NASA

Record Arctic Sea-ice minimum 2012 declared – it’s the Silly Season!

by Gareth September 23, 2012

In early August I posted my predictions for the “sceptical” response to the record sea ice minimum. Time to call myself to account. I had planned to do my own analysis, but John Mason at Skeptical Science has done such an excellent job of ploughing through the mountains of bullshit that I asked his permission [...]

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Ice bottom blues

by Gareth September 19, 2012

According to the latest bulletin from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the US, Arctic sea ice is likely to be at or about its minimum extent for the summer (as of Sept 17th). The animation above shows how the ice melt proceeded through the summer (up to Sept 14th), and the graph [...]

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This is our planet

by Gareth June 30, 2012

A wonderful video to start the weekend — time-lapse photography from the space station compiled by Tomislav Safundžić. If anyone ever tries to tell you that man’s influence is too puny to affect our great planet, point them at this. The world is littered with our lights, and much else besides. Watch the full HD [...]

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Polar projections

by Gareth June 22, 2012

This stunning view of the Arctic and the northern hemisphere was captured by the Suomi-NPP satellite a couple of weeks ago. You can clearly see where the Arctic sea ice is beginning to melt and break up (the bluish bits of offshore ice). More on the image at the Earth Observatory. Meanwhile, new research indicates [...]

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High and dry

by Gareth June 9, 2012

From NASA’s Earth Observatory: yesterday’s Image Of The Day (RSS feed) was this stunning picture of an intense high pressure system over the Great Australian Bight to the southwest of Tasmania, acquired by the MODIS sensor on the Aqua satellite on June 5th. In high pressure systems, dry descending air suppresses cloud formation, in this [...]

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The unseen transit

by Gareth June 6, 2012

It’s been snowing most of the day chez Hot Topic, so any chance I may have had of viewing the transit of Venus across the sun earlier today was lost in a haze of snowflakes and cloud. However, thanks to the fact that the sun provides the energy that drives the climate system, I can [...]

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Life’s a gas

by Gareth June 4, 2012

While Britain celebrates (Monarchists should not click on that link, be warned) its Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and New Zealand hibernates on her birthday (which, of course, it isn’t), the planet has hit a notable milestone on its rapid transition to a new climate state. From way up in the Arctic, where the early summer melt [...]

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The unfettered rage of dismal denial

by Bryan Walker February 10, 2012

I knew that climate scientists were on the receiving end of some nasty emails, but it was still a shock to read James Hansen’s recent communication, in the course of which he gives a sample of the emails that he’d had in just the one week. They’re a dismal example of the unfettered rage which [...]

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Cracked PIG spawns big berg

by Gareth November 3, 2011

NASA’s IceBridge operation for this Antarctic summer has discovered that the Pine Island Glacier is in the process of calving a massive iceberg — 880 square kilometres of the floating glacier tongue is about to go floatabout, leaving the glacier snout shorter than any time since its position was first recorded in the 1940s. The [...]

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Southern lights

by Gareth September 30, 2011

If you watch nothing else today, take the time to look at this spectacular movie of an aurora australis taken by the International Space Station on September 17, and made available by NASA’s Earth Observatory a couple of days ago. Not really climate-related, unless you’re into solar/climate linkages, but posted because the images are spectacular. [...]

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