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Have a look at this, for example.

"...Although temperatures and humidity levels have been much above average, the number of deaths resulting from this summer's heat has not approached the magnitude of heat waves of the recent past. The 1995 Chicago heat wave resulted in more than 400 deaths in a 9-day period as shown in the adjacent plot. In the disastrous heat wave of 1980, more than 1250 people died across the U.S. as the direct result of extreme conditions, with an estimated 10,000 deaths related to heat stress. Additional information on heat and drought-related deaths and economic impacts during the past 20 years can be found in the Billion-Dollar U.S. Weather Disasters technical report. ..."

Well, you have the "deep sea" equivalent of NASA, called NOAA - National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration that explore the deep seas.

The general radar imagery area of that site is here. You can get static imagery or loops of individual radar stations at different ranges, and they also offer composites of the contiguous 48, etc. I find the nice thing about the composites is that they also show you the range of each radar station, so you know where the coverage gaps are. The images are rairly raw: there's no attempt to clean up ground clutter or smooth out the pixels (like you typically see in commercially-produced stuff like your local news).

For hard-core radar data like what you seem to be asking about, a good place to start seems to be here

My personal fav, though, has got to be the satellite imagery. I'm easily amused and I like watching the terminator move across the visible light loops.

The general radar imagery area of that site is here. You can get static imagery or loops of individual radar stations at different ranges, and they also offer composites of the contiguous 48, etc. I find the nice thing about the composites is that they also show you the range of each radar station, so you know where the coverage gaps are. The images are rairly raw: there's no attempt to clean up ground clutter or smooth out the pixels (like you typically see in commercially-produced stuff like your local news).

For hard-core radar data like what you seem to be asking about, a good place to start seems to be here

My personal fav, though, has got to be the satellite imagery. I'm easily amused and I like watching the terminator move across the visible light loops.

The general radar imagery area of that site is here. You can get static imagery or loops of individual radar stations at different ranges, and they also offer composites of the contiguous 48, etc. I find the nice thing about the composites is that they also show you the range of each radar station, so you know where the coverage gaps are. The images are rairly raw: there's no attempt to clean up ground clutter or smooth out the pixels (like you typically see in commercially-produced stuff like your local news).

For hard-core radar data like what you seem to be asking about, a good place to start seems to be here

My personal fav, though, has got to be the satellite imagery. I'm easily amused and I like watching the terminator move across the visible light loops.

Semi Off-topic, but I've been making great use of another .gov site recently for the weather - Sure beats the hell out of the other guys with their popups getting worse each day!

Don't laugh. You know what a wood louse or sow bug is?

Well, they have larger underwater cousins, which are sometimes called "sea roaches".

You can see them live at the New England Aquarium.

No privacy issues if the hiker initiates the device, although it looks like you should stick with the newer 406 MHz devices. The newer devices include a GPS signal, making recovery easier.

Might have these available for use at Ranger stations, although they are on the pricy side. I'd suggest some form of deposit.

Decent study ideas, but is undersea exploration and nutrition studies really the function of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration?

Perhaps the other branches of government, such as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and the National Oeanic and Atmospheric Administration should start X Prizes of their own?

For your article from late 2001, I'll give you an article from the very same agency.

Then, how about looking at the various timescales?
Yes, earth has been warmer in the past, and over the 2-4billion years of its existance, there are longer periods warmer. Imagine the universe is only 3K warm. Great. What does that mean for our situation at hand?

Now have a look at the very same link you provided, which is probably more of our concern, the time of human civilisation. As you can see,
the climate has been actually colder in average (Hence the often cited "fear of the Ice Age" in the 70s). But not only that, judging from the previous curves, 2000 AD should be the peak of its curve.

But, a time-scale which has ticks every 10 millenia is also a bit out of scale. Strangely enough, most people are more concerned about the next decades up to a century, not millenia.

Have a look at the curve, which is probably more of our concern. Should that not be recent enough, here some more, including one from 2003.

> But how much, and is it even measurable compared to a massive volcanic eruption?

