Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

The National Science Foundation's U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) has a large center at the Christ Church airport. Clothing for those headed to "the ice" is issued there.

So what DO YOU pack when you’re headed to the very bottom of the world??

Little clothing surprisingly!

Most of my winter clothing will not suit for Antarctica and instead when I get to Christ Church, I will be outfitted with the polar clothing. I did spend 50$ on special long underwear. I will be given much heavier long johns when I get to Christchurch but this is for those “warm days’ at McMurdo.

McMurdo is actually not bad in high summer. Highs can reach near freezing. The South Pole is much different.  If it gets above -20F that is a warm day. The permanent residents consider anything above -30 a warm day!

Antarctica is a HUGE place. About the size of the Continental USA and almost entirely covered by over 2 miles of ice. It’s also completely surrounded by ocean. No other continent is situated in this way, and that ocean isolates the weather in Antarctica.

If you thought the North Pole and the South Pole had similar weather you would be very wrong. The South Pole in high summer is just a little warmer than the North Pole in Winter. The ocean and all that ice, along with an elevation of nearly 3km’s is why.

What you have to wear on the flight from Christ Church to McMurdo! Image courtesy Scientist Herman Kolanoski

So what am I taking?

Three still cameras. Two digital SLR’s and one pocket camera that shoots HD video. I’m also taking a Panasonic AVCHD camera that shoots gorgeous high definition video. The files are huge and it takes a very expensive editing software just to view them properly. So, I will have about 100 gigabytes with of special SD cards with me.

The other must haves are back up batteries for all those cameras. Chargers as well. The cold will make a battery that lasts two hours last 5 minutes. Chemical hand warmers are hopefully going to keep those batteries warm until needed.

A special bit of advice that I’m taking very seriously is to put my cameras in a plastic bag when I come inside. The cameras will be cold soaked and moisture will want to condense on the internal parts, causing havoc. I plan on making sure I do just that.

The three cameras are mine. The TV station bought the  special HD video camera for the trip. It is light weight, small and as I said, shoots incredibly good video. I bought insurance for that!

I hope to be able to post the story of my adventure with pics and video here. McMurdo has decent internet but when I am at the WAIS site or at the Pole the internet will be very poor. Much of my time will be at McMurdo so I should have frequent posts!

If you post any questions, I will gladly try and answer them and that goes for students and classes as well. I may even try and do a Skype video with a few classrooms. Email me at dansat@gmail.com if you would like to and I will try my best.

Dan

This wall of ice is over 20 stories tall. Dan's picture from Greenland. (2007)

I have linked to some of the excellent TED talks before in this space. This one is perhaps the best I have seen. There is an old saying that perception is reality. That seems to be the problem in regard to climate science. Many people think that scientists are still arguing over it.

They are not.

Getting that message out is one reason I started writing these ramblings about the Earth and Science.

It’s hard to explain in words just what is happening in the far north of planet Earth. I know that I am one of the few people to have witnessed a 25 story wall of ice collapse into the ocean. 95% of the glaciers on the planet outside of Antarctica are retreating rapidly. Antarctica itself has now begun to show changes across the continent.

So if a picture paints a thousand words, then spend twenty minutes and look at these:

Seattle- Dan's pic

Back in the 1970′s there was a popular TV show called “Here Come the Brides”. I never watched it much, but I loved the theme song “Seattle” by Bobby Sherman. seattleclip

Seattle is one of my favourite places. I even went there on my honeymoon! (Yeah, I know, only a weather geek would go to a city renowned for rain and drizzle, on their honeymoon.  It’s a weather thing.)

Me and Marian in Seattle Oct. 1983

Today was anything but typical for Seattle. It was brutally hot. Now, everyone thinks that Seattle is a rainy place. They do have a lot of cloud and frequent drizzle, but there are plenty of places that get more rainfall each year. Like my house here in Huntsville Al. Yes, it’s cloudy a lot, but a clear summer day can really bring the bluest skies you’ve ever seen.

Today, however, it was different. Record highs anywhere are infrequent, but a record ALL TIME HIGH is very rare. Seattle hit 39.5C Smashing there old all time high by 1.5C. (39.5C is 103F on the old Fahrenheit scale, used only in the USA now)

Newscasts in Seattle showed people standing in long lines to buy air conditioners in the intense heat. Most people living around Puget Sound do not have them. It rarely gets above 30C in Seattle..much less 40C!

Mount Rainier August 2006 Dan's pic

So, while Chicago has it’s coolest July in decades, the folks in the Pacific NW continue to bake. Mother nature tends to balance out the planet. When one part of the world is unusually hot, you can usually find somewhere else where it is unusually cold. When we get cool snaps, I will often get emails from people asking what happened to “Global Warming”??

The June temps. globally actually put this in perspective.

