If you haven’t heard Jeff Master’s story about flying in to Hurricane Hugo, check this out. Also, computer and science junkies will appreciate a great history of Weather Underground, one of the web’s most popular weather portals – which is almost a parallel history of the world wide web itself.
Arctic ice melt season is in full swing, so it’s the time of year for climate deniers to jingle shiny distractions and distortions to keep their adherents from thinking too hard about the implications. Vlogger Collin Maessen, has analyzed the latest dodge, and reports in this guest post.
I’m heading up to the “Oil and Water Don’t Mix” rally in St. Ignace, MI, today.
One of the things I do is to keep an ear out to what the so-called sceptics are saying in their corner on the internet. I do this on for example Twitter where I follow several well-known figures and organisations among the climate science deniers, one of them being Marc Morano. His account @climatedepot on twitter tweets mostly articles from his website climatedepot.com and one of these tweets stated something that sounded really odd to me:
I followed the link to his website and ended up on the Steven Goddard WordPress blog that said the following:
NSIDC likes to pretend that there is no satellite data for Arctic ice prior to 1979.
The snow we saw at the top of the Greenland sheet last week was relatively fresh – there’s been a cold spell that delayed this year’s melting season somewhat, without too much evidence of black carbon soot. That may change as the melt season moves along.
Our samples were designed to focus on the melt layer from 2012, when record setting melt may have been accelerated by soot from wildfires like the one described here by Dr. Jeff Masters.
A massive fire burning in northern Quebec is Canada’s second largest fire since fire records began in 1959, according to the Canadian Forest Service. The fire was more than twice the size of Rhode Island on Tuesday–1,621,000 acres. Called the Eastmain fire, the near-record blaze was ignited by lightning on May 25, and was burning along a 100-km front near the east shore of James Bay by the village of Eastmain. At times, the fire spread at 19 mph (30 kph). The fire cut power to Montreal’s subway system and to 10% of the population of Quebec (500,000 customers) on July 4, when smoke from the fire ionized the air by key hydroelectric power lines, causing a cascade failure.
Figure 1. On July 4, 2013, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of wildfires burning in western Quebec near James Bay. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fire. The Eastmain fire, which became the 2nd largest fire since 1959 in Canada at 1.6 million acres, is at the upper left of the image, just east of James Bay. Other fires near Nemiscau, Quebec (about 150 – 200 km to the southeast of Eastmain) are also burning, but these patches are “only” 120,000 – 200,000 acres. MODIS also observed smoke from the fires moving across the Atlantic Ocean on July 5, July 6, and July 7. By July 8, smoke was drifting over Scandinavia. Image credit: NASA.
The largest fire in Canadian history was the 2,119,000 acre fire that burned in 1979 in the Northwest Territories. For comparison, the total acreage burned by wildfires in the U.S. as of July 4, 2013 was 1.9 million acres, so the Eastmain fire by itself has burned almost as large an area. The fire’s spread is being limited by the Opinaca Reservoir on its east, and by areas burned in 2002 to the south.
The fire spread rapidly last week into a patch along its northern and northeastern sides that burned in 1989 (click hereto see the very impressive spread of the fire between 16:45 UTC and 18:22 UTC last Thursday from the Suomi NPP VIIRS shortwave IR instrument; look on the northeastern front of the fire, which is inside the former 1989 fire patch–it spreads extraordinarily rapidly at approximately 10 mph.) While cool and relatively wet weather is expected in Quebec during the coming week, keeping fire danger low, there is speculation by some Canadian fire experts that the Eastmain fire will burn the entire summer unless there are a significant number of consecutive rainy days.
Mike MacCracken’s presentation at the AGU Chapman conference in Granby, CO, June 2013.
Dr. MacCracken was the subject of a previous video, comparing his lecture on climate change from 1982 at Sandia Labs with contemporary observations, see here –
Dr. Jason Box extracts a core sample from the ice sheet, including the all-important 2012 melt layer, that will be analyzed in coming weeks and months, at labs in Copenhagen and Los Angeles.
