Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

Devin Bowling took this shot (in Albertville, Al.) of a wall cloud (upper left). A tail cloud is the center, pointing toward the rain. Tail clouds are often mistaken for tornadoes.

As forecasters expected, violent storms tracked across Alabama and Tennessee on Tuesday. Tornadoes then hit South Carolina in the early morning hours of Wednesday. I was on air for nearly 8 hours straight. My voice is yet to recover.

Wall clouds are the parent clouds of a tornado. Not every wall cloud will produce a twister but if you see one, go the other way. Fast. Better yet, get under something sturdy. DO NOT head for a nearby overpass. Winds are accelerated under them and taking shelter under one can be a deadly mistake.

On the Great Lakes, it was the second strongest storm on record. Winds gusted to 80 mph. The waves on Lake Superior reached 9 meters!! (For the metrically challenged that’s over 26 feet!!)

The pressure at the center of the storm dropped to 955.2 millibars. That’s the lowest pressure ever recorded in Minnesota. Only the storm of January 1978 was stronger.

The 1978 storm is referred to as the great Ohio Blizzard. The pressure dropped to an incredible 950 millibars in that storm. Almost everyone older than 35 in Ohio can tell you stories of that event.

The Great Lakes Storm on Tuesday. It passed over Duluth and now holds the record for the lowest pressure ever recorded in Minnesota. Image courtesy NWS Duluth.

The storm in 5th place is rather famous. On November 10, 1975, (thirty-five years ago next month) a surprise storm produced a low pressure of 980 millibars. That storm hit Lake Superior hard and resulted in the sinking of an iron ore carrier called the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Canadian Gordon Lightfoot made the gale famous by his song about the doomed freighter. One line in particular has stayed with me.

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours.”

Update Oct. 29,2010: It now appears that the Minnesota storm missed the the non tropical storm record for the mainland U.S. by 0.01 inches of mercury!

Me on the ice runway at NEEM in Northern Greenland.

I love ice and snow and I have had a lifetime’s dose of it this year. January saw me set foot at the South Pole and in late July, I found myself at the top of the world. Antarctica was thanks to the National Science Foundation. Greenland was thanks to Dave Jones at Storm Center Communications.

Some of the most critical and urgent science in the world right now is the connected with obtaining ancient cores of ice at the top and bottom of the world. Thanks to Dave (President of Storm Center), I was asked to be part of a three person team that spent 9 days at the NEEM ice core drill site.

We were the guests of lead U.S. scientist James White at the Univ. of Colorado and Danish Scientists J.P.  Steffensen and  Dorthe Dahl-Jensen.

J.P. and Dorthe are the amazing field leaders at NEEM. To Dave, Jim, J.P. and Dorthe, a sincere thank you from the heart for an amazing science adventure.

Now, let me share it with you! Here is part one. Music by Holst courtesy of incompetech.com.

Your's truly looking at the ice core from 2,500 meters beneath the Greenland Ice Cap. The science trench where the drill is located is -20C and is about 10 meters below the surface. Dan's pic.

I’ve just returned today from Greenland and am looking forward to seeing my first “night” in 10 days!

The 14 countries that have supported the NEEM ice core project got their money’s worth this week. The two year project to drill an ice core through 2,500 meters of ice finally reached Greenland rock.

Where Is It

NEEM at Midnight- Dan's Pic.

The NEEM site is at 8,300 feet on top of the ice sheet. I arrived there a week ago Tuesday and was a guest for 8 nights. There were 38 of us in a small camp in the middle of a magnificent desolation of white.

The population of this tiny outpost is an international mix of young and older scientists, researchers and ice core drilling experts. Many like Jim White, the Director of the Stable Isotope Lab at INSTAAR are renowned experts in their fields.

It was a fun and fascinating 9 days with top ice scientists from Denmark, France, USA,Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand.

There was a riot of different accents but everyone had one thing in common.

Scientific curiosity.

Among those in science, that always transcends national borders, languages and cultures.

About NEEM

James White of the University of Colorado and director of INSTAAR.

