Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

Me at the entry sign into McMurdo.

I’ve spent one day and zero nights here at the bottom of the World now. Before bed last night I walked to building 155 to get  midnight rations in the cafeteria. The sun was shining high above the dirt main street that is McMurdo Station.

Midnight rats, as they call it, was delicious. The NSF has kindly given me a distinguished visitor pass so I can eat right at midnight instead of waiting until 12:30 when all of those who are not working an overnight shift can eat. The food is free and plentiful. The cold and hard work means you have a very high metabolism. 4,000 calorie per day diets are the norm for many and at the pole, where it’s MUCH colder and higher, a 6,000 calorie a day diet is common.

Brian Johnson explains putting up a tent in Antarctic conditions. Josh Landis of CBS on right. We were standing on Snow (on top of sea ice) on the McMurdo Ice Shelf..

Today was survival school. It lasted all day. It’s mandatory for anyone going to the inland sites away from the bases at McMurdo or South Pole. Since we are going to the Western Antarctic Ice Shelf drill site, and the Dry Valleys, our group of 8 were required to do the course.

Brian Johnson of the McMurdo staff was our instructor and he was a fountain of fabulous information.  I learned info that may save my life someday, although I hope I never need it.

Memorial at Hut Point to member of the British Antarctic Expedition. Mcmurdo Ice shelf behind me. Pic taken at 1125PM.

Afterwards we drove in the snow bus for an hour to a spot on Ross Island called “room with a view”. I’m not even close to being a good enough writer to describe it- but I took pics!

Let’s just say that I have never seen anything like it, and unless you have been here- you haven’t either!

Everyone here works very hard. Support staff outnumber scientists and researchers by five to one. It takes a lot to survive here. The living quarters are very spartan. I have a tiny bed and a tiny desk. No light in the room. (It’s light all the time so not really needed.) My room mate is one of the survival school instructors.

The main thing you do is sweat.

Really! I kid you not.

Our transport onto the ice shelf. It took about 20 minutes from McMurdo, but we drove another hour out to a spot called "room with a view".

See, you have to keep your ECW (Extreme Weather Clothing) gear nearby when going away from the base. Depending on the weather, you usually get hot and sweaty walking in the heavy bunny boots. The ECW kit is very good. You do stay warm, but it takes awhile to get the right amount of layers. When you exert yourself, the needed layers change!

Warnings are posted everywhere about not getting dehydrated. EVERYWHERE.

You can think of McMurdo as a kind of busy mining town surrounded by nothing. I mean nothing. Empty and quiet and very bright white. Intensely beautiful. Amazingly beautiful and vast.

A Skua flying over us at lunch. They are the scavengers of the Antarctic.

More than any picture can convey.

There are Penguins and Leopard Seals and Skuas (The scavenger bird of Antarctica) The wildlife have no fear of humans at all, but disturbing them in anyway is strictly prohibited. The Antarctic Treaty is followed to the letter and spirit, with the the t’s crossed and the i’s dotted. If it can be recycled it is. Trash that has to be burned is shipped to Port Hueneme California and incinerated. 65% of waste at McMurdo is recycled.

This is the greenest town on Earth bar none. McMurdo sets a fabulous example for the rest of the world.

I saved the biggest news for last!

Tomorrow is Sunday here ( I wrote this at 830pm Saturday night here in Mac Town.) At 2pm Sunday out on the Mcmurdo Ice Shelf is the annual New Zealand (Scott Base) vs USA  (McMurdo Base) Rugby game. They play in the snow on frozen ocean. Wearing bunny boots!

The view from Hut Point. About a 10 minute walk from my room. Robert Falcon Scott's 1902 hut is just a few steps away. I will show pics of that tomorrow!

In case you do not know, Rugby is wildly popular among the Kiwis and they play it very well. The American team has NEVER won. Actually the McMurdo team has never scored a point!

So tomorrow at 2pm I will cover my first sporting event! Pics and video to come!! (Trust me if you are wagering, bet on the Kiwis! (everyone here is!)

Dan

McMurdo Science Base, Antarctica

22:42 Saturday 9 January 2010

Joe Vaughn has.

I received an email over the past weekend with a picture and a question. What is this??

Ice Ribbon- Image by Joe Vaughn at Huntsville, in Alabama

What you are looking at is an ice ribbon. They are also sometimes called a frost flower. It’s been about a decade since a viewer sent me a picture of one. I have only seen them myself once.

So what are they? Are they natural? Are they really ice?

The answer is yes. They are ice and they are indeed natural.

They form when liquid water inside a stem seeps out into the open air and freezes. Capillary action inside the plant pumps more water out so a continuous stream of ice is formed. Almost like a tiny glacier!

So why does the water inside the plant not freeze too?

The most likely answer is that the water is coming up from the ground where the temperature is above freezing. If the water is under pressure, the freezing point is lower so the water could be super cooled. Water only freezes at 0C at standard atmospheric pressure of 1013.25mb (29.92” of Hg on the old scale).

