How old is the sea ice in the Arctic, and why does that matter?
We’ve just released a new sea-ice age dataset covering 1991–2024. It helps researchers track the decline of older, thicker ice & improve climate studies, model evaluation & safe traffic in the region. @met.no
nersc.no/en/features/...
Eye-opening presentation about demographic decline from Jesús Fernández-Villaverde. He thinks population will peak and begin to fall in 2055, much earlier than UN projections.
This problem is solvable with policies that respect peoples autonomy.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e...
The tide seems to be finally turning on global coal, as both China and India are now adding enough clean energy to reduce their coal generation: www.carbonbrief.org/...
I recently had a chat with Bob Grove for the climate hour about Arctic climate and tipping points, its out now online and on the air climategkc.org/climate-hour/
The map shows the spatial pattern of median conditions for the selected month, while the lower panel tracks how the season may evolve at your chosen location.
You can:
• Jump between different ski resorts (like Myrkdalen in the screenshot)
• Switch to major Nordic cities
• Or just click anywhere on the map to get a local forecast time series for that spot
The tool uses ECMWF’s 51-member seasonal ensemble and summarises the range of possible conditions each month.
In the time series you see the 5th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 95th percentiles, so you get a sense of the spread.
Winter has arrived properly in Norway this week ❄️ After a few days of heavy snow it already feels like mid-season, so it’s time to look a bit further ahead.
I’ve built a small interactive tool to explore ECMWF seasonal snow forecasts for the Nordics:
climatecompass.shinyapps.io/Snow_Depth_F...
On car sizes
We are recruiting! (x2)
There are two permanent positions available in our climate dynamics and prediction group, so if either sounds interesting to you do apply, or share with your colleagues:
www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...
Sarcasm aside, it's perhaps worth pointing out that the evidence suggests that weather disasters reduce economic growth for decades - the idea that there's rapid bounceback, or even extra growth stimulated by recovery, has proved wrong
www.newscientist.com/article/mg23...
Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy:
www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...
A reality check for me was working with students on an internal carbon accounting platform that Bon App our food provider uses. Beef was less than 5% of our purchases but around 50% of our food emissions even with international work to be plant forward.
apnews.com/article/plan...
The real headline is there in the article:
“The wealthiest are increasing their wealth faster than any other group.”
That’s the story. Not the meaningless number.
So when we say the richest 1% hold $52 trillion, we just check out. It sounds like monopoly money.
We’re not wired to understand exponential scales — and that’s exactly how the story slips past us.
Who has a sense of what $52 trillion means?
It’s too big, too abstract. Even billion vs. million is a scale most people can’t intuitively grasp — a billion seconds is 31 years; a million seconds is 12 days.
Growing wealth inequality is devastating for societies.
But with headlines like “the wealth of the top 1% reached $52 trillion”, the topic gets ignored — because those numbers mean absolutely nothing to anyone.
I am happy to announce that we received major funding from Schmidt Sciences under their VICC program to study rapid #Permafrost Thaw Carbon Trajectories (PeTCaT). The 5-year project led by my team @awi.de partners with an international team to quantify how rapid thaw contributes to climate change.
Published today: our new paper showing a 44-year trend of increasing global wildfire disasters (fatalities and economic losses) due to climate change-induced extreme weather. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
By applying a tracking method to both climate models and satellite data, @davyclimate.bsky.social found that sea ice age is a more sensitive indicator of change than ice thickness or volume.
🧪🌊 Read the publication here: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....
Are you interested in seasonal forecasts and how they have advanced over the past two decades?
Chris O’Reilly (Univ. of Reading) led a new paper on exactly this: rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
I may have found my defining quote.
Pair this with my pinned post and you will see what I mean!
Thanks to the fantastic team at NERSC, Jakob Dörr, and Philipp Griewank.
If you’re working on climate dynamics, prediction, or sea ice processes, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how sea ice age could play a role in your work.
#Arctic #SeaIce #ClimatePrediction #ClimateModels #ESA #SAGE
This work also launches us into our new ESA project, SAGE, where we’ll dig deeper into how sea ice age can reshape the way we evaluate and improve climate models. Stay tuned. 🌍❄️
Most exciting: sea ice age reveals low-frequency variability in the Arctic (see Fig. 5 in our paper). This opens a new window into decadal-scale fluctuations — crucial for improving #ClimatePrediction systems.
For the first time, we applied the same ice-tracking algorithm to both model output & satellite observations. This fair, like-for-like comparison reduces long-standing biases and shows that sea ice age captures dynamics thickness & volume alone cannot.
Sea ice age is more than just a number — it integrates the dynamic + thermodynamic processes shaping Arctic sea ice. Unlike area or thickness, it can’t easily be tuned in models. Age emerges from the cumulative history of growth, melt & drift. A tough benchmark for climate models.
We have a new paper out today taking a fresh look at sea ice age, showing how this variable offers new insights into Arctic climate change:
A Fair Assessment of Sea Ice Age Reduces Bias and Gives New Insight to Arctic Sea Ice Dynamics
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
I'll be talking this afternoon about challenges in interpreting and making fair comparisons of sea ice age between climate models and observations, and demonstrating one way to resolve this using a common definition of sea ice age (paper out soon).
@signeaaboe.bsky.social kicking off the Sea ice Age (SAGE) project webinar to discuss current challenges and opportunities in using age to monitor sea ice change.
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
#ESA #SeaIce
