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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?
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.
Total bullshit on the part of the media.
You've got to learn to not believe what reporters say. Read the actual bill.
http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/...
"The Commission shall direct the Science Panel to include in its five-year updated assessment a
comprehensive review and summary of peer-reviewed scientific literature that address the full
range of global, regional, and North Carolina-specific sea-level change data and hypotheses,
including sea-level fall, no movement in sea level, deceleration of sea-level rise, and
acceleration of sea-level rise. When summarizing research dealing with sea level, the
Commission and the Science Panel shall define the assumptions and limitations of predictive
modeling used to predict future sea-level scenarios. "
The first version of the bill was the one that the news picked up and, well, just plain made up bald-faced lies about.
Here it is:
"Historic rates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios
of accelerated rates of sea-level rise unless such rates are from statistically significant,
peer-reviewed data and are consistent with historic trends. Rates of sea-level rise shall not be
one rate for the entire coast, but rather the Commission shall consider separately oceanfront and
estuarine shorelines."
See the part about not including 'acccelerated rates of sea-level rise"? That's the controversial part of the bill. By taking the most extreme sea-level rise predictions, some sea-side community was announcing a need for huge sums of money to prepare for the "predicted rise". The bill was simply saying that you had to use peer-reviewed data and historical trends.
I don't have a problem with the legislature requiring both historical and peer-reviewed data for predictions of sea-level rise, and I cannot imagine any scientist having a problem with that.
These legislators have been slipping such clauses into the law all the time, and this time they got caught. Otherwise they would have happily forced the value of pi to be 3.0 exact.
Do you have problems with the legislators decreeing what interpolation technique the scientists must use? Limiting the data sets they might use? Or do you modify the bill after getting caught with hands in the cookie jar and then whip up prodigal quantities of false outrage?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You mean where they say "Observed changes in global mean surface air temperature since 1950 (from three major databases, as anomalies relative to 1961–1990) are shown in Figure 1.4. As in the prior assessments, global climate models generally simulate global temperatures that compare well with
observations over climate timescales (Section 9.4). Even though the projections from the models were never intended to be predictions over such a short timescale, the observations through 2012 generally fall within the projections made in all past assessments. The 1990–2012 data have been shown to be consistent with the FAR projections (IPCC, 1990), and not consistent with zero trend from 1990, even inthe presence of substantial natural variability (Frame and Stone, 2013)."
Is that where they dismiss the models outright? Perhaps *you* should read it.
Your claim does not stand up to scrutiny.
I happen to live near one of the main weather stations which was caught up in that FOX News brouhaha and happen to know about the local history. tl;dr as usual, the whole story was all a load of vaporous bullshit. And apparently it worked since you took the bait.
One hundred years ago the local weather station was established outside the harbor master's office down by the docks (and the water). The city grew up and forty years ago or so the weather station was moved 500 feet up a hill to outside the local observatory, which is surrounded by forest.
Moving a temperature sensor away from a large body of water, out of a "heat island" of now-paved urban roads, out of a canyon of concrete and glass buildings, and to a higher elevation will all change the readings of the sensor. If you want to keep a continuous record before and after moving, before and after various construction projects and re-roofing nearby, and before and after population changes, you're going to have to figure out and apply a correction factor for each of these things.
There is nothing particularly unusual about our local weather station's story which hasn't been repeated in most cities around the world. So it is not surprising that noisy long term time series need to be cleaned up before being fed into sensitive predictive models. It would be dishonest not to if you know there was a change in the sampling history which required it.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.