The European Space Agency satellite observations show that the Arctic has lost more than one third of summer ice volume in the last ten years, reports Medical Xpress.
The University of Washington has produced analysis reports for the past three years which estimate the volume of the summer sea-ice in the Arctic and the same has been confirmed with the new satellite observations.
The model from the University of Washington and the satellite observations show that the Arctic sea ice is one-fifth when compared to the volume in 1980, reports Medical Xpress.
"Other people had argued that 75 to 80 percent ice volume loss was too aggressive," said co-author Axel Schweiger, a polar scientist in the UW Applied Physics Laboratory. "What this new paper shows is that our ice loss estimates may have been too conservative, and that the recent decline is possibly more rapid."
The model developed at the University of Washington shows a monthly change in the arctic sea ice of 34 years. The Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System, or PIOMAS, is designed to work efficiently with weather records, sea- surface temperature and pictures from satellite to calculate the ice volume in the model. The results are then cross verified with the actual thickness and measurements of the sea ice from the submarines in the Arctic.
"Because the ice is so variable, you don't get a full picture of it from any of those observations," Schweiger said. "So this model is the only way to reconstruct a time series that spans multiple decades."
The model also verifies its measurements against the date collected by NASA's dedicated satellite, Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, launched in 2003. The last measurements showed the thickness of the sea ice across the Arctic to be 37 centimeters in spring of 2008, according to the report.
The model's predictions from 2008 till now show some significant numbers that may be hard to believe and raised questions regarding the loss of ice it displayed in the model.
"The reanalysis relies on a model, so some people have, justifiably, questioned it," Schweiger said. "These data essentially confirm that in the last few years, for which we haven't really had data, the observations are very close to what we see in the model. So that increases our confidence for the overall time series from 1979 to the present."
These findings are also published online in Geophysical Research Letters.
