NSIDC has announced the discovery and recovery of space footage of Earth’s polar icecaps, dating back to 1964.
The recovered photographs have yielded some startling surprises, according to David Gallaher, technical services manager at NSIDC, bold mine:
In the Arctic, sea ice extent was larger in the 1960s than it is these days, on average. “It was colder, so we expected that,” Gallaher said. What the researchers didn’t expect were “enormous holes” in the sea ice, currently under investigation. “We can’t explain them yet,” Gallaher said.
“And the Antarctic blew us away,” he said. In 1964, sea ice extent in the Antarctic was the largest ever recorded, according to Nimbus image analysis. Two years later, there was a record low for sea ice in the Antarctic, and in 1969 Nimbus imagery, sea ice appears to have reached its maximum extent earliest on record.
When NASA launched Nimbus-1 50 years ago, the agency’s key goals were to test instruments that could capture images of clouds and other meteorological features, Gallaher said.
The Nimbus satellites dished up such excellent observations, NASA eventually handed over key technologies to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for use in weather forecasting, including hurricane forecasts.
But even with such success, data tapes and film that recorded Nimbus observations slipped through the cracks.
“At the time, the satellites’ real-time observations, including clouds, for example, were what people wanted most of all, for weather forecasting,” Gallaher said.
He and colleagues with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, tracked down old Nimbus film to a NOAA facility in Suitland Maryland, where they were stored for about 25 years, and then Asheville, North Carolina. There, hundreds of 35-millimeter film reels lay in an old storage facility.
With funding from NASA, the researchers located and made operational an old film reader that could digitize the images. The team figured out how to determine geographic location for each image, given the orbit of the satellite. And they’ve now made more than 250,000 images public.
Source: NSIDC press release. h/t to Eric Worrall
Video:
Links:
Check out and download Nimbus data.
Learn more about the data rescue project.
=====================================================
Note: I attempted to look at the files myself, and discoverd that the vidicon imagery is stored in Hierarchical Data Format (.hdf). If anyone wants to make use of it, they’ll need a viewer, which can be obtained here: http://www.hdfgroup.org/products/java/hdfview/index.html
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Just shows how very little we really know about climate. #humility needed.
Wow. An actual possibility of getting reliable satellite data (after a fashion) from the already remote past! One wonders how many current assumptions made about the state of the planet at that time this data will contradict. I’m guessing dozens. Demonstrating once again that we don’t really know much about the planetary state before roughly the 1970s, although there may be surprises such as this treasure trove waiting in somebody’s old bin, or in warehouse 42.
rgb
Anthony, this is some of the work that we assisted the NSIDC with for the High Resolution Infrared Radiometer data that NASA recovered from data tapes at the NSIDC.
Glad to see this finally going public…
Dennis, I had suspected as much, a pity they didn’t see fit to give you any credit in the PR.
They could find out a lot if they re-analyzed the ESMR data for snow/ice cover on E and re-analyzed the NEMS and SCAMS instruments on E & F for atmospheric temperature/snow ice data. You could push the satellite record for temperature back a good 5 years to the early 70s. Yeah, mashing the data together would be a problem, but still.
@denniswingo 8:19 am
Please tell us what happened with regard to ISEE-3.
The last WUWT post I can find about it is
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/15/breaking-news-on-the-isee-3-mission-it-may-not-be-lost-its-those-o-rings-again/
Which doesn’t sound promising.
If there is anything later in WUWT, it isn’t tagged well.
And this from C|Net Aug 10,
Somewhere in Mountain View, a group of civilians take over the ISEE-3 satellite using old radio parts bought on eBay. Today, they’re screening a live lunar flyby.
http://www.cnet.com/news/from-an-old-mcdonalds-ordinary-people-steer-nasa-satellite/
Found this:
ISEE-3 Post-Lunar Flyby Status and Modification of Mission Goals
Here is a link to my latest post on the subject.
https://denniswingo.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/isee-3-post-lunar-flyby-status-and-modification-of-mission-goals/
Dennis, …is there anything to be gotten from the older TIROS imagery? I remember seeing that on TV every once in awhile, even in the early 1960s.
Sine
David Gallaher from the NSIDC is the world expert on this and there is an AGU presentation that he made on this.
I want to emphasize that the NSIDC folks are good people and want to do the right thing for science. The AVCS film was found in a room open to the weather at the federal records center and Walt Meir and his group got the funding to get all of this digitized and updated for modern scientific study.
As much as I am a skeptic and as much as I know about some of the crap that passes for science and climate science I want to say without any equivocation that the work that Walt and his group has done is first rate. One thing that I will say is that whenever these guys publish something they get a proctology exam from ALL sides of the issue. The politicization of climate science makes conscientious scientists jobs very difficult these days.
What do we do with the drunken sailor, sorry so called experts, who doesn’t know that what’s seen on image is the effect of the worst sea ice calving we know of year 1956. More than 10 000 ice berg was “born” in Arctic as well as Antarctic that year. Not to mention the effect in Northern Hemisphere of the warm summer 1959 due to this + Arctic’s angle re. sun under pre-summer before.
Been written numerous of papers as well as books and articles over the years about 1956.