Let's start with the fact that vulcans contribute their CO2 regardless whether humans contribute or not. So anthrophogenic CO2 is added to their exhaust.

Now to the data. According to these geologists, anthropogenic CO2 emissions are roughly 150 times the estimated emissions of volcanos.

1. "[Anhydrous ammonia] is lighter than air (unlike HFCs and CFCs) so releases typically float away"

IANAP[hysicist], so can someone help me understand how a subtance that is heavier than air (and therefore can't "float away"), when released at or near ground level, can be responsible for damage to the ozone layer 10 to 50 km above the earth's surface?

I'm really interested in understanding the science, since we were taught for years that our old aerosol hair spray was damaging the ozone layer. How is it getting up there?

ok, let's go back 1000 years and then look at some model results. (graph in the middle of the page, the IPCC site is slow at the moment)

In the grand scale of the Earth the observations just a century so of data might as well be one days data.

True, but on the grand scale of me, or a city, or a civilization, 140 years is quite a long time. And applying theories to data (and data to theories) is what science is all about). If you're doing historical science you can make a prediction about what you expect to see in data obtained from the past. Do you not believe in geology?

a: carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere (see the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory)

b: carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation (graph)

So an increase in CO2 should lead to an increase in temperature, which we observe. Any questions?

They have used blimps in the past to monitor drug traffic from the south. Its called the TARS Program (and here. These blimps have been operational since the 1980's. (1984?). This new program is like an updated TARS program.

If all the ice in the world melted, the sea level would rise by about 70 meters. That leaves ~2400 meters wanting for the seabed, if this boat was only half way up the mountain (assuming the parent got that height right, and 2,500 meters isn't that high)

Let's assume this shortfall was made up by plate techtonics. I haven't read the bible, but I'm assuming they're dealing with a relatively short time frame here, since the Noah story was supposed to have taken place. Let's give them a good chuck of time, say 7200 years to keep things nice a mathematically simple.

So, to give plate techtonics the credit, the Ararat area would therefore have to be moving 33cm a year, or 1mm every single day for the last 7200 years, vertically.

Continental drift occurs at, on average, at the same speed your fingernails grow, or ~5-10cm a year. Now three time the average would be something special, but three times the yearly average purely vertically would have geo physicists very interested, esspecially considering the Arabian plate is esitmated to have an average tectonic movement of around 4cm per year (this is largely horizontal movement, remember).

OK, so let's give a little give and say the 4cm/y was purely vertical over the last 7200 years, that's 288 meters, leaving us still 2,112 meters short of the sea level, even if all the ice had melted.

So, tectonics would have had to have being working overtime and a half to have made up for this shortfall.

Let's think about this from the perspective of the geological record. From observation by many different people around the world of sedimentary strata, from gas sample taken from ice cores along with many other observations, it is agreed in the scientific community that sea level was about 6 meters higher ~8,000 years ago.

Now, truth is that ~8,000 years ago (7600 to be a little more precise), there were huge floods, as the weather was very unstable, but the flooding that occured certainly didn't cover the Earth (there'd be some wicked Quaternary formations if it did), which leads me to thinking that the story of Noah's ark should be taken more in terms of a fishing tale (thiiiiiiis big), rather than an accurate record of a historical event.

Besides, need we get into the debate about exactly how big that arc would have to have been in order to contain two of every species on earth? Or that for a gentically viable population, you need around 10-20 breeding pairs (according to a genetics scientist friend of mine). Or that reforesting the Earth would have taken hundreds of thousands, if not million of years. Or that the bible has been rewritten, translated and modified many, many times (but let's not go there) .

