atmosphere – Hot Topic

A year’s weather in 8 minutes (and other things)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2Gy8V0Dv78&w=480]

From the team at EUTMETSAT: all the weather of 2013 as seen from the world’s weather-watching satellites. It’s an HD video, so a slow download on my rural NZ treacleband internet connection, but worth every second of the wait. I strongly recommend clicking the full screen button (bottom right corner), and multiple viewings. Fascinating, with an informative commentary. And, because we haven’t had an open thread for a while, please take this opportunity to wax lyrical on any climate-related topic currently in the news…

Any way the wind blows: earth’s atmosphere animated

This is just brilliant: click on the image to see an animation of atmospheric flows around the planet, coded by Cameron Beccario, using forecast data from NOAA ((Data updates every three hours)). It’s mesmerising and addictive, but educational and informative too. Click on the “earth” on the bottom left of the web page, and a menu pops up that allows you to choose different layers of the atmosphere (explained on the about page). Click on 250mb to see the jet streams that guide storm tracks. This is what they looked like over New Zealand yesterday (the brighter the colour, the faster the winds).

NZwindsjetstreams

If you click and drag the globe, you can choose your viewpoint and zoom in or out. Here are the jet stream tracks above the northern hemisphere yesterday:

NHwindsjetstream

You can also play with different map projections – the row of letters in the menu – go backwards and forwards through forecasts, and click to hover above your location (the circle in brackets). Beccario was inspired by the hint.fm wind map of North America, and cut his teeth by coding a wind map for Tokyo. Wonderful stuff.

[Bo Rap with lyrics]

Anthropogenic CO2 Far Exceeds Volcanic

I was a little startled a few weeks back to see in a Waikato Times column written by former National Party MP Michael Cox the extraordinary claim that the 1991 Mt Pinatubo eruption “shot out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in its entire years on Earth”. I don’t know where he derived this from – no doubt it’s floating around somewhere in the denial world, though even there it seems possible that he misunderstood what he was reading. Anyway it served to support his view that talk of human-caused warming is a Left-inspired crusade to compensate for the collapse of communism! I was able to say in a letter to the paper how ridiculous the Pinatubo statement was, and pretty much everything else he said as well. Continue reading “Anthropogenic CO2 Far Exceeds Volcanic”

Great balls of… air

Two images of the day: above — the picture says it all. Doesn’t look like much, does it? [via Ecohustler, h/t @Revkin]. And below, a NASA photograph from the International Space Station showing what that thin skin of air looks like in situ. Note the large cumulonimbus clouds casting shadows, especially the one left of centre, which looks as though it’s bumped into the tropopause. [h/t In It For The Gold]