You can even get pure water down to -20C in your freezer if you freeze it very slowly in a clean container with no movement. Once any piece of dust or crystal is introduced it will suddenly freeze in front of your eyes! Even changing the pressure slightly will trigger an instant freeze as crystals form in rapid succession.

(They don’t get it, but you do!)

Supercooled water is the rule in the atmosphere, not the exception. Many clouds you see are made up of water droplets that are well below freezing and yet still liquid. If it were not for dust and other atmospheric aerosols, cloud drops would rarely coalesce into the much bigger rain drops that give life to the land below.

We are used to living in a world where the pressure is near 100 hectopascals of pressure and the temperature between -10 and 40C. If we lived in a world that deviated from these norms, we would see many, many things that we would call strange, yet are perfectly normal! I will not live long enough to witness the exploration of the planets in our solar system and beyond, but I cannot imagine the strange objects and sights that await future explorers.

The other climber is in shadow.

Here is an example. I took the picture above of two ice climbers in the Canadian Rockies. They were about 1500 meters away. (Zoom lens). The temperature was -25C and the wind was dead calm.

So what was so unusual?

The two climbers were talking to each other and I could hear them clearly. They were talking in a normal tone of voice and I could hear them easily 1500 meters away! The sound was reflected by the frozen ice and traveled a long way in the calm and frigid air.

These frost flowers tend to happen after a heavy rain event in mild weather. A sudden blast of arctic air will bring air temperatures well below freezing, but the ground will stay warm. The sudden freeze will cause water in stems to freeze and expand. This causes tiny slits to form in the stem. The warm water then seeps out of the slits due to capillary action. The water freezes quickly in the cold air and forms the ice ribbons/frost flowers. (Addition: Cool video for fellow geeks interested in capillary action in terms of physics.)

This exact sequence of weather happened here in the Southeast USA this past week. The result is that Joe Vaughn who has been hiking the beautiful mountains around the Huntsville area for many years, got a real surprise!

NASA has released this model of Earth’s weather from 9 days in last August. The model was run at a resolution of 7 km. This is a very high resolution for a global model. You can see a bigger picture of the model run HERE. It’s a stunning example of how well we can reproduce our atmosphere inside a computer!

The highest resolution weather model I look at on a daily basis for forecasting is the WRF model. (Weather Research and Forecast model). It runs in a window over North America and is not global. We get 4 runs per day at a resolution of 12km. The forecast goes out 84 hours.

So why not run them all at 7 km?  Better yet make it a resolution of 4 km! Wouldn’t that give a better forecast?

Yes it would. Up to a point. (see chaos theory if you want to know why at some point you get diminishing returns no matter what)

The problem with increasing the resolution means you have millions of extra cubes of data that you have to do the math for. This increases the run time of the model. A weather model used to predict the weather for the next 3 days is not much use if it takes a week to get the output!

You can imagine it this way. Put 20 layers of sugar cubes on top of a map of the united states. The computer has to keep track of the weather in each of these cubes and using complex equations, it moves weather between cubes.

Now do it again with cubes that are half the size. You will see that it takes far more than twice as many cubes. You also have to use a shorter step in time and this more than doubles the run time!

One of the major problems with forecasting with computers is this. You have to tell the model the weather before you run it. Think about this for a second. You have to tell the model the weather in EVERY one of those cubes.

The NOAA WRF model I look at daily has more than 20 layers up to over 20,000 meters! All of them 12 km wide.

We obviously cannot afford to send up a weather balloon every 12 km! If we did, air traffic would have to come to a stand still twice a day for about two hours!

21 different computer model runs forecasting the height of the 500 millibar surface.

We also do not have surface weather stations every 12 kilometers apart either! So the weather is estimated using various techniques based on the data we do have. It’s amazing how close we come on most days to initializing the model with a very close approximation of the real atmosphere!

The fact that nations share their data makes it possible. Even during the cold war, we shared weather data with the Russians!

Still, the “first guess” we give the models is not perfect and this is one reason why weather models beyond about 5-7 days are not very trustworthy. The longest range model used for forecasting on a daily basis is run out to 10 days.

One way around this problem is to run the model several times (with very slight changes to the first guess weather) and take an average forecast. This is called ensemble forecasting and the idea is that the consensus among the models is most likely to be correct.

Research shows this to be true and there has been some very promising research on forecasting hurricane tracks using ensemble methods.

Climate models due a very good job of reproducing past temperature changes. This is why scientists are so concerned about what they are forecasting over the next 100 years.

Models used by the IPCC have a resolution of around 100 km but they are run for hundreds of years back in the past or into the future. Ensemble forecasting is also used to a great degree.

How good are these models? The graphic on the right shows a comparison of the climate model run with the actual air temperature over the past 150 years. When you want to know just the average climate, you don’t need to have the high resolution.

We don’t need to know what time it starts raining on June 4th 2098. We DO want to know how much it rains that year in a given region! This is the difference between weather and climate models.

When you put in the increasing greenhouse gases, it tracks very closely with what has happened. This is one of the major ways we know that it’s the CO2 and NOT natural changes. (Someone needs to explain this to the former Alaska governor who obviously doesn’t know it.)