Thanks to Google, I was able to dig up one more photo of the OO.org mascot.

image1,

MSU - 1970s era air temperature

• http://ghrc.msfc.nasa.gov:5721/sensor_documents/ms u_instrument.html

• http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
• http://aqua.nasa.gov/AMSU3.html

• http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/atms_summary.ht ml

• http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/uso/readme/ssmt1.html (about the only decent information that's left about it)

• http://xenon.aerojet.com/Weapon_Systems/Earth_Sens ing/SSMIS/
• http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/IMAGES/ssmisdoc.htm
• http://www.metoffice.com/research/interproj/nwpsaf /ssmi/ssmis_ug_moud001_v2.pdf (PDF gets pretty technical but lots of good info)

• http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/cmis_summary.ht ml

All of the above are what are known as microwave sounders or radiometers. They look at radiation in specific bands in the microwave region of the spectrum (based on oxygen absorption lines) to infer air temperatures.

It looks like the study in the article was using MODIS and TOVS data. TOVS consists of some of the above instruments - MSU and AMSU in particular for this application. MODIS is another sensor that doesn't look at the microwave region of the spectrum, so it's out of my area of expertise. Look at the website for more info on that if you're interested. :)

MSU - 1970s era air temperature

• http://ghrc.msfc.nasa.gov:5721/sensor_documents/ms u_instrument.html

• http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
• http://aqua.nasa.gov/AMSU3.html

• http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/atms_summary.ht ml

• http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/uso/readme/ssmt1.html (about the only decent information that's left about it)

• http://xenon.aerojet.com/Weapon_Systems/Earth_Sens ing/SSMIS/
• http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/IMAGES/ssmisdoc.htm
• http://www.metoffice.com/research/interproj/nwpsaf /ssmi/ssmis_ug_moud001_v2.pdf (PDF gets pretty technical but lots of good info)

• http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/cmis_summary.ht ml

All of the above are what are known as microwave sounders or radiometers. They look at radiation in specific bands in the microwave region of the spectrum (based on oxygen absorption lines) to infer air temperatures.

It looks like the study in the article was using MODIS and TOVS data. TOVS consists of some of the above instruments - MSU and AMSU in particular for this application. MODIS is another sensor that doesn't look at the microwave region of the spectrum, so it's out of my area of expertise. Look at the website for more info on that if you're interested. :)

MSU - 1970s era air temperature

• http://ghrc.msfc.nasa.gov:5721/sensor_documents/ms u_instrument.html

• http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
• http://aqua.nasa.gov/AMSU3.html

• http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/atms_summary.ht ml

• http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/uso/readme/ssmt1.html (about the only decent information that's left about it)

• http://xenon.aerojet.com/Weapon_Systems/Earth_Sens ing/SSMIS/
• http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/IMAGES/ssmisdoc.htm
• http://www.metoffice.com/research/interproj/nwpsaf /ssmi/ssmis_ug_moud001_v2.pdf (PDF gets pretty technical but lots of good info)

• http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/cmis_summary.ht ml

All of the above are what are known as microwave sounders or radiometers. They look at radiation in specific bands in the microwave region of the spectrum (based on oxygen absorption lines) to infer air temperatures.

It looks like the study in the article was using MODIS and TOVS data. TOVS consists of some of the above instruments - MSU and AMSU in particular for this application. MODIS is another sensor that doesn't look at the microwave region of the spectrum, so it's out of my area of expertise. Look at the website for more info on that if you're interested. :)

MSU - 1970s era air temperature

• http://ghrc.msfc.nasa.gov:5721/sensor_documents/ms u_instrument.html

• http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
• http://aqua.nasa.gov/AMSU3.html

• http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/atms_summary.ht ml

• http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/uso/readme/ssmt1.html (about the only decent information that's left about it)

• http://xenon.aerojet.com/Weapon_Systems/Earth_Sens ing/SSMIS/
• http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/IMAGES/ssmisdoc.htm
• http://www.metoffice.com/research/interproj/nwpsaf /ssmi/ssmis_ug_moud001_v2.pdf (PDF gets pretty technical but lots of good info)

• http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/cmis_summary.ht ml

All of the above are what are known as microwave sounders or radiometers. They look at radiation in specific bands in the microwave region of the spectrum (based on oxygen absorption lines) to infer air temperatures.

