Arctic Sea Ice Time Lapse from 1978 to 2009 using NSIDC data

31 05 2009

Jeff Id at the Air Vent has been doing some interesting work lately. Before the NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice anomaly plot went kaput due to failure of the satellite sensor channel they have been using, they had created a vast archive of single day gridded data packages for Arctic sea ice extent. Jeff plotted images from the data as viewed from directly over the North Pole. It took him over 15 hours of computational time. An example image is below.

30 Year Arctic Sea Ice - NSIDC NasaTeam Bootstrap

Jeff gathered up all the resultant plotted images and turned them into a movie, but placed them on the website “tinypic” where the movie won’t get much airplay.

I offered Jeff the opportunity to have it hosted on YouTube and posted here, where it would get far greater exposure and I completed the conversion this afternoon.

What I find most interesting is watch the “respiration” of Arctic Sea Ice, plus the buffeting of the sea ice escaping the Arctic and heading down the east coast of Greenland where it melts in warmer waters.

Jeff writes: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 191 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, oceans, sea ice

Divining images in the clouds

31 05 2009

Everyone see things in the clouds. People, animals, Christ on the cross,  UFO’s, angels, and even schizophrenically imagined chemical attacks by contrails. You name it, somebody has seen it. So when I was prodded with a news item that said “new cloud type defined” I was thinking “uh oh, here we go again”. It is a lot like cyclomania, as humans tend to assign patterns to randomly ordered observations of nature. Looking for meanings in the clouds isn’t much different than looking for meanings in the alignments of the stars and planets.

From ChattahBox and The UK Telegraph:

Click for a larger image

(ChattahBox)—Meteorologists around the world have taken notice of a new storm cloud on the horizon, literally. And if they have their way the dark and choppy cloud will take its rightful place among its more famous cousins, cumulus, cumulus, cirrus and nimbus.

Cloud gazing Meteorologists first noticed the stormy and billowy formation floating over the Scottish Highlands and above Snowdonia, Wales. The unique gray storm cloud was also spotted over Australia, the cornfields of Iowa and high above the Arctic Sea off the coast of Greenland.

A group in England dedicated to cloud watching, the Cloud Appreciation Society, became quite excited when viewing numerous photos of the new storm cloud floating in the atmosphere.

The Cloud appreciators describe the cloud as “…a bit like looking at the surface of a choppy sea from below,” said Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, and the first man to identify the new cloud. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 86 Comments »

Categories : earth, fun_stuff, weather

New Cycle 24 spots emerging

31 05 2009

Michael Ronayne writes:

To the right of the burned out pixel, a second Sunspot group, with two spots, is forming which can be seen in this image:

SOHO_MDI_053109

The burned out pixel between the two groups is a fairly common issue with SOHO, and they routinely “bake” the sensor to get rid of them. Sometimes people mistakenly interpret them as sunspots in this new age of counting sunspecks. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 117 Comments »

Categories : solar