NASA

Hansen: it can be cold in a warming world.

by Bryan Walker January 30, 2010

“If it’s that warm, how come it’s so darned cold?” is the heading James Hansen has given to a recently finalised essay circulated to his email list. In more sober terms he subtitles it Regional Cold Anomalies within Near-Record Global Temperature.  The essay explains how the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) goes about analyzing global [...]

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…Keep out of the kitchen

by Gareth October 20, 2009

It appears that Ian Wishart is back on the climate beat, with a couple of posts in the last week attacking Hot Topic. One goes so far as to accuse me of incompetence and dishonesty, which is a bit rich coming from someone who was threatening to sue me for libel a few months ago… [...]

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A beginner’s guide to the importance of Arctic sea ice

by Gareth October 7, 2009

In this beginner’s guide Tom Wagner, NASA’s cryosphere programme manager, outlines why studying Arctic sea ice is important, illustrating his talk with some great graphics. Meanwhile, the NSIDC has announced the final figures for September’s sea ice minimum: The average ice extent over the month of September, a reference comparison for climate studies, was 5.36 [...]

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Thin ice #2

by Gareth July 8, 2009

New analysis of Icesat data by a NASA team headed by Ron Kwok shows that from 2004 to 2008 Arctic winter sea ice “thinned dramatically”. Icesat measures the “freeboard” of the sea ice, the amount above water level. The graph below shows the extent of the decline, which is most marked in multi-year ice (ice [...]

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This year’s model

by Gareth May 28, 2009

Take MIT’s global ocean model, assimilate data from NASA’s fleet of satellites, and run the whole thing through two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers on a much more detailed grid than used before, and you get this stunning animation of ocean currents from 1994 to 2002. It makes fascinating viewing: look for the complex [...]

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Cracking up

by Gareth April 22, 2009

With the “pin” to Charcot Island gone, big cracks that first formed in 2008 are are opening up in the Wilkins ice shelf, and a new break up is taking place close to Latady Island. The animation above uses ESA “webcam from space” images captured on April 18 and 21 (the latter has black corners). [...]

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Where the streets have no name

by Gareth February 26, 2009

Not much of a climate connection here (though Greenland and sea ice are in the picture), but regular readers will know that I’m fond of looking down on the Earth from space. This image from NASA’s Earth Observatory shows a beautiful von Karman vortex street downwind of Jan Mayen island in the Greenland Sea (600 [...]

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Smoke on the water

by Gareth February 11, 2009

On Monday there was a haze over the Canterbury plains. It looked like someone was burning scrub to the west. Today’s MODIS Image Of The Day shows the source. The image captured on Feb 8th shows that smoke travelled from the Victorian fires (red dots top left — click image to see larger version) across [...]

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Fractured air

by Gareth February 8, 2009

The roots of the recent cold weather in Britain and eastern North America lie in unusual goings on high in the atmosphere above the North Pole, as this animation from NASA’s Earth Observatory demonstrates (full video here: 6MB .mov file). The left hand image shows vorticity (rotation, roughly) and the right the temperature at 20km. [...]

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Censoring Science

by Bryan Walker February 8, 2009

It’s Official: Griffin is Gone. That’s the heading on Mark Bowen’s blog on 27 January.  He forbore to add the exclamation mark that tempted him. You would understand this as a noteworthy piece of news if you’d read Bowen’s book Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming [...]

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