[Vision2020] PIOMAS "..to melt.sea ice... the amount losing on an annual basis... 86% of U.S. energy consumption."

[Ted Moffett]

PIOMAS is Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System.If I
understand this correctly, the following information from the Polar Science
Center at the University of Washington provides an easy to understand
perspective on the energy added to the Earth's climate system from
anthropogenic global warming, though this information quoted below does not
specifically mention AGW.

They calculate the added energy that is increasing rates of ice melt in
watts per square meter, in terms of flashlight bulbs.

Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

---------------------------------------
http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/
Content below from website above:
Perspective: Ice Loss and Energy

It takes energy to melt sea ice. How much energy? The energy required to
melt the 16,400 Km3 of ice that are lost every year (1979-2010 average)
from April to September as part of the natural annual cycle is about 5 x 10
21 Joules. For comparison, the U.S. Energy consumption for 2009 (
www.eia.gov/totalenergy) was about 1 x 1020 J. So it takes about the 50
times the annual U.S. energy consumption to melt this much ice every year.
This energy comes from the change in the distribution of solar radiation as
the earth rotates around the sun.

To melt the additional 280 km3 of sea ice, the amount we have have been
losing on an annual basis based on PIOMAS calculations, it takes roughly
8.6 x 1019 J or 86% of U.S. energy consumption.

However, when spread over the area  covered by Arctic sea ice, the
additional energy required to melt this much sea ice is actually quite
small. It corresponds to about 0.4 Wm-2 . That’s like leaving a very small
and dim flashlight bulb continuously burning on every square meter of
ice. Tracking
down such a small difference in energy is very difficult, and underscores
why we need to look at longer time series and consider the uncertainties in
our measurements and calculations.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20160829/dfc1b577/attachment.html>