OK, here’s a bonus true-color satellite image from today (NASA Terra satellite, MODIS instrument, taken approximately 10:30 a.m. local time), looking northward from northern India across the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau (click for full-size version):

Many years ago as a NASA employee I was asked if I wanted to be considered to fly on the Space Shuttle as a Payload Specialist to support an Earth Observation Mission instrument I was principal investigator on. I turned down being considered, and the mission was cancelled anyway (as were many others) after the Challenger disaster. I went on to work on NASA’s (unmanned) Mission to Planet Earth, while Fred Leslie from our group ended up flying on the Shuttle with his fluid dynamics experiment.

Fred was probably much more suited to flying in space than me, having jumped out of airplanes over 2,500 times (“in a row”, as he liked to say). He brought back home movies of living on the Shuttle, and he remarked on how three-dimensional the Earth looks from space. You just want to stare out the windows, but every minute of your time up there is scheduled with a variety of tasks and you don’t have the luxury.

Now, with a variety of Earth observation satellites on-orbit, near-realtime access to that data, and the amazing mapping capabilities of Google Earth, we can create images of the Earth on a daily basis, from viewing perspectives as if we are flying in space. I thought I would provide some of these for your enjoyment, the locations chosen mostly based upon their beauty.

This is South Australia today, looking south toward Antarctica. Since it’s one of the few places on Earth that has “Spencer” on the map (Spencer Gulf), I thought I’d start my “Dr. Roy’s Earth Today” series there (click for full-size version):

I spent three weeks in Townsville, Australia in January 1993 supporting NASA’s portion of the TOGA-COARE field experiment. I had a specially designed microwave radiometer we were flying over thunderstorms in the NASA ER-2 high-altitude aircraft, a modified U2. The experiment was a replacement for the cancelled Space Shuttle mission.

For those who have never been there before, Australia is an amazing and exotic place. Rain forests next to deserts. Giant lizards, giant bats, and giant mice (called “roos”) that can walk on their hind legs. I remember never being able to get my bearings because the sun was always in the wrong part of the sky, and walking through a pouring rain at night without a cloud in the star-filled sky.

Here’s the NASA MODIS image of 140 mph Typhoon Vongfong from several hours ago, which I have displayed in Google Earth, as it approaches Okinawa (click for full size version):

As seen in the latest forecast track, Vongfong is expected to make a direct hit on Okinawa, then progress up through the main islands of southern Japan.

Since you folks paid for it, you might as well know how to use it….

You can access the latest (or any previous day’s) MODIS data from either the Aqua or Terra polar-orbiting satellites, import it into Google Earth, and make your own Big Blue Marble.

I didn’t know how to do this until recently. I had to ask in a NASA meeting we were having, and even the knowledgeable people present had to ask someone else.

1) go to the MODIS Worldview website
2) choose the month and day (along the bottom)
3) choose either the Terra or Aqua satellite (upper left)..they sample 3 hours apart, nominally 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.
4) click on the camera icon (upper right) for downloading data,
5) choose a resolution (I chose 5 km for a quasi-global image, 250 meters would be for a smaller region…there is a filesize limit involved here)
6) resize the “camera window” to get the area you want
7) choose KMZ for the Google Earth file format, and click “Download”

After the file downloads to your computer, you should get a prompt to open the file in Google Earth (downloadable here). Then, you can use all of the other Google Earth functionalities to cruise around the world.

The highest resolution available is 250 meters, so don’t expect to see streets and trees like the high-resolution aircraft imagery in Google. At best, you can pick out some interstate highways. But what you get is daily data, with today’s data only a few hours after it is collected.

Rated the strongest typhoon since Haiyan, which killed 6,000 people in the Philippines last November, Super Typhoon Vongfong in the extreme western tropical Pacific now has peak winds of 165 mph and ocean swells as high as 50 ft as it moves northward toward Okinawa, Japan.

I put together this NASA MODIS image montage, only a few hours old, which shows the intricate swirling cloud structure within the eye of the typhoon early Thursday afternoon (click for full-size):

Here are some other great views of Typhoon Vongfong at mashable.com.

The Capital Weather Gang’s Jason Samenow has written that the record long hurricane drought is leading to a sense of complacency in a growing south Florida population. New building in hurricane-prone areas is at greater risk as unsuspecting residents are lulled into a false sense of security.