It looks like the study in the article was using MODIS and TOVS data. TOVS consists of some of the above instruments - MSU and AMSU in particular for this application. MODIS is another sensor that doesn't look at the microwave region of the spectrum, so it's out of my area of expertise. Look at the website for more info on that if you're interested. :)

...if what you say about rotation and cooling is true and relevant, it should also apply to Mercury - and doesn't. True, I believe - relevant, less so.

The gas giant "reconciliation" is just a guess, not tested, not known to be workable. Considerably less definite than the actual measurements.

When I talk about lightning, I don't have atmospheric storms in mind. They don't have the energy density to do much, and it's not as if Mars has an atmosphere to brag about anyway.

However, if the discharge came from a near-miss by a highly charged comet or KBO or even planet, the scar would look pretty much as it does, random gougey bits starting in the west, picking up to a single (pair of) stream as enough debris flies up to provide really good conduction, a big splatch in the middle at closest approach where the discharge "sticks" at the shortest distance between two points, then more trench tailing off to the ever shallower random isletty-looking stuff to the east.

As to the always-forms-glass idea, I call bullshit. (-:

More examples? here (check out some of the secondary damage and think about what a few thousand cubic km of Mars rock would do under suitably scaled-up circumstances) here and many other places. Google is your friend.

There's an official statement about this here...

from 11 years ago, just as it was starting to leak from Usenet.

They can feed through chemosynthesis

Subject: G7) Why doesn't the South Atlantic Ocean experience tropical cyclones?

Though many people might speculate that the sea surface temperatures are too cold, the primary reasons that the South Atlantic Ocean gets no tropical cyclones are that the tropospheric (near surface to 200mb) vertical wind shear is much too strong and there is typically no inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) over the ocean (Gray 1968). Without an ITCZ to provide synoptic vorticity and convergence (i.e. large scale spin and thunderstorm activity) as well as having strong wind shear, it becomes very difficult to nearly impossible to have genesis of tropical cyclones.

However, in rare occasions it may be possible to have tropical cyclones form in the South Atlantic. In McAdie and Rappaport (1991), the US National Hurricane Center documented the occurrence of a strong tropical depression/weak tropical storm that formed off the coast of Congo in mid-April 1991. The storm lasted about five days and drifted toward the west-southwest into the central South Atlantic. So far, there has not been a systematic study as to the conditions that accompanied this rare event.

Tropical cyclones with maximum sustained surface winds of less than 17 m/s (34 kt, 39 mph) are called "tropical depressions". (This is not to be confused with the condition mid-latitude people get during a long, cold and grey winter wishing they could be closer to the equator ;-)) Once the tropical cyclone reaches winds of at least 17 m/s they are typically called a "tropical storm" and assigned a name. If winds reach 33 m/s (64 kt, 74 mph)), then they are called: a "hurricane" (the North Atlantic Ocean, the Northeast Pacific Ocean east of the dateline, or the South Pacific Ocean east of 160E); a "typhoon" (the Northwest Pacific Ocean west of the dateline); a "severe tropical cyclone" (the Southwest Pacific Ocean west of 160E or Southeast Indian Ocean east of 90E); a "severe cyclonic storm" (the North Indian Ocean); and a "tropical cyclone" (the Southwest Indian Ocean) (Neumann 1993).

Most of the South Atlantic is actually cooler than average, so it seems unlikely that global warming is to blame.

DGPS is more a concept than anything (use nearby readings to cancel out as many forms of GPS error as possible), and can provide anywhere from WAAS-level accuracy to centimeter-level accuracy if you're willing to take readings over several days and process them on a computer after the fact.

There's the COUGAAR agent framework and its supporting projects - it's funded by the feds.

There's also this NOAA project site.

If these two outer gas giants cool further, I wonder if the convecting fluid layer will become thinner and thinner as the core freezes? If so, the magnetic field should split into more and more domains. Ultimately, the remaining thin layer will form a dense pattern of Rayleigh-Benard convection cells.

Those small domains will be hard to detect, though. As planet moves to equilibrium and the fluid layer thins and cools, the delta-T driving the convention will weaken. Smaller cells of slower-moving fluid will mean a much weaker magnetic field. Now we only need to wait a few billion years to see if this is what will happen......