The lesson to take away here is that asking a meteorologist for a forecast beyond 7 days is a waste of time. I can sometimes give a general trend out to 10 days but beyond that is simply not reliable. If you want to know the approximate time it will clear or the rain will stop, then 36 hours is really pushing it in most cases.

An error of less than plus or minus 5 degrees F. on a 5 day forecast makes me happy. Less than three degrees is excellent.

I should have charged double!

(Note I changed the name of this post slightly after publishing it initially- I just liked the new name better!)

Image from one of my viewers- Donna Butcher of Huntsville,AL. (Yea that's a real funnel cloud too!)

Lightning kills far more people in an average year than hurricanes and tornadoes. It also fries a lot of electronics too. I speak from experience there. Back in my storm chasing days, I couldn’t hear well for two hours after being very near a big bolt. Ask any storm chaser and they will tell you that lightning scares them far more than a tornado.

So what does lightning have to do with that old truck spewing smoke that you ended up behind yesterday??

It just may have caused it!

Scientists have long known that air pollution can and does affect rainfall, but a new study in Geophysical Research Letters (AGU) this week has also linked air pollution to an increase in lightning. The paper found that lightning over the Southeast USA is more likely mid week, when pollution levels are higher! less rain and fewer bolts were seen during the weekend when smog levels were lower! The research, led by Thomas Bell of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, used data from the National Lightning Detection Network.

NASA Landsat image of New York City's urban heat island.

If you think that the weather in your community is much the same as it was 100 years ago, then prepare for a surprise. It’s not. It’s warmer and in most cases wetter. The reasons are many. Climate change from increased greenhouse gases is just one reason.

Air pollution produced by our carbon based economy is another factor, and urban areas produce their own heat islands. (In case you’re wondering, these urban heat islands ARE factored in and adjusted for when looking at global temperature changes.

I grew up in a rural area about 7 miles west of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the mid 1960’s, you could sleep with the windows open on most  summer nights, and it would be quite cool by morning.

Not anymore!

The temps. are now much warmer at night due to the heavy urbanization of the area. A 10 degree difference I would guess.

Forecasters have a lot to take into account when forecasting for large urban areas!

Later,

Dan

Image from the NSF

I’ve been keeping a big secret.

Way back in August I had a call from a friend  who works at the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) in Washington, DC. She asked if I’d heard that the National Science Foundation was opening up applications for science reporters to visit Antarctica.

In case you have never looked into the logistics of going to the South Pole, let me educate you!

I have.

Oh, have I!

It’s NOT serviced by your local airline. It’s not serviced by ANY commercial airline.

Basically, unless you are a scientist working on an NSF funded project at the pole, or a very rich or well funded explorer, (That leaves me out) you are not going to get there. It’s very expensive to do anything there and very dangerous. I keep getting told that “Antarctica is a beautiful place where it’s very easy to die”.

Getting there is not easy and it’s not without danger. A mild summer day at the South Pole is -30C. A cold summer day is 50 degrees below zero on the old Fahrenheit scale.

The South Pole is on top of two miles of ice at the bottom of the world. Elevation is over 3,000 meters. The air is very thin and very cold. The weather can change in seconds.

So with all of this in mind and the fact that it’s been my life long dream to visit Antarctica, the call from Ann Posegate at NEEF got my attention real quick. She suggested a joint application from us both. Me at WHNT -TV and she at NEEF. We went for it!

Greenland and Antarctica are home to the planets only remaining ice sheets. Greenland pic by Dan

With an incredibly short deadline, we put together an application asking to see the sites where all this incredible  science is being done and the people doing it. We told the NSF that we would share it with the world if they let us go.

Today we got the official word.

They said YES!

In case you did not know…The most important science on the planet is being conducted in Antarctica.

The importance of the climate science speaks for itself. What you may not know about are the incredible discoveries of life being made. Life that’s surviving in environments that were thought impossible for sustaining life. Guess who is really interested in that??

NASA-That’s who!

NASA will soon be sending new probes to other planets and asteroids looking for life. The science in the Antarctic freezer is giving them  new clues on what to look for out there.

Think about that. It’s one of the fundamental questions of science. It’s one of the fundamental questions of humanity!

Are we alone in the cosmos?

We will fly from Christ Church to McMurdo and then to the Pole. Map from geology.com Mouse image for full size.

We were selected from a field of many applicants, and I’m the first Meteorologist working for a local TV station to ever make it. Two years ago I visited the High Arctic (on my own dime and it wasn’t cheap). They say it gets in your blood. I think it does.

So in early January, I will fly from Christchurch New Zealand and land at the bottom of the world. Best of all, I am going to take you along with pictures and video and any other way I can think of. (Yes, they have internet down there.)

Most of all I want young people to realize that science is not sitting in a room reading a book! It’s about discovery. Dale Andersen knows that.  I’ve been trading some email with him from the Dry Valley in Antarctica. He is one of the people I want to tell you about.

I cannot wait to get back to the great white quiet. The polar regions are special places. They are unlike anywhere else on Earth, and this time I am going to stand at the very bottom of the world.

Oh, and yes my wife does indeed think I am crazy.

More soon!

dan