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Out of the Warehouse: Climate Researchers Rescue Long-Lost Satellite Images
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Once stashed in warehouses in Maryland and North Carolina, images and video captured from orbit by some of NASA's first environmental satellites in the mid-1960s are now yielding a trove of scientific data. The Nimbus satellites, originally intended to monitor Earth's clouds in visible and infrared wavelengths, also would have captured images of sea ice, researchers at the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center realized when they heard about the long-lost film canisters in 2009. After acquiring the film—and then tracking down the proper equipment to read and digitize its 16-shades-of-gray images, which had been taken once every 90 seconds or so—the team set about scanning and then stitching the images together using sophisticated software. So far, more than 250,000 images have been made public, including the first image taken by Nimbus-1 on 31 August 1964, of an area near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Besides yielding a wealth of sea ice data, the data recovery project, which will end early next year, could also be used to extend satellite records of deforestation and sea surface temperatures."
is this from Warehouse 13?
I read this article earlier.
Here's the things people are going to fixate on, without having near enough data actually genuinely analyze them.
The article states that Antarctic Ice was way larger in are in 1964 than it is today(or was in 1972, the until-now earliest satellite data date)
And the deniers are going to fixate on the fact that there were holes in the ice.
And since there's not a lick of expert analysis vis-a-vis the implications for climate change involved there, I can't bring myself to care, what some people on slashdot are going to conclude without the numbers.
>using sophisticated software
I wonder what that means. Is it more sophisticated than the software I use day to day? What makes it sophisticated?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
These film were stored in North Carolina. It is actually illegal there to predict sea level rise. There is some question about whether the law makers there banned the prediction of sea level rise or the banned sea level rise itself. But anyway these NASA scientists need to tread carefully in North Carolina.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They could have had a much more interesting picture if they had used 50.
Glad to see something related to this topic that is not brimming over with pre-masticated opinions.
The question we have to ask now is will NOAA and the ABoM falsify that data as well????
lulz
It's not like we can stop the melting, and even if we tried, other countries wouldn't care. Oh well.
Crackpot Crackpot Crackpot Crackpot...there.
but, but, that can't be. Republithugs must deny peer reviewed data. They must have maniupualted the bill somehow.
As anyone who has done VR panorama stitching can tell you, software can only do so much. The output will have some issues, like things not lining up quite correctly or colors being off in one section, etc. So you have do some Photoshop work to make it look good.
Kind of like the raw data vs. adjusted data issue. If they show you the massaged data to back up a claim, but then say they accidentally lost the raw data (or outright refuse to release it, as in some cases)... well then you know they're no longer in the realm of science but a religious crusade.
Paul McCartney called Elvis on that day.
...the new data shows it was even cooler in the 60s than we previously thought! More global warming!
Well, you have a few stumbling blocks:
a) While the mechanism for AGW is pretty obvious and indisputable, the actual predicted value of climate models has been lacking. That's just a fact. They are getting better, and they will get better, but it is fact that they are inaccurate today.
b) The private sector is already pricing risk due to climate change into models for various natural disasters. Right now this is just best guess based on the models, but as the models improve, so will the risk models based on them. So, the "cost" of climate is something the market is working towards deciding. Until that actual cost is well known and understood by all parties, it will be politically impossible for anyone with any degree of skepticism towards the government in general to agree to let government decide what that price should be.
c) Since, the price of doing nothing is not even agreed to yet, it follows that any mitigate response must be viewed with suspicion, because, you can't compare the cost of action with the unknown cost of damages. A tell tale sign that there is a perceptual agreement on this issue by everyone, purported denier, and believer, is that, most believers remain anti-nuclear power, and I've seen little evidence this administration has even considered increasing research into nuclear fusion.
d) If the climate is always changing, it doesn't matter in the minds of some, if man is changing it or not, when something else will change it just as well.
So, the actual dollars and cents reality is that the proponents of climate change reform are asking everyone to make some rather radical changes in their life, to let there be new winners and new losers, when it is not at all understood how much the winners will win and the losers will lose, if we choose to do nothing but let fossil fuels exhaust themselves or deal with doomsday when it happens. Sure, there's denialism, but by casting opponents of your point of view into that camp, all you've done is basically positioned yourself as someone who is advancing a political agenda with climate change as its mask, rather than fixing any problems of climate change itself.
This is my sig.