International Articles on Global Warming

2016 Climate Trends Continue to Break Records

Two key climate change indicators -- global surface temperatures and Arctic sea ice
extent -- have broken numerous records through the first half of 2016, according to
NASA analyses of ground-based observations and satellite data.
Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month
globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880, according to
scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The sixmonth period from January to June was also the planet's warmest half-year on
record, with an average temperature 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit)
warmer than the late nineteenth century.
Each of the first six months of 2016 set a record as the warmest respective month
globally in the modern temperature record, which dates to 1880. Meanwhile, five of
the first six months set records for the smallest monthly Arctic sea ice extent since
consistent satellite records began in 1979.
This video is public domain and can be downloaded from the Scientific Visualization
Studio.
Five of the first six months of 2016 also set records for the smallest respective
monthly Arctic sea ice extent since consistent satellite records began in 1979,
according to analyses developed by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland. The one exception, March, recorded the second
smallest extent for that month.
While these two key climate indicators have broken records in 2016, NASA scientists
said it is more significant that global temperature and Arctic sea ice are continuing
their decades-long trends of change. Both trends are ultimately driven by rising
concentrations of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere.
The extent of Arctic sea ice at the peak of the summer melt season now typically
covers 40 percent less area than it did in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Arctic sea
ice extent in September, the seasonal low point in the annual cycle, has been
declining at a rate of 13.4 percent per decade.
Chunks of sea ice, melt ponds and open water are all seen in this image captured at
an altitude of 1,500 feet by the NASA's Digital Mapping System instrument during
an Operation IceBridge flight over the Chukchi Sea on Saturday, July 16, 2016.
Credits: NASA/Goddard/Operation IceBridge
"While the El Nio event in the tropical Pacific this winter gave a boost to global
temperatures from October onwards, it is the underlying trend which is producing
these record numbers," GISS Director Gavin Schmidt said.
Previous El Nio events have driven temperatures to what were then record levels,
such as in 1998. But in 2016, even as the effects of the recent El Nio taper off,
global temperatures have risen well beyond those of 18 years ago because of the
overall warming that has taken place in that time.

The first six months of 2016 were the warmest six-month period in NASA's modern
temperature record, which dates to 1880.
Credits: NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies
The global trend in rising temperatures is outpaced by the regional warming in the
Arctic, said Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist at NASA Goddard.
"It has been a record year so far for global temperatures, but the record high
temperatures in the Arctic over the past six months have been even more extreme,"
Meier said. "This warmth as well as unusual weather patterns have led to the record
low sea ice extents so far this year."
NASA tracks temperature and sea ice as part of its effort to understand the Earth as
a system and to understand how Earth is changing. In addition to maintaining 19
Earth-observing space missions, NASA also sends researchers around the globe to
investigate different facets of the planet at closer range. Right now, NASA
researchers are working across the Arctic to better understand both the processes
driving increased sea ice melt and the impacts of rising temperatures on Arctic
ecosystems.
NASA's long-running Operation IceBridge campaign last week began a series of
airborne measurements of melt ponds on the surface of the Arctic sea ice cap. Melt
ponds are shallow pools of water that form as ice melts. Their darker surface can
absorb more sunlight and accelerate the melting process. IceBridge is flying out of
Barrow, Alaska, during sea ice melt season to capture melt pond observations at a
scale never before achieved. Recent studies have found that the formation of melt
ponds early in the summer is a good predictor of the yearly minimum sea ice extent
in September.
"No one has ever, from a remote sensing standpoint, mapped the large-scale depth
of melt ponds on sea ice," said Nathan Kurtz, IceBridges project scientist and a sea
ice researcher at NASA Goddard. "The information well collect is going to show how
much water is retained in melt ponds and what kind of topography is needed on the
sea ice to constrain them, which will help improve melt pond models."
Operation IceBridge is a NASA airborne mission that has been flying multiple
campaigns at both poles each year since 2009, with a goal of maintaining critical
continuity of observations of sea ice and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.
At the same time, NASA researchers began in earnest this year a nearly decadelong, multi-faceted field study of Arctic ecosystems in Alaska and Canada. The

Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) will study how forests, permafrost

and other ecosystems are responding to rising temperatures in the Arctic, where
climate change is unfolding faster than anywhere else on the planet.
ABoVE consists of dozens individual experiments that over years will study the
region's changing forests, the cycle of carbon movement between the atmosphere
and land, thawing permafrost, the relationship between fire and climate change,
and more.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/climate-trends-continue-to-breakrecords
NASA Nears Finish Line of Annual Study of Changing Antarctic Ice
Operation IceBridge, NASAs airborne survey of changes in polar ice, is closing in on
the end of its eighth consecutive Antarctic deployment, and will likely tie its 2012
campaign record for the most research flights carried out during a single Antarctic
season.
We are probing the most remote corners of Spaceship Earth to learn more about
changes that affect all of us locally, such as how ice sheets are contributing to sea
level rise, said NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman on her very first flight
over Antarctica with the IceBridge team on Nov. 17. At NASA we explore: not only
space, but also our home planet.
Operation IceBridge is particularly well suited to measure changes in polar ice: it
carries probably the most innovative and precise package of instruments ever flown
over Antarctica, Newman said.
"This campaign was possibly the best Antarctic campaign IceBridge has ever had,
said John Sonntag, IceBridge mission scientist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "We flew as many flights as we did in our best prior
campaigns down here, and we certainly got more science return out of each flight
than we have before, due to steadily improving instrumentation and also to some
exceptionally good weather in the Weddell Sea that favored our sea ice flights."
Antarctica is heading into austral summer, a period of rapid sea ice melt in the
Southern Ocean. But this year the sea ice loss has been particularly swift and the
Antarctic sea ice extent is currently at the lowest level for this time of year ever
recorded in the satellite record, which began in 1979.