1958/59 was of course the International Geophysical Year, timed to coincide with a sunspot cycle maximum (spot numbers) and by sheer HS luck, it turned out to be the highest recorded sunspot numbers in all of sunspot record history. Subsequently, for several 11 year cycles, the sunspot numbers stood at higher than average, numbers. More recently, we have of course seen a quieter sun.
Is that real sunspots, or Sears sunspots? Are they Lief Approved? It’s very dangerous to assert that 1958/1959 was anything more than a run of the mill not-so-grand maximum these days, and that the subsequent cycles were anything more than high the way that they were many times before in the existing sunspot record.
And I gotta say, that isn’t unreasonable, given all of the data. He’s convinced me he’s probably right. At the very least, anybody who wants to assert that he is wrong has some explaining (of various magnetic measurements) to do.
rgb
rgb,
Did you notice that in his recent paper Leif (and coauthors) said that while there was not a modern grand maximum that there were 5 of 6 solar cycles in a row that had high numbers and that this was unprecedented in the last XXX years? So a modern record cumulative run of maximums ….. That still seems potentially relevant.
Prof rgb @ur momisugly 2:50:
“Is that real sunspots, or Sears sunspots?”
Your Zappa reference is awesome.
That was gravity and plasticity.
What happens at the glacier/ground interface is only speculation.
No it isn’t. It was 15 years ago. But that’s completely proven now what happens. No speculation. And it was due to Archaological methods it was proven!
Makes you wonder how many Arctic overflight photos are lurking around waiting to be ‘discovered’!
I’m afraid they might use the ‘new data’ to ‘cool’ up the past even more.
Ministry of truth must have something to do…
““And the Antarctic blew us away,” he said. In 1964, sea ice extent in the Antarctic was the largest ever recorded, according to Nimbus image analysis. Two years later, there was a record low for sea ice in the Antarctic, and in 1969 Nimbus imagery, sea ice appears to have reached its maximum extent earliest on record.”
So, does this mean it was worse than we though, even before we thought about it?
Heh. That’s the routine in climate science.
Was the film stored next to the Ark of Covenant?
REPLY: Yes, by “top men” -Anthony
Bam!
Ark of the Covenant
Those “big holes” in the ice are interesting, because Russian sources from the 1940’s through 1960’s talk about polynyas at high latitudes that remained open even in winter (se e. g: Uspenskiy, S. M.: Žizn v vysokich širotach).
We haven’t seen any of those recently.
The rapid rise in Arctic temperatures during the first half of the century could only be explained by increased heat ventilating from the ice and as such predicted these holes.
http://mclean.ch/climate/Arctic_1920_40.htm
Farging iceholes!
I do wonder if some of the more obtuse climate debtors have modelled themselves on Roman Moroni. You could argue they do to science what Mr. Moroni did to the English language 😉
You know how to catch polar bears ? Dig a hole through the ice and lay a row of peas around the perimeter … when the polar bear comes up for a pea, kick it in the icehole. 😉
“Farging iceholes!”
Oh no you di-ent!
Interesting, vidicon tubes were used in some of the early CCTV cameras. You just don’t see that word tossed about very often. Kinda like Klystron 🙂
Yaahhg! KLYSTRON 9 make me cringe.
http://www.baynews9.com/content/news/baynews9/weather/klystron-9-radar.html
We still use Klystrons every day. Varian Medical Systems incorporated that technology into the design of their high-energy linear accelerator (for Radiation Onocology)… and have been using it for over 30 years. It works great in our industry. 🙂
I would add that if this device used a vidicon tube for imagery, they are subject to burn-in and what you see may not actually be what was viewed at the time of the image capture.
burn in only happens if the vidicon is left on the same exact scene constantly. These were polar orbiting satellites, so the scene always changed.
First Klystron I worked with was on a missile site overlooking Anchorage from the top of a mountain in the nearby Chugiak range.
We drove it up to the site in the back of a 5 ton truck, used a crane to insert it into the system, and then had to wait for 24hrs for the filaments to warm up before we could start testing it.
Klystrons were VERY cool…
Still have any connections to AK? There is a group here restoring parts of that site. They’d love to hear from you!
Dan L
There are also submarine sonar data from the 1950s.
Russian ballistic missile subs hiding in their Arctic Ocean bastion rely on polynyas for launch.
Are there any ex-nuke crew who are able to discuss the extent to which our submarine fleet logged water temperature data from the various operational depths? If such data exist is it “warehoused” in unclassified files that the public might access? Both USSR and US subs regularly visited these waters so it seems worth a little digging.
If NASA/NOAA had known what these images contained they probably would have been classified “Top Secret” and never would have seen the light of day.
Wow… He makes is sound like the Arctic and Antarctic were so dynamic, in the pre-warming era.
I know… people back then were so unenlightened.
Just be glad that we have the Yamal Tree to remind us that up until the Industrial Revolution, nothing ever changed. Ever.
Today this would be called rotten ice and unprecedented. Send more money.
It’s funny (strange) that no one tried to retrieve those images ten years ago. Or twenty. You’d think that retrieval would have been at the top of a scientist’s To-Do list, if he wanted to find out what’s (been) happening.