As the movie “Chinatown” comes to a muddy conclusion, hard boiled private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is dragged away from the scene by his partner, who counsels, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown….”.
As the Dark Snow Project team reeled thru a week of miscues and disappointments leading up to the finish of our Greenland project, I kept thinking of that line, except substituting “..it’s Greenland”.
In Greenland, you come with a plan. The plan goes out the window. You initiate Plan B, then plan C. Greenland shreds those.
You start improvising. Then the true dimensions of your obstacles begin to emerge out of the mist. You try to stay busy. Your circadian rhythm is blown to hell, so you can’t tell day from night. Your head spins. You beat yourself up and start sorting thru shouldas and wouldas. You spin out alternative scenarios. You look at maps, satellite pictures, flight schedules and budgets. You give up. You sink into a fog soaked funk. You stare into your 5th cup of coffee and realize that you’ve spent 9 months and 17 days of your life spinning your wheels and you’re coming up with nothing – your magnificent vision is ignominiously circling the drain.
About the time you realize that, is when your real project begins.
Glacier scientist Alun Hubbard, who I interviewed in Kangerlussuaq, completely understood the feeling. In a rich Welsh brogue, Hubbard offered that working in Greenland is “..loik witing for Gaw-dough..”
I never worked on a meticulously planned ambitious project that didn’t turn into an improvised as you go masterpiece. – Dark Snow Supporter
Quick update: The DarkSnowProject team touched down on deep in the heart of the Greenland Ice Sheet on monday. In an unusual helicopter expedition, the team refueled midway at the Dye 2 science station, and continued on to the Greenland Saddle, topographical divide of the ice sheet, deep in the interior, at 8700 foot elevation.
The team raced the clock, drilling shallow ice cores, taking Spectra, digging a Snow pit despite driving, drifting powder, shooting concurrent video and audio – and made it safely back to Kangerlussuaq.
Ice Reflectivity expert Mckenzie Skiles arrived this morning in Kangerlussuaq, and the team is now together at the terminal waiting our flight to Nuuk, staging area for the next ice sheet attempt.(photo by Jason Box)
We spent the night at KISS (Kangerlussuaq International Science Support), revisiting the Polar Bear cafe – try number 43, the musk ox panang, or the musk ox pizza – and did follow up interviews at the Watson River bridge with Jason and ice sheet expert Dr. Alun Hubbard, which I’ll be integrating in a future video. Takehome message: the ice sheet is beginning to accelerate at depth, and Greenland is deglaciating at a rate not seen in 10,000 years.
Dr. Alun Hubbard, Glacier expert at Aberystwyth University(photo by Sara Penrhyn Jones)
With the arrival of JPL’s Mckenzie Skiles this morning, the team is now complete for our planned jump to the ice sheet on monday or tuesday. It’s a trip that is somewhat unusual, Jason calls it “adventurous”, for a chopper, and will require prepositioning of fuel at a depot along the flight path. Unusual enough that we’ll be needing an additional clearance from higher ups at Air Greenland monday morning.
Don’t leave home without it. Mckenzie Skiles’ spectrometer.
Among the items we checked thru Air Greenland this morning was the ice drill that Jason and Mckenzie will use to extract a core of the 2012 melt layer, which should not be that deep, but likely pretty solid ice due to the surface melt last year. In addition, Mckenzie has brought a spectrometer that will keep track of snow albedo.
Waiting out coastal fog in the Kangerlussuaq terminal, we’re all sipping coffee and catching up online.
Looking out over the inland ice sheet at 3 am this morning. We drove/hiked to the highest point in these parts, a knob called Sugarloaf, and watched the sun come over the edge of the Fjord.(photo by Sara Penrhyn Jones)Jason Box and myself on Black Ridge, overlooking the Watson River at Kangerlussuaq. In the distance you can see the airstrip, built originally during the cold war for B-52s. (photo by Sara Penrhyn Jones)
More evidence that rock music and humor have an uncontrollably corrosive effect on authoritarianism in any culture, any language. Chinese netizens are deconstructing propoganda video from the Cultural Revolution era and re-editing as music videos.