An iceberg surrounded by sea ice in the Bellingshausen Sea, as seen from aboard
NASA's DC-8 scientific aircraft Oct. 22, 2016.
Credits: NASA/John Sonntag

Large rift near the Pine Island Glacier tongue, West Antarctica, as seen during an
IceBridge flight on Nov. 4, 2016.
Credits: NASA/Nathan Kurtz

NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman is interviewed by a film crew shortly

before departing on her first Operation IceBridge science flight out of Punta Arenas,
Chile, on Nov. 17, 2016.
Credits: NASA/Maria-Jose Vias
"We flew over the Bellingshausen Sea many times during this campaign and saw
that areas that are typically covered by sea ice were just open water this year, said
Nathan Kurtz, IceBridges project scientist and a sea ice researcher at NASA
Goddard. "It is a reminder that it is important that we continue the time series of
IceBridge measurements in the area so that we can measure both changes in sea
ice extent and in sea ice thickness to assess the future trajectory of the ice pack
and its impact on the climate.
IceBridge expanded its reach this year, covering a vast swath of Antarctica from
the Ruppert Coast in West Antarctica to Recovery Glacier in the eastern half of the
continent, plus the Weddell and Bellingshausen seas. Additionally, IceBridge flew
twice over the South Pole, an area rarely measured since satellites dont overfly it.
During its six weeks of operations from its base in Punta Arenas, in the
southernmost tip of Chile, IceBridge carried out 24 flights over Antarctica. In total,
IceBridges airborne laboratory and team flew 308 hours.
"We are very satisfied that we flew all of our baseline flights and most of our highpriority ones, said Joe MacGregor, IceBridge deputy project scientist and

glaciologist at Goddard. "We flew to places we had never surveyed comprehensively

before or had only flown once, like the Abbott Ice Shelf, and revisited some of our
classic targets, like the ever-changing Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers.
One of this years missions flew over a massive rift in the Antarctic Peninsulas
Larsen C Ice Shelf. Ice shelves are the floating parts of ice streams and glaciers, and
they buttress the grounded ice behind them; when ice shelves collapse, the ice
behind accelerates toward the ocean, where it then adds to sea level rise. Larsen C
neighbors a smaller ice shelf that disintegrated in 2002 after developing a rift
similar to the one now growing in Larsen C.
The IceBridge scientists measured the Larsen C fracture to be about 70 miles long,
more than 300 feet wide and about a third of a mile deep. The crack completely
cuts through the ice shelf but it does not go all the way across it once it does, it
will produce an iceberg roughly the size of the state of Delaware.
"Its a large rift on an ice shelf whose future we are curious about. Inevitably, when
you see it in satellite imagery or from a plane, you wonder what is going to happen
when it breaks off, MacGregor said. "However, large icebergs calve from ice
shelves regularly and they normally do not lead to ice-shelf collapse. The growth of
this rift likely indicates that the portion of the ice shelf downstream of the rift is no
longer holding back any grounded ice.
As with every field season, IceBridge collaborated with other science teams: this
year, IceBridge flew under one of ESAs (the European Space Agency) CryoSat-2
satellites tracks and coordinated with a team from the British Antarctic Survey that
was also conducting aerial surveys of the frozen continent.
"The British group began their campaign after we did, but targeted some of the
areas we flew with a similar instrument suite. Once we process our data and they
process theirs, well be able to compare our measurements and combine them to
form a better picture of Antarctica, MacGregor said. "We also flew over their oncontinent bases, providing them with images of nearby areas as they prepare their
operations for this field season.
During her stay in Punta Arenas, Newman met with Chilean researchers and
students to discuss future opportunities with Chile.
We love working with our Chilean colleagues: from the northern Atacama desert for
astrobiology research to its southernmost city, Punta Arenas, to study Antarctic land
and sea ice, Newman said. Given this strong partnership, were looking forward to
exciting future collaborations.
In addition to the NASA deputy administrator, IceBridge also welcomed U.S.
Ambassador to Chile Carol Perez. Other guest participation included visitors from
the State Department and U.S. Embassy in Chile; six U.S. teachers currently living
and teaching in Chile; a Facebook representative; a visual artist; two photographers;
and several journalists from various media outlets.
IceBridge researchers and Maggie Kane, a high school science teacher from
Colorado who was embedded in the Antarctic campaign through the Arctic Research
Consortium of the United States PolarTREC program, participated in 70 chats
directly from the plane with classrooms in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Chile,
reaching over 1,800 students. Kane also gave several talks on IceBridges research
to Chilean students in Punta Arenas and Santiago.

The mission of Operation IceBridge is to collect data on changing polar land and sea
ice and maintain continuity of measurements between NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land
Elevation Satellite (ICESat) missions. The original ICESat mission ended in 2009, and
its successor, ICESat-2, is scheduled for launch in 2018. Operation IceBridge, which
began in 2009, is currently funded until 2019. The planned overlap with ICESat-2
will help scientists validate the satellites measurements. For more about Operation
IceBridge and to follow future campaigns, visit:

NASA's Operation IceBridge website

Banner image: The northernmost Antarctic Peninsula, viewed from the northeast
aboard the IceBridge research aircraft on an Oct. 17, 2016, flight toward the
mission's inshore survey line in the western Weddell Sea. Credit: NASA/John
Sonntag
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-nears-finish-line-of-annual-studyof-changing-antarctic-ice
Last Updated: Nov. 19, 2016
Editor: Rob Garner