But I would argue that, unless 9 year olds are now building on the beach and insurers have decided that hurricanes are no longer a threat, Floridians haven’t forgotten. How can anyone forget 2004 and 2005, with 7 hurricanes hitting Florida, unless they are only 9 years old?

And are 1 million new residents moving to Florida since then really that clueless about hurricanes? Have people moving to Kansas not heard of tornadoes?

It is rare that any given midwestern town is hit by a tornado. But everyone understands that the threat is there. Eventually, another one will hit. So, when there’s a tornado watch, people pay attention.

And when it’s hurricane season, people pay attention. Especially if they have never experienced one before.

When the next hurricane threatens Florida, people will be so inundated with media-hyped warning of just how bad it might get that, if anything, Floridians will be too responsive.

The bigger threat in my mind is over-warning when weak hurricanes hit. This is what happens with tornado warnings, and it also happens with hurricanes. Over-warning leads people to skip evacuations, or to not head to an interior room or a basement.

So, unlike Mr. Samenow, I’ll take the old-fashioned view that fewer hurricane strikes are a good thing…and that people aren’t stupid.

While still claiming that the results do not cast doubt on climate change, a new NASA press release says that the global oceans below 2,000 meters depth haven’t warmed since 2005. This is the period that we have had the deep oceans reasonably well sampled with thousands of globally-distributed Argo floats.

The thing that annoys me about such press releases is the obligatory disclaimer (no doubt crafted so that “skeptics” don’t have a field day with the press release):

“Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself.”

Such statements have the usual vagueness that allows the True Believers to interpret it any way they want.

Does it mean: “It doesn’t throw suspicion on Al Gore’s impending thermogeddon”?

Or does it mean: “It doesn’t throw suspicion on the fact that climate has always changed, and always will change, with or without the help of humans”?

Or maybe something in between?

You see, as long as the IPCC gets away with basing alarmist rhetoric upon factually benign statements, like over half of the warming since the 1950s has been human induced (yawn), the global warming debate will remain dominated by extremists.

And this allows politicians to get away with saying whatever they want. Scientists are so vague that their statements can be used in a wide variety of ways that help the politician.

I seldom post original material by other authors, but this is one of those cases where someone I agree with has said something better than I ever could. I hope you will visit his blog.

Originally posted by Pointman on October 2, 2014

TELL ME WHY

I posed some simple questions a number of articles back and I’d like to begin this piece by asking them again, because they’re fundamental.

Don’t they know how many of our own poor can no longer afford to heat their homes? Don’t they know how many millions die in the developing world from malaria because we won’t allow them access to DDT? Don’t they know that a million children a year die or are simply blinded for life by withholding the distribution golden rice? Don’t they know how many lives could be saved by supplying the poor with drought and disease resistant GM seeds? Don’t they know that switching from growing food staples to growing biofuel crops for cars only the rich can afford has more than doubled prices of basic foods? Don’t they know about the people killed in the food riots? Do they actually know anything? Do they care anyway?

There’s no oily sophistry about those questions, no sophistication, no tricky debating traps, no guile, no hidden agenda but always an essential inhumanity to the silence or uneasy evasiveness with which they’re met. I’ve raised an impolite subject. The truth is people are not dying, they’re being killed and we’re the ones through inaction doing the killing. I make no apology for being so blunt because they’re needed questions, simple questions, brutal even, and yet there’s always that awkward silence in response to them.

There really isn’t a party line on the moral dilemmas which are at the very heart of those questions, because morality is no longer about people or ones behaviour towards them, but simply about what’s good for the Earth or not. All else is subordinate to that consideration. In a deeper sense though, any wider altruistic morality is now about nothing more than projecting a good image of oneself rather than any notion of common humanity.

What we’re talking about are the lives of the most vulnerable being needlessly sacrificed atop a green altar, because of an almost automatic obeisance to a new and terrible earth goddess called Gaia.

You might think those questions were addressed at the real climate fanatics, those who’re absolutely determined to save the Earth even if that means over the megadeath, rigour-mortised and stacked-high burning corpses of humanity, but you’d be wrong because as must be obvious by now, those zealots simply don’t care about such collateral damage. After all, a smaller, more “sustainable” number of people on the Earth is one of their oft expressed aspirