Greenland’s Summer Melt Late Starting
By Paul Homewood
I mentioned back in March that the winter in Greenland had been dominated by high pressure systems, bringing cold, dry weather. As a result, the lack of snow meant the ice cap had added less mass than usual.
As weather would have it, the situation has reversed this month, with low pressure bringing lots of snow. Consequently Greenland has seen record amounts of mass gain on some days, and even now the ice mass continues to grow well after the time when it should have begun its summer melt:
http://polarportal.dk/en/greenland/surface-conditions/
Looking at the weather forecast for the week ahead, it does not look like there will be much change. So I suspect the ice mass will continue to grow until the end of this month, and probably return to the 1981-2010 average .
Summer melt usually ends in mid August, so this year’s may end up being one of the shortest on record.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The DMI temperature North of 80′ has been below average for the last week or so, and has rarely gone abover average in any summer for the last 5 or 6 years. I watch Greenland and Arctic every two or three days and and the Promice weather stations have been showing some impressively low temperatures over the winter, especially the one in central Greenland.
Maybe a silly question as I know very little about snow, but why is there a gain in the average surface mass balance. a layman might expect that the average would go back to zero in August. The balance graphic also seems to show a gain of about 2 GT /d, or 700 GT/y which agrees with the other graphic. Where does the extra snow go: is Greenland getting deeper in snow every year?
“Where does the extra snow go: is Greenland getting deeper in snow every year?”
Yes. See WWII P-38 Discovered Under 300 Feet of Ice in Greenland
https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a22575917/wwii-p-38-discovered-under-300-feet-of-ice-in-greenland/
The mass balance calculation does not include calving of glaciers
He is right that water demand will exceed supply, because no new reservoirs have been built.
On everything else he is wrong.
…..and, for the record, I live in Edinburgh and despite the BBC propaganda about the lovely hot lockdown weather, this had been one of the coldest springs here that I can remember. We have had little sunshine and have been subject to a constant northerly airstream (which, incidentally, always brings clearer air and explains why greens have been rejoicing in clear views. It has nothing to do with reduced co2 emissions). The temperature here today in 14c and it has risen above 20c on only three days his year so far.
The northerly flow is part of the natural climatic shift to meridional weather patterns. Expect this pattern to go on for the next 30 years. Examples of the effect of this part of the natural 60-year climate cycle include:
1. Heavy spring snow still lying on the mountains of Norway.
https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=0.9037934768863405,56.25062684572072,17.778793476886342,64.49476747072072&t=2020-06-18-T05%3A47%3A37Z&e=true
2. Massive Saharan dust storms associated with the strengthening of the North East trade winds as advected air moves south towards the convection storms of the West African location of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (doldrums)..
https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=-48.08890598200873,0.7575509878022437,19.411094017991267,33.73411348780225&t=2020-06-17-T05%3A47%3A37Z&e=true
The wind patterns associated with these early summer advection dust storms can be studied on Ventusky
https://www.ventusky.com/?p=21.9;-13.9;4&l=rain-3h&t=20200617/1200
Similar here in the South West of Ireland. Although we had a very dry May with a warm week at the end of the month, the rest of the Spring was cool overall. June has been overcast and average so far but distinctly chilly over the last few days.
Despite that two different people remarked to me yesterday that the day was exceptionally warm for June. The maximum temperature yesterday was around 17°! It seems that for many people nowadays CAGW narrative trumps actual lived experience.
Has the BBC reported this strange phenomenon called weather.
This prognostication didn’t age well:
Paul
Expect a year on year fall in temperatures in the long and short term soon. The hiatus is the turning point, the next change is an increasing rate of decline, as with all the other cycles that have gone before.
My question is related but not directly. However VERY important when comparing the end of the current warm phase of the short term 1Ka composite climate cycle with the MWP. As per link
Is the Greenland location where the Vikings are known to have farmed from the records and archeological remains still unfarmable permafrost as I have read, but don’t know?
If YES then something is wrong with either the 0.84 deg warming since 1850 or the ice core records to 1850, which suggest it should be warmer than the MWP. As I read it. Thanks for any help.
Don Easterbrook clarifies things here:
https://kaltesonne.de/temperatures-over-the-past-10000-years/
There is a lot of multidecadal variation, so we find that current temperatures are similar to the 1930s, while 1970s/80s were much cooler. Such cycles must have existed in the past, so it is more appropriate to look at the average of the warm/cool spells
The graph over 11,000 years appears to be from Alley 2000 and is of a low resolution that doesn’t capture century-to-century variations that the red end spike shows.
Also it is incorrect to extend smoothed graphs beyond their formal endpoints which is why the original graph stops around 1850 — otherwise it implies knowledge of future trends.
Further, the twentieth century average was, eyeballing, only about 0.2C – 0.3C above 1850:
https://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1850/to:2000/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1850/to:2000/trend