Atmospheric

Skegness is SO bracing said the posters featuring the Jolly Fisherman.  But what is it that makes the seaside air so invigorating?  Not ozone, as your auntie or granny might have told you, adding that it was “good for you”.  A whiff of ozone down the Tube, where it used to be added to kill airborne germs, or more recently standing by a photocopier, should soon disabuse anyone of that misapprehension.  And ozone, at ground level anyway, is certainly not good for you. No, the “smell of the sea” is due to dimethyl sulfide (DMS).  But hold on!…

“Do you believe in global warming?” he shouted after me as I was leaving the plane. On the plane  going back from ESA's Living Planet Symposium  in Bergen I sat beside a very lively and  knowledgeable couple from the New York area. They had been visiting family in Latvia and Norway and were on their way back home. I rarely talk to my neighbors on the plane, mostly because I use  the opportunity to work while enduring the torturous narrow seats. I'm 1.73 m tall (go metric ) and  the leg space is made for midgets. On this flight though, I acted like a normal social…

This is such a breathtaking view of the sky above Cotopaxi Volcano in Ecuador. Time lapse video takes you from day to night- full of shooting stars, and even some hikers' flashlights near the end. This thumbnail is a preview of the wonders to come. Click on the link below to go to the full site with the movie clips: http://www.astrosurf.com/sguisard/Pagim/Cotopaxi.html I keep watching this over and over and over.... HT to New Scientist for pointing me to the link.

If we can't get rid of CO2, the greenhouse gas that gets the most press, perhaps we can store it, say researchers.    Maybe even in rock form.     Carbon dioxide when mixed with water forms carbonic acid (also known as carbonated water or soda water), which can percolate through  rocks, dissolving some minerals and forming solid carbonates with them, thereby storing the carbon dioxide in rock form. Sigurdur Gislason of the University of Iceland has been studying the possibility of sequestration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in basalt and presented his findings today to…

A tornado is a rotating column of air extending from a thunderstorm to the ground.  Tornadoes are capable of 250 MPH wind speeds, cutting a swath of destruction in excess of one mile width and dozens of miles in length. If you see a dark, greenish sky or a wall cloud and hail, you might be getting a tornado.  If you have something that sounds like a freight train, you definitely are. Tornadoes form in violent thunderstorms when there is sufficient instability,  meaning warmer and more humid than usual conditions in the lower atmosphere, and possibly cooler than usual…

The Sun is the biggest external source of energy which affects Earth’s climate. Long-term variations of the Earth’s orbit lead to long-term (~20-400,000 year) variations in the total energy received from the Sun (Milankovich cycles) and respectively in the terrestrial temperature. For shorter time-scales, decades to centuries, the reason for solar-induced changes in the Earth’s climate are changes in the Sun itself. In the solar minimum the magnetic field of the Sun resembles the field of a magnetic dipole, with magnetic field lines in north-south direction. Differential rotation (fastest at…

Desperately Denying Arctic Warming This is the age of rapid public access to satellite images.  If you want to know what is happening to the Arctic ice you can see for yourself. There are some people who don't want you to look.  They want you to read their drivel instead, and go away believing that the Arctic ice isn't really melting, or if it is then that is nothing unusual. On Saturday, May 01, 2010, Paul Driessen wrote a piece of blatant propaganda called "(Desperately) Looking for Arctic warming".  It was "co-authored by scientist Willie Soon".http://townhall.com/columnists…

Researchers writing in Science have found the possible source of a huge carbon dioxide 'burp' that happened some 18,000 years ago and which helped to end the last ice age. The results provide the first concrete evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) was more efficiently locked away in the deep ocean during the last ice age, turning the deep sea into a more 'stagnant' carbon repository – something scientists have long suspected but lacked data to support. Working on a marine sediment core recovered from the Southern Ocean floor between Antarctica and South Africa, the international team led by Dr…

Two weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Spencer is a trained atmospheric scientist and actively publishes in peer-reviewed journals –  he is also a global warming skeptic. Given his background and contrarian views, I asked Spencer what evidence there is to suggest that a majority of the climate science community is wrong about global warming. He explained that the IPCC climate models used to forecast drastic temperature increases assume that low level clouds, which tend to cool the climate, dissipate in response to warming from CO2…

Scientists from the University of Alabama, Huntsille have developed a new way to use satellite instruments to measure surface temperatures over most of the world's land area.  The new technique developed by Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. Danny Braswell, both research scientists in the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, uses microwave sensors on NOAA and NASA satellites to collect surface temperature data over virtually all of Earth's land area. They say they hope the new system will provide a stable method for monitoring climate change without some of the…