June 2009 was the 2nd warmest on record worldwide. From NOAA/NCDC

If you lived in Denver in June, you might think summer had disappeared. It was much different for almost all of the rest of the planet, with unusually warm conditions. Notice the warmth in the far north. This has been predicted to be a result of increasing greenhouse gases, for over two decades. It seems to be showing up very frequently these days.

Important to note here, that it’s very bad science to blame an unusually hot, or cold day on climate change. All you can say is, that if the high temp. is like a roll of the dice, the high numbers will keep coming up more often, in more places, than the cold ones.

The language of science is not proof. It’s probability!

Astronomy and Meteorology are two sciences that have legions of non scientist helpers. Thousands of people across the world record weather data each day in places that governments cannot afford to locate “official” stations. In the USA, COCORAHS members record rainfall with high quality, and very accurate rain gauges in thousands of locations. They do it because it matters. This data is invaluable to forecasters like myself, and to future and present researchers in weather and climate. It is very likely that this weather data will be looked at over 100 years from now by researchers not even born yet.

In Astronomy, it’s much the same. Backyard observers are usually the ones who spot a new comet or gamma ray burst. As thanks, a comet finder gets it named after him!

This brings me to the WOW images I talked about.

Thierry Legault is an Engineer in Paris. He is one of these backyard Astronomers who is very familiar to professionals who work in the large telescopes. Thierry specializes in astrophotography and even has an asteroid named after him. (Many asteroids are found by backyard sky watchers.)

A couple of days ago, Thierry took a photo of the sun. The image was taken with his 13 cm wide telescope.

Here it is:

Photo by Thierry Legault Paris

I know what you are thinking. I’ve seen it before you say. I can just go outside.

Well Thierry took this photo at just the right moment. I mean JUST the right moment. Look in the lower left quadrant of the image above. You see a speck? It’s not your monitor.

Here is a blown up image of that speck:

Space Shuttle Atlantis and Hubble Space Telescope Passing in front of Sun by Thierry Legault in Paris.

You see it??

It’s what you think it is.

The Space Shuttle Atlantis, and just below it is the Hubble Space Telescope. He had to time it to the second, and he got it!

He has some other INCREDIBLE images on his website. You MUST see them!

The other image is from NOAA. The National Climate Data Center (NCDC to us wx geeks) has released the April global temperature anomalies.

Here it is:

Ctsy. NOAA NCDC

The red dots indicate areas that were warmer than normal, and the blue dots are areas colder than normal. The bigger the dot, the greater the departure from normal. Notice how many of the red dots are in the far North.

Now look at the global temps for ALL of 2008.

From NCDC NOAA

You see the same thing.
Now here is one more piece of information.

Climate models have improved dramatically over the last twenty years. The early models were crude, but all of the models have been very consistent, in forecasting the greatest warming (from increasing Carbon Dioxide levels) to be in the far North. In Science, a prediction that verifies adds weight to a theory. A theory that makes prediction, after prediction, and keeps verifying, soon comes to have a high level of acceptance among scientists. The images above are just one of hundreds of verifications, seen around the world over the last twenty years.

Climate model forecast of global temps. at end of this century. Compare the warming at the top of the globe, with the previous anomaly images.

This is why there is such a high consensus among climate scientists, that we may be running out of time, to deal with greenhouse gases. I showed the April image on air Friday night. When I show anything to do with climate, I get emails like the one I received tonight:

Subject: GW lunacy

interesting that you make a big deal about the april climate, but i don’t remember you doing so on a cooler month. Your global warming hysteria has become political.

Just to be clear, I don’t do politics. You will see nothing here on the current climate legislation. Yes, I am very much in favour of doing something to srop greenhouse gas emissions globally. We have no choice. REALLY- WE HAVE NO CHOICE. I will leave the political arguments to others. The Science is much more interesting. I just hope  something that works is done, because my kids, and grand kids will have to live with the consequences if we do not. So will yours.

Oh, if you are wondering about those other months that I supposedly am not mentioning. If we get a major volcanic eruption, or a very strong La Nina, we might get one.

It will be temporary though. The CO2 is still increasing, and it will overwhelm the temportary cooling of such events fairly quickly. Dr. James Hansen of NASA says, even a quiet sun with no sunspots (A new Maunder Minimum) would only stop the temp. rise for about 7 years. The CO2 would rise so much, that we would start warming again within a decade.

We tend to think of the atmosphere over us as a gigantic entity. Only astronauts can escape it, but they don’t have to go very high. You might be surprised to know, that by the time the solid rocket boosters burn out , two minutes after launch, the Astronauts in the Shuttle are looking at a nearly black sky. They are already above 95% of the atmosphere. Just two to three minutes from a sunny, and blue Florida sky to the black of space.

I offer in evidence the image below, taken yesterday from Atlantis:

From Space Shuttle Atlantis - 500km above Earth. Click for full res.

Look at the thin blue line around Earth, behind the Hubble Telescope. That’s our atmosphere. Basically the “whole shootin match” as we would say in Oklahoma!

Go Atlantis!

Later,

Dan