Nobody wants to know what’s been happening.
Rewriting history is No 1 priority.
why? when you could ask for a truckload of money to build a climate computer model, and the model would tell you not only what it looked like then, but also in the future? DOE labs had these supercomputers not doing much as the nuclear weapons design programs were slowing down and dissappearing.
Its only in the last dozen years or so that we know those models dont work and the arbitrary fine tuning a parameters can be used to give any output desired.
Oh, dear! Someone will have to adjust downward the ice coverage of the arctic for dates prior to the late 1960’s. Got to increase the standard deviation, too. Uncertainty… such a pesky beast.
Not to fear. There are people at NOAA well versed in changing the historical record.
NSIDC also made a big deal about that 1964 Antarctic maximum in the published paper written by Meier and colleagues last year, based on this same data:
Meier, W. N., Gallaher, D., and G. C. Campbell. 2013. New estimates of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent during September 1964 from recovered Nimbus I satellite imagery. The Cryosphere 7:699–705. doi:10.5194/tc-7-699-2013. http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/699/2013/tc-7-699-2013.html
I commented about how they downplayed the Arctic ice extent revelation they made in that paper, announced in an NSIDC “monthly highlights” article, vs the Antarctic data, in June of last year:
http://polarbearscience.com/2013/06/16/nsidc-says-the-sea-ice-minimum-in-1964-was-not-different-from-1979-1981-or-2001/
Here is what I said then:
” Meier et al. estimate that the Arctic sea ice minimum in 1964 was 6.90 ± 0.3 million km2. This is not far off the average extent for 1979-2000, which is 6.04 ± 0.55 million km2.
They state:
“Overall the, the 1964 estimate is reasonably consistent with the 1979-2000 conditions, with the 1964 estimate falling within the range of extents during the passive microwave era (Fig. 7). This suggests that September extent in the Arctic may have been generally stable through the 1960s and early 1970s, though more years of data are need to confirm this.”
Odd that Meier et al. would conclude “stability” through the 60s and 70s on the basis of one data point, given how remarkably variable sea ice has been since 1979. Because it wasn’t higher than 1979? They don’t say.
Nevertheless, they continue with this remarkable caveat:
“On the other hand, the estimate is considerably lower than form the UK Hadley Centre (Rayner et al. 2003); even after adjustments to be consistent with the passive microwave record (Meier et al. 2012), the extent of 8.28 million km2 is much higher than the estimate from Nimbus I. This may reflect bias in the Hadley estimates or limitations in the ability to detect the ice edge in Nimbus I imagery.”
Interestingly enough, this disparity between the Hadley Centre estimate – a number now ensconced in the peer-reviewed literature – was not deemed worthy of mention in their formal conclusions. Instead, they focus on the finding that “1964 Antarctic ice extent is likely higher than any year observed from 1972 to 2012.”
Susan Crockford, PolarBearScience
Yes it is odd to conclude so much. Especially when they have contradictory data showing very little thin ice in early satellite records prior to the official satellite record in 1979.
For a collection of reports on changing artic conditions here is a good reference.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/polar-meltdown/
Propaganda Alert: CAGW advocates will now trumpet that Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice are even more diminished than previously thought.
Headline “Newly Discovered Polar Images Confirm Ravages of Global Warming”
“We can’t explain them yet”
It appears the list of “we can’t explain” items grows larger every year.
I had suspected as much, a pity they didn’t see fit to give you any credit in the PR
I really did not do much with the AVCS stuff, that was all the NSIDC. Our principal contribution was with the High Resolution Infrared Radiometer Data. I think that Walt Meir and his crew are in a very difficult position, trying to do the right thing for science while under pressure to be politically correct. I have nothing but praise for the work that they have done with the Nimbus data….
we used to thumb our noses at the (former) soviet union for the same thing. unreliable reports because they were first filtered by Political Commissars. Pravda became important not for waht it said, but for what it didn’t say.
eventually the system collapse due to the gap between “official” truth and “actual” truth. everyone was throwing money at “official” problems, while actual problems were ignored.
sort of like the gap between climate models and actual temperatures. governments are rushing headlong to solve global warming, because the official models tell us warming is happening, even though actual warming stopped a long time ago.
The realization that the Warmists views on climate are as fictional as “Happy Days” was to the 1950s will stun them some day…
For those wondering about the ISEE-3 Project….
https://denniswingo.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/isee-3-post-lunar-flyby-status-and-modification-of-mission-goals/
We are sending out a lot of stuff this week for those who donated for the patches. Anthony has my permission to reblog here….
… Confirming the lack of interest in much of the “climate science community” in looking at *actual data* (vs. scary “computer simulations”). I doubt the existence of these tapes was much of a secret. At lest they have (finally) been found.
“We can’t explain them yet,” Gallaher said.
====
oh please…the extent was larger “of course”….but we can’t explain the holes
If these morons could explain it…..they would have know it was there all along
Is there overlap with the more modern 1979 forward data so that a calibration can be done?
Dr Mann, is that you?
Haha, ya, that’s kinda what I was thinking. But seriously, are we comparing apples to apples?