aircraft flying through the tops of the storms, and dozens of weather balloons, the Thin Ice teams hope to learn how these common but poorly understood storms form. They want to know how the sea ice affects the storms. The data should help improve the models used to forecast the weather in the northern part of the world.
Waves that menace fishing vessels are whipped up by the storms. A lot of these communities are having to move. The people are falling into the ocean. In the summer, the cargo and cruise ships rushing to take advantage of newly ice-free passages are at risk of being struck by storms. Alex Crawford is a climate scientist at the University of M. You will know if you stay in port or go on.
Tropical cyclones are powerful, but not as big as the summer'sarctic ones. The GreatArcticCyclone of 2012 was 5000 kilometers long and spanned the entire ocean. The storms can wander around the ocean for weeks at a time. There isn't anything to get rid of.
Hurricanes are powered by the energy in water vapor rising from a warm ocean, while the polar regions get their spark from horizontal temperature difference The air can start spinning at high altitudes because of a collar of winds 5 to 8 kilometers up. There are temperature differences between the ocean and the ice front. A low level spin-up with one at the top intensify into a storm. Crawford says that storms from lower latitudes are imports.
The consequences of both winds and ice are complex when a storm blows across an ocean. The storms' cloud cover can cause melting. As ice thins near the edge of the pack, storms can cause waves that stir up warmer waters, and break up ice into smaller pieces that melt more quickly. The rough surface of the ice makes it difficult for the wind to blow. The storm's core can be kept stable by the friction.
Climate models can't forecast the storms and sea ice. Jim Doyle, an atmospheric scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory and the leader of the U.S. component of Thin Ice, said two leading models differed by a full day when they predicted a storm. The U.K. Met Office creates storms that tend to melt summer ice too quickly, while the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts leaves too much ice leftover.
The models don't perform well because they don't have enough data on the conditions in the north. The models have a hard time with the physics of the clouds. Ian Renfrew is a meteorology professor at the University of East Anglia. Cloud data from within the storm will be gathered by Thin Ice's high-flying aircraft.
The marginal ice zone is where modelers are eager for surface-level data. In the past few years, a few models have begun to include parameters to account for the marginal ice rather than treating it uniformly smooth. Researchers don't know whether the models' forecasts match reality or not. The ice-skimming flights should help model the interplay of winds and ice.
Sea-ice retreat is caused by the storms. Steven Cavallo is an atmospheric scientist at the University of Oklahoma. Up to 40% of annual ice losses can be attributed to the destruction of a couple hundred thousand square kilometers of ice by storms. It's pretty significant. And it's getting bigger.
Climate change doesn't seem to have created stronger or more frequent summertime storms. Warming causes the ice to be more vulnerable to storms. The melting of the ice is having a big impact.
The models show that the summer sea ice in the northern part of the planet will be lost by the year 2050. The million-dollar question is how that will affect the summer storms. The competing forces are working together. The open ocean is expected to provide more water and fuel for storms, but it would also reduce the low-level spin-ups that spark many storms by eliminating the temperature difference between the ocean and land.
They looked at scenarios from a set of models that were designed for an ice-freeArctic. The strength of the storms is determined by the predicted pressure. There were imported storms from lower latitudes that caused the number of storms to rise. It may not be all good news. The storms were more lasting without rough ice. That is what you care about when you are a fisherman in the northern part of the world.
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