contrails

bildan wrote:

"Recently published research by Barber and colleagues shows that the ice
cover was even more fragile at the end of the melt season than satellite
data indicated, with regions of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas covered by
small, rotten ice http://nsidc.org/cgi-bin/words/word.pl?rotten%20ice
floes."

There is no good news from the National Snow and Ice Center, regardless
of the The Mail says.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly


Look at this:

http://climate.nasa.gov/news/index.c...ews&NewsID=242

I had no idea the mass loss was accelerating. No good news at the South
Pole, either.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

On 1/13/2010 9:43 PM, Eric Greenwell wrote:
bildan wrote:

"Recently published research by Barber and colleagues shows that the ice
cover was even more fragile at the end of the melt season than satellite
data indicated, with regions of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas covered by
small, rotten ice http://nsidc.org/cgi-bin/words/word.pl?rotten%20ice
floes."

There is no good news from the National Snow and Ice Center, regardless
of the The Mail says.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
* Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

Look at this:

http://climate.nasa.gov/news/index.c...ews&NewsID=242
I had no idea the mass loss was accelerating. No good news at the South
Pole, either.

Hmmm. 24 cubic miles of ice loss per year since 2002 across Antarctica.
Sounds pretty bad. Thats a lot of ice.

But the area of Antarctica is 5.5 million square miles. Average ice
depth across the interior is estimated to be 1.2 km. Thats a couple
million cubic miles of ice. Now that's a lot of ice.

Makes 24 cubic miles seem pretty trivial. But maybe its wildly abnormal
to loose that much. Or maybe it really is trivial normal variation. I
don't know.

But watch out for scale and context. Big numbers can be used to
illustrate, impress, or deceive.

A seven knot thermal may sound pretty impressive. But on a strong day at
Parowan, its not even worth slowing down for

-Dave

Speaking of big numbers, here's a recent article that explains how the
temps at the Vostok research station in Antarctica dropped to a record
-89 C in 1983; http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8087

-Scott