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
Don’t panic! The IPCC is taking care of this.
http://www.amazon.com/Wite-Out-Extra-Coverage-Correction-Fluids/dp/B001DVXNYK
Oh NOES! It’s worse than we thought. Our CO2 is time traveling to kill the earth quicker.
for HDF
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/panoply/
quick and easy.
getting HDF into R is harder, gdalulities helps
“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.”
OK, so the recent satellite records are now being replaced by the early satellite records.
I wonder how radical the sea levels changed between 1964 and all that melting in 1966 before we got back to the 1969 record.
Bet the fluctuation was really substantial.
Or not.
From the 1974 Time Mag “ice age approaching” article:
“When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.”
The graphic accompanying the article contrasted the expansion of the Arctic sea ice extent from May 26, 1969 to May 26 of 1974.
With the new data here, and what Anthony alerted all to (well, all eccept the national media) to in 2012 . .
“I came across a number of maps showing Arctic ice extend from 1893 to 1961 collected by DMI in “Nautisk Meteorologisk Aarbog”. Each year DMI have collected information on sea ice extend so that normally each of the months April, May, June, July and August ice extend was published.” Here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/02/cache-of-historical-arctic-sea-ice-maps-discovered/
. . . one should be able to construct a rather accurate account of the natural variability in cycles of sea ice extent of the Arctic region.
I’m sure the Russian navy has disposed of its stockpile of “thermite” bombs used to melt ice by now
Wow cool stuff. I’m glad the film wasn’t destroyed.
Shazam !!!
More like Bazinga!
“enormous holes” in the sea ice!?! – Congratulations on discovering something that has long been known. With over 40 deployments north of the Arctic Circle aboard U.S. & Brit nuclear subs (’75 – ’09), I can categorically testify that this has always been so.
The September 1964 Arctic sea ice extent at 6.90M km2 also indicates that all the historic sea ice reconstructions estimating the Arctic minimums use to be at 10M, or 9M or 8M in the past were just way-out faulty alarmist propaganda.
Some of the reconstructions are being fixed now but you will often still see the out-of-date wrongly estimated ones. Point out this fact whenever you see someone try to post one.
This is great news!
Thermite bombs, and large holes in the ice? Gads, it’s The Thing all over again! That was one really huge fricking spaceship stuck in the ice, eh?
A couple of weeks ago I detailed in this article hundreds of science and news reports demonstrating that arctic ice levels in the 1920 to 1940 period was not dissimilar to today.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/22/historic-variations-in-arctic-sea-ice-part-two/
Tonyb
Well, it is official. The Northwest Passage will never again be navigated!!
The various islands of the archipelago are separated from one another and the Canadian mainland by a series of Arctic waterways collectively known as the Northwest Passages or Northwestern Passages.[3] Parliament at Ottawa renamed it the “Canadian Northwest Passage” in motion M-387 passed unanimously 2 December 2009.[4][5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Passage#cite_note-5
There is another large, unused source of sea-ice imagery: the Corona satellite images from 1960 to 1972 which are in the public domain. They are of course quite spotty in coverage, but of much better quality than the Nimbus images and can be used to extend and verify the Nimbus data. The first satellite image ever recovered in August 1960 for example clearly shows sea-ice conditions off Chukotka.
I’ve always said that sea-ice extent is almost completely irrelevant, all it does is reflect the overall state of other processes. Neither side should be crowing about sea ice extent, IMO, since it shows almost exactly nothing useful.
However, this is exactly the sort of thing that demonstrates the major flaw in “climate science”. There is absolutely no possible way that a trace gas like CO2, in the quantities we’re talking about, can possibly unbalance the planet in such a short time. Those who think it’s possible have no sense of scale, at all. Showing previous fluctuations can only undermine the alarmist cause.
Also, I love seeing these reminders that even in the 60s, when technology was so absolutely primitive, useful data was being gathered and organized for us to find in the future. Recently I’ve been watching a lot of declassified old nuclear information on YouTube, and it is either fascinating or terrifying depending on your perspective.
I wish alarmists were as fascinated by Science as I am.
Warmists are already explaining the recent polar vortex on low arctic sea ice levels in a new “study” that just came out. Seems like open water affects the jet stream according to the quickly-produced study. How convenient. They can explain anything… warm, cold, wet, dry… with the evil CO2. Nothing can upset their models… nothing.
I wonder if the good folks at the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project could lend them a hand?
http://www.moonviews.com/
Paul
We did. We translated all of the Nimbus High Resolution Infrared Radiometer (HRIR) from tapes to modern netcdf-4 standards….
Thanks for thinking of us.
Anthony – Just wanted to say “Thank you” for this. I was one of the operations engineers and video analysts for the Nimbus 1, 2, 3 and 4 spacecraft. Haven’t seen that video for a lot of years. I’ve suspected that it would be applicable to the “climate conversation” but didn’t know where it went.
Jim, the honor is mine sir. Thanks for your service to science.
Anthony – That’s where I learned about “science”. I accept nothing less, especially from the Church of AGW. Problem is, they never learned what “science” is or should be. It makes for difficult conversations. Well, difficult for them, anyway. Keep up the good work.
Check Joe bastardi’s article in the Patriot Post, 24Jun13. Shows a photo of a US sub on the surface within a large gap in the ice at the North Pole back in 1962. I seem to recall other surfaced sub photos at the pole posted on this site in the past. There are photos of Soviet subs also somewhere on the Net. As Tom Jones sang, “It’s Not Unusual”.
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/18796
RGB at Duke
Bob,
The sunspot maximum of the late 50’s was epic in its effect on HF amateur radio communications. It is still remembered fondly by older hams who were active then. By the criteria of effects on Earth’s ionosphere, this one is probably the biggest to be observed in the radio era.
Goes without saying but I’ll say it. Someone needs to capture and save these images in order to document the inevitable “scientific” adjustments and “smoothing” of the images that will be necessary for the public to understand the horrific CAGW “evidence” contained in them.
Google Submarines and Arctic, Polar, or North Pole. The USS Nautilus (SSN-571) went the North Pole in August 1958! There are many photos of the Nautilus and other Subs at the North Pole in open water with dates – some even in winter. The photos about the ice coverage are out there, they can be found and they prove the whole AGW scam. They may not provide details of the extent of the ice coverage, but should provide an idea of the amount. The log books are also available and contain the exact location, time, date, and even water/local temperatures – good project for a budding research scientist looking for the truth. There should be a good correlation to the number of trips, the route and time spent there in a year/season and the ice extant.
I’m appalled at NASA having not properly archived all of the stuff they created. I felt the same way about the attempted recovery of a 60s satellite – the difficulty in finding all the data. Almost very newspaper, major or minor has a record of its papers going back, in some cases, a couple of centuries…. The Spectator in the UK back to 1828 and I’m sure many earlier.
Meier et al. gave an estimate for september 1964 arctic sea ice extent (6.9 million sq. km.) using Nimbus I data.
Now that they have finished with Nimbus II and Nimbus III, I think that it would be really interesting to get an estimate for september 1966 and 1969 arctic SIE as well.