4 November 2009

Sudden Mac Withdrawal

Posted by Dan Satterfield

Red is above normal and blue is areas with below normal temps. Image from NASA's MODIS Sensor) on the TERRA Satellite.

Red is above normal and blue is areas with below normal temps. Image from NASA's MODIS Sensor) on the TERRA Satellite. Image from NASA.

My Mac Book Pro crashed Monday night, and since my life is in one and zeros on it’s hard drive I’ve been going through a bit of withdrawal all week. (My wife would argue that it’s been a bit more than “a bit”).

The good news is that it’s fixable and mainly free at that! The bad news is I am writing this post on a machine running some awful OS called windows… 😉

That said I have some interesting images today worth fighting with the code from Redmond, WA. to post…

NASA’s AQUA and Terra satellites with their fancy MODIS sensor have produced incredible images of Earth with tons of invaluable data on our biosphere/atmosphere, cryosphere..you get the picture.

Actually you really DO get the picture. See above. It’s the land and ocean anomalies from Sept. 2009 from same. The oceans have been running at the warmest levels ever recorded. There is talk that with the El Nino brewing and getting stronger in the Pacific, the planet may break it’s temperature record set in 1998.

Numerical Ocean models are forecasting a moderately strong El Nino this Winter.

Numerical Ocean models are forecasting a moderately strong El Nino this Winter. Image from NOAA CPC.

This will really mess up the denier crowd (Not really that many of them left anymore) who use 1998’s warmest year to claim the planet is cooling. If you see that on air or online you are being fed propaganda and not science.

I got a kick out of the AP reporter who sent the raw data to a bunch of statisticians and asked them to look at it and tell them if there was cooling in the last 20 years.

They all said no, of course, which is what anyone with a decent grasp of science and statistics already knew.

Later,

A still whimpering from Apple withdrawal,

Dan