arctic refreeze is stalling

-- Burning Earth Radio, November 2016 youtube

"There's three cyclone activity areas in the arctic; you have one off the north coast of Iceland, one strong one off the north coast of Norway, and another one up here at the north pole. There's a lot of strong winds associated with these cyclones.

We have a lot of wind activity at the surface associated with these cyclones. We can see why we're getting these winds -- we have all of this warm water coming up in the gulf stream coming up and pooling in the arctic. We have extremely warm waters here, hot spots up to 9.9C warmer than normal and very large warm pools 1.1C-2C above average. And what it's doing is bringing a lot of warm air with it, up into the arctic.

What's happening is that these low pressure areas are pulling cold air down off the arctic. Now you have the cold air pulled off the Greenland ice sheet, drained off Siberia...You can see this going back to the temperature map, you have the cold air extending into the southern latitudes here, and warm air extending very high into the arctic.

With a lot of these strong winds, you're going to get a lot of breaking up of the sea ice. You can see that a lot of this air is carrying a lot of moisture. What this is doing is that this is creating a lot of strange rain events in the arctic... We can see that there's this jet of precipitable water in the air that's coming up over Europe and getting pulled into the arctic, bringing rain.

With these high winds, these storms, we have a lot of wave action. For example, 4.5 meter waves off these Russian arctic islands, 9.9 meter waves off the coast of Norway, 3.9 meters near the north pole -- these are very big waves.

These waves are causing a lot of problems for the sea ice in the arctic. We have the warm water, a lot of wave activity -- the sea ice just doesn't have a chance. Looking at the sea ice graph, we can see is that the sea ice isn't doing too well this year. The sea ice is basically crashing, running into this brick wall of cyclone activity and warm air that's being pulled up into the arctic.

A lot of the air in the arctic this November is 20C warmer than average. Don't be fooled that 1C or 2C average warming doesn't make a difference.

These cyclones in the arctic -- we're only going to see more of this as the Earth warms. Eventually, this whole warm anomaly is going to connect across the arctic basin, and we'll see a lot of these storms raging around the arctic."