| DAMOCLES |
[Jan. 24th, 2006|07:17 am] |
"Developing Arctic Modelling and Observing Capabilities
for Longterm Environmental Studies"
 
OK it's no secret that i love WorldChanging, and today's article by Jamais cascio on DAMOCLES is a perfect example of why-- not only does he show us this amazing new tool but he brings it up in the light of MashUps and that just rocks! MashUps as you probably know, used to be audio and video collages where two predominant cultural artifices (say, a Madonna song and a song by Young Buck) get spliced and mixed together to create a synthesis of the two in a new and funny way... Well the MashUp Jamais is talking about is a little different, but amazing!! He brings our attention to DAMOCLES, a project by the Technical University of Denmark to provide compelling and useful information on the effects of climate change on Arctic ice. DAMOCLES adds satellite and ground-level sensor data to Google Earth polar maps, providing daily-updated readings of ice motion and thickness. Wow! so you can now see whats happening in real time (almost, you can see the Total ice concentration image, 3-day ice drift vectors from Global Monitoring Mode data of ESA's ENVISAT ASAR, Location and drift track of the Russian North Pole 34 manned ice drift station, and Location of a number of drift buoys in the Arctic region. Most of these buoys are deployed as part of the International Arctic Ocean Buoy Project. Updated daily, Data supplied by the AARI (Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute) in St. Petersburg. ).
Love it!!! forget video games, this is the real deal..... |
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| Gamma's on a roll.... |
[Nov. 19th, 2005|08:56 am] |
well, we're now watching Tropical Storm Gamma turn into Hurricane Gamma. while they like to say that it's the 24th storm this hurricane season, it's misleading, as before Gamma got it's name, it was called "TD 27" Or the 27th tropical depression. Again I hope that it doesn't wreak too much havoc, as they say, (after it's stay in Honduras and Belilze) it will descend upon Floridians once more...
Now, with 27 storms, you may want to look at this whole "climate debate." Is frequency increasing? Is size and or packed-energy increasing? Well two tools for you if you are so inclined: 1) Oxford University just launched their new site: "The Basics of Climate Prediction" for all you junior climate sleuths, they offer free software to help with your predictions (of course if you've been reading this for a while and already have your decoder ring, you also already have your own desktop General Circulation Model, right?)
2) The other goodie I have for you is a little scary. And its already out-dated, but it's a movie from NASA (always fun!). It's the 2005 Hurricane season at a glance (well upto wilma, no greeks). It's only about a minute and a half long, but gives you a great idea about whats going on in the tropics.... check it out here |
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| no alarms and no surprises..... |
[Sep. 7th, 2005|07:18 am] |
NASA's Earth Observatory newswire just reported that this year's Arctic Sea Ice is clocking in aruond 15% lower than normal. A new low. (and that's 15% averaged out over the whole space... those dark brownish areas are 50% below normal). I remember a conversation with an old bandmate who loved the images of "dead machines and post industrial detrius," i do see some of the haunting allure, as in the image above, but wish we were spared the beauty.
...as an aside; while the browns signify a 50% decrease in sea ice, and the overall trend is for it to disappear. You might also take note that white = no change and blue is up to 50% increase in ice. And especially around the western side of Greenland, where it's been noted that a glacier is now growing at speeds up upward of 12Km a year(!) there is no brown. For me anyway, this little spot (home to Santa) is ground-zero four the ice age we are now beginning. Just my own opinion, maybe... |
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| ask and ye shall receive |
[Jan. 17th, 2005|10:13 pm] |
wasn't i just bitching about how climate models so far have been lame??? Well today there's some great news out o the UK that scientists from the Hadley Centre (makers of *the best* GCMs to date) have joined forces with a supercomputer team in Yokohama Japan (makers of the Earth Simulator supercomputer) to take their HADCM3 and add HADGEM (a climate model based on marine and terrestrial life's climate interaction) HiGEM (a model that takes the standard GCM grid-scale of 500 sqmi and busts it up into tiny organic pieces) to create....... (drum roll please) "NUGEM"
woo hoo! the Nu Gem is so info-intense, it could only run through Earth Simulator's 5100 processors (i's the size of 4 tennis courts) which do an amazing 36 Teraflops (36 trillion calculations per secons) and they say it's the most accurate climate predictions we've ever had.... I wonder what they will tell us? |
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| goodbye Sims hello Gcms! |
[Jan. 12th, 2005|11:51 pm] |
ExPan Killer Ap for 2005: EdGCM,
the DIY desktop climate model
NASA's GISS and Earth Sysems Directorate have just released EdGCM, a free version of their (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) General Circulation Climate model (GCM), tailored for education (aside from ecogeeks, who but students are going to be the early adaptors to this gem?). You can run through common scenarios (including several GHWarming and Ice Age scenarios), as well as create a model and tweak it to see how the planet will react to say, a tripling of CO2, or full breakdown of the thermohaline belt. Forget what the pundits say, see for yourself what may happen in our near future!
on their site, EdGCM says:
"Most climate researchers believe that climate change will impact our planet's environment and the world's economy profoundly in the coming decades. Thus, everyone should have a basic knowledge of the Earth’s climate system so that informed judgments may be shaped with regard to critical issues" ---i couldn't have said it better myself!
While GCMs aren't perfect (they don't fully understand clouds and rainfall all that well) they have gotten much more accurate in their parametrization of these tougher issues --which are actually more chemistry than physics so its understandable that it would be a weak spot in these atmospheric models. And since they are atmospheric models i hasten to say that the real fun with these will also be hacking in and hybridising some sort of Ocean Circulation Model to get a much more detailed and accurate model... Way more fun than Sea Monkeys! |
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| interesting ....and scary. |
[Jan. 12th, 2005|11:43 pm] |
an interesting thing about these GCMs ..even though they don't have the chem as well as the phys, and even though they don't all couple with Ocean Circulation Models ...at this point almost all of the GCMs around are predicting that the Thermohaline Circulation (what keeps europe warm) will shut down. They're right that people should know about this. |
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| i'm only laughing cause no one gets hurt |
[Jan. 12th, 2005|11:12 pm] |
funny life-imitating-art-imitating-life from the above mentioned ExPan killer ap of 2005:
in the read-me from the above mentioned EDGCM desktop climate model (and i quote)
"1. We recommend that you NOT leave the GCM running on a Windows laptop
unattended. We have found that some Pentium laptops have difficulty dissipating
heat and may shutdown (hibernate) without warning causing the climate model to crash. This does not appear to harm the laptop, but can corrupt GCM output files."
--again i couldn't have said it better myself |
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