Put another way, does anyone remember what the economists predicted for 2003? I'd bet that their predictions for GDP, employment, the stock market, etc. were all wildly off base. Yet no one ever seems to hold them accountable. Even meteorologists attempt to verify the accuracy and skill of their predictions I'd argue that any forecaster who doesn't bother to even verify his own predictions has no more credibility than a fortune teller or astrologer.

I still don't know why those get no respect, they are really nice cars, I bought an Integra and love it, but every time I see a del Sol I think about how much it would rock if I dropped my engine in one. Happily the S2000 seems to be much better liked, after I move somewhere that doesn't have a high of 3F right now, I'll be getting one.

Hourly weather at Fox Field about 6 miles from me as the crow flies and in the same weather pattern. (Most storms go around us.)

Oh, and I completely agree with you about javascript. It's done more to screw up the web than all other technologies (using the word loosely) combined. I could count the times I've seen it used as the real best solution without taking off my shoes.

The NYT may be correct. Recent warm winters have reduced the amount of great lakes ice cover (noaa.gov) This leads to increased evaporation and thus increased cloud cover and snow fall downwind of the Great Lakes (e.g. Bufallo,NY...) It also leads to falling lake levels. Lake Michigan/Huron dropped more than three feet in the last three years. That's quite alot of water that rained/snowed out somewhere else in the world.

Also, for those in Europe global warming has the potential to lower average temperature by disrupting the arctic salt water/fresh water migration that drives the Gulf stream. Sometimes I wish greenhouse warming caused a simplistic effect easily recognized by the public. But climant doesn't work that way. During the three day jet travel restriction after September 11, 2001 there was more diurnal temperature variation in the U.S. than during any 3 day period in recorded history. We are having an effect on the climate, its only prudent to try to study that effect to minimize unforseen side effects, such as crops and lakes being destroyed by previously endangered Canada Geese!

The Great Lakes are having a similar problem with Mussels (and other creatures) from the Black Sea (and other regions) being dumped out of ballast tanks and into the Great Lakes. I recalled hearing something about this on the news a couple months ago -- Google found this link which seems to have some information on the subject.

Life always seems to find a way. I recall once reading about how a swarm of locust rode a Hurricane from Africa to North America. I've also heard of similar weather events transferring fish eggs from the Southern US to the Northeast. Am I the only one that thinks you can't possibly rule out every method of these GM'ed fish escaping -- thus it strikes me as a very bad idea. Not that anyone will listen....

According to the guy this causes one of the biggest uncertainties in todays climate models! They try to compensate this by fudging with the so called bucket correction factor.

I didn't dream up the system, the first poster did, I just attempted to clarify...

It gets better: Here is a list of acronyms starting with 'm'. With that system mb is already taken for millibar and Megabits are Mb...

As I said, it will be some time before this gets sorted out properly. I have no illusion that my post on /. will change the scientific community one iota, but perhaps people will stop stomping on someone else for getting confused - let alone start a flamewar (ala vi vs. emacs or PC vs. Mac, or Microsoft vs. Linux) about being ripped off if their hard-drive is smaller than they think it should be :-)

For warm-blooded manatees, one would think that having heated water would reduce the amount of energy required to heat the body while swimming. The average water temperatures mid winter appear to be in the mid 60's F. Therefore, for the same amount of calorie intake, the energy that would have gone into heating can be redirected to species reproduction.

For cold-blooded creatures, their activity is proportional to the ambient temperature of their surroundings; warmer water would allow more reproductive activity than the colder waters outside of the waste heat plume.

I would also expect more plantlife food source in the plume, since plant growth is proportional to temperature. With an increase of food supply, that attracts the plant eaters, and the meat eaters always follow.

Not quite right either. The solar 'constant' is not constant.

It's not constant, and so it only took several decades to prove it.

The important point here is: we are altering the planetary system, but can not predict the effects.

There is no doubt that we are changing the planetary system. If nothing else, CO2 concentrations are rising dramatically and human activity is definitely the culprit. And global temperatures are definitely rising. Humans may or may not be the culprit, but a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that more CO2 should cause higher temps.

