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."

Comments

Re:Straight to the pointless debate

[TemporalBeing]

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.

Not to mention that if it doesn't go for how the AGW claimers want, then they'll just say the sensors were not accurate enough and write it off with the other side will point to the data as showing no AGW issues.