The Approaching Storm in the Beaufort Sea

We've been following the approaching cyclone in the Arctic for a few days, and this morning the predictions are starting to come true. Out of all the various forecasting models we've looked at so far only ECMWF offers a "nowcast". That's the model's idea of what's happening in real time in the real world, and here's how it looked over the Arctic first thing this morning, as visualised by the Danish Meteorological Institute:

The Danish Meteorological Institute's surface pressure chart for July 23rd 2013

Apart from being zoomed in on the Arctic the isobars don't look too different to yesterday's ECMWF forecast for this morning, available from the MeteoCiel archives:

ECMWF SLP forecast for July 23rd 2013 from the July 22nd model run

That should give us some confidence that the ECMWF model's prediction for midnight tonight GMT will come to pass:

ECMWF SLP forecast for July 24th 2013 from the July 23rd model run

What is likely to be of most concern to the members of the two teams currently in small boats in the Arctic is, however, the wind speeds near the surface rather than the atmospheric pressure, and the effect those winds have on the ice. That information is a bit harder to come by. Obviously if you want to model what's going to happen to sea ice in the Arctic you need to model what's going to happen to the atmosphere just above the ice. The US Navy's NAVGEM model does just that, but the output is a bit hard to read when the isobars get packed closely together as they're predicted to do over the next 24 hours or so. However as luck would have it the ECMWF recently received a presentation on yet another forecasting model, called Polar WRF. This model has been specially designed to work better in the polar regions than more general purpose atmospheric models, and here is its forecast for midnight tonight:

Polar WRF SLP/Wind forecast for July 24th 2013 from the July 22nd model run

It's still rather hard to read, but hopefully if you click on the image above you will just about be able to make out all the little arrows with 2 or 3 "barbs" clustering around the cyclone which has a predicted central pressure of 979 millibars.

After all these assorted predictions you may well be wondering exactly what's happening at sea (or ice) level in the Beaufort Sea. As more luck would have it the webcam we showed you a couple of days ago is mounted on the same floating buoy as a weather station, which reports that the pressure is indeed dropping whilst the wind is rising:

O-Buoy 8 reports on the weather in the Beaufort Sea on July 23rd 2013

The waters of the Beaufort Sea are starting to look slightly agitated:

Image of the Beaufort Sea from O-Buoy 8 on the morning of July 23rd 2013