The problem is that we can't predict the effects of these changes. It isn't like there's a global thermostat that we can turn up or down a half-degree by altering our industrial output. Rather, it is like throwing random chemicals into a bowl in a closed room, hoping you don't create toxic fumes. You might, you might not, but you don't know one way or the other, and you can't get out in any case.

I spent several months looking into climate models and concluded that they're complete bunk. We can't predict the weather a week out, but people use the very same techniques to "predict" the climate a century out. Consider this: if you believe in a human activity-climate link, then in order to predict climate, you have to predict human activity. So predicting the behavior of the entire world economy is just one small source of the uncertainty in these models! They're garbage! Computer climate models just create a false sense of predictability about climate change.

So this leaves us in a scary place. Here we are on earth. If we screw it up, we have nowhere else to go. We're making changes, but we don't know the effects. Since we don't understand the planetary system, we can't necessarily undo the effects. It's like remodeling an aircraft in flight.

Since any chemical reaction not completed results in some isotopic enrichment one might enrich U235 by, feeding the dissolved Uranium oxide produced by Thiobacillus Ferrooxidans from raw ore to the anaerobic Desulfovibrio ferrireducens where it would reprecipitate. Then feed the precipitated uranium oxide back to thiobacillus ferrooxidans to produce more uranium liquor to feed to desulfovibrio ferrireducens forming cascaded stages which would gradually enrich the U235 until it was useful for fuel rods etc.

WHOA DUDE! That's a very very interesting idea. AFAIK, isotopic enrichment is very common in biological systems. In fact, isotopic ratios are used to determine if the creature was a herbivore or carnivore (see this for more info). My understanding is that the differences in nuclear weight of different isotopes change the reaction kinetics and can interfere with enzyme dynamics. Since U-238 is not much different from U-235 in mass (compared to the differences among Iron or Oxygen isotopes) the enrichment might be modest. On the other hand, I suspect that one could artificailly evolve the bacteria for their enrichment prowess.

You have suggested a very interesting approach to what is often a very hard problem. Like you, I smell profit, but it may not come from uranium enrichment, but from carbon enrichment. Apparently, isotopically pure Carbon-12 should create diamonds (think semiconductors) with twice the thermal conductivity of mixed carbon diamonds. If biological enrichment were cheap enough, one could become a monopolist supplier of C-12 for high performance semiconductor manufacturing.

IBM also has the contract for the central supercomputing facilitity.

It was a combination... cost was a big driver, but also that the developers of the new AWIPS apps pushed it that way.

These aren't your normal desktops. They run very custom applications and in some cases have three LCD monitors per CPU.

That said, Forecasters will normally have a Windoze box to the side for surfing the web, email, etc.

Use this software to download the compressed binary data and save it different formats or create graphics
Beware, though... the datasets are pretty large and normally updated every hour.

What kind of education is required to get a job developing and analyzing the forcasts? Would a CS master degree suffice?

How to feel about CFD? Enjoy PDEs?

Typically you need a 4 year (applied) physics degree and a 1 year diploma of meteorology or a degree in meteorology.

Or Ask these guys - met career

A few months ago I wanted to putz around with some hourly temperature data covering a year or so for a couple of cities. Since this data is produced by the National Weather Service

Did you try the National Climatic Data Center?

I found the data for $10 (Climate Data Online, NCDC) for a download.

A few months ago I wanted to putz around with some hourly temperature data covering a year or so for a couple of cities. Since this data is produced by the National Weather Service

Did you try the National Climatic Data Center?

I found the data for $10 (Climate Data Online, NCDC) for a download.

Try poletopole.org

Other than their data for Canada (or any non-US site) may be up to 45-50 minutes late because they used publically accessible data via NOAA.

The most accurate and up to date source of Canadian weather data free for the public is via weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca. Data delays are roughly 5 minutes or less "from the wire."

The Weather Network (in Canada) are poor at not updating their forecasts and not cannot beat the source of their raw data, Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) Environment Canada.