I was a guest of Paleoclimate expert  Jim White the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the Uni. of Colorado. Dr. White arranged the support of the National Science Foundation. After Denmark, the NSF was the second biggest funder of NEEM.

So what did the folks at NEEM do in plain language?

They pulled up ice that was once falling as snow in Greenland around 150,000 years ago! Then they analysed and read it like a climate history book. This was the first time that a boat load of science was done on an ice core as it was being obtained.

This was during the ice age that preceded the Eemian. The Eemian is the warm period before our last ice age. This means we now have an ice core that goes all the way back through the Holocene (The warm period after the last ice age in which we now live), the ice age before the Holocene, and then the warm period before the last ice age (The Eemian) and finally into the penultimate ice age before the Eemian!

This is from the Antarctic VOSTOK ice core. Notice how stable the climate has been during the short blip of time called the Holocene. Virtually all of civilisation developed in the Holocene. Notice how unstable the climate was before! NEEM has now obtained a core from Greenland that goes back a similar period to that shown here. (NOAA)

Knowing what the climate of Earth was like in the Eemian is vitally important. The main reason is because there is overwhelming evidence the Earth will be as warm as the Eemian by the end of this century.

It should not be. The best evidence we have is that the Earth should be cooling slightly. It is actually doing just the opposite because of rapidly rising greenhouse gases.

There is no doubt among the scientists that we will continue to warm. Even if we quit burning fossil fuels tonight, the planet will continue to warm at least another degree. That’s because a lot of the warming has been stored in the oceans. If we keep burning coal and oil, the warming will be much more severe.

There is little debate about that in the science community. Almost none actually.

NEEM Camp- Dan's pic (click to make real big)

The Scary Bit Is What Is Not Known.

Could there be a rapid warming?

A significant jump in temperature that happens in a decade?

Sound crazy?

Think again., The ice core at NEEM and the other Greenland cores all show that this has happened many times in the past. Very abrupt warmings are part of our climate. The question is what are the tipping points that cause these. The bigger question is are we about to reach one.

This ice core at NEEM may hold very important clues.

Pictures and Video

I took thousands of pics and made 5 hours of video at NEEM. We will air reports on WHNT for those in North Alabama and there will be an in-depth documentary about NEEM coming as well from Dave Jones at Storm Center Communications. I was part of the three man team that Dave sent.

My colleagues, David Stroud and Robert Freeland, and I had an incredible adventure. I learned more of the latest climate science in 8 days than I could have in a year at home. (I had captive climate experts to ask questions of and I took advantage.)

We were there when NEEM reached bedrock.

Stay tuned here for the pictures and the story. I think you will find it fascinating.

One thing for sure, the phrase “snow on the toilet paper” will have a significant meaning to me for the rest of my life!

More soon after I sleep for awhile!

Dan

From NOAA- NCDC

Click or ful size- From NCDC

NOAA/NCDC released a whole slew of rather grim climate news today. It’s important to remember that besides the sun and increasing greenhouse gases there is a lot of built in variability in the climate system. It’s only been in the last couple of decades that the greenhouse warming has risen out of the noise created by weather.

That said, even with El Nino gone and the sun coming out of one of it’s quietest periods of the century, the temperatures have soared. The last 4 consecutive months have been the hottest on record. The first 6 months of the year are also the hottest on record.

The mid tropospheric temps from UAH and RSS are also running near or above the warmest ever on their much shorter record.

The Arctic sea ice also continues it’s decline. The rate of decline in June was the fastest ever measured.

From NSIDC

The Antarctic is actually gaining ice due to a complex weather pattern induced by ozone depletion and cooling in the stratosphere. This cooling is also caused by increasing greenhouse gases.

Robert Scott's hut at Hut Point near Mcmurdo Base, Antarctica. (Dan's pic Jan. 2010)

Here is a Great Google Tech talk on Antarctica. Having been in both Shackleton’s and Scott’s huts, I am of course a big advocate of preserving not only these sites but in preserving the last great unspoiled continent on Earth.

Well worth watching. It’s also nice to hear a Christ Church accent again!

What an incredible tragedy if these places and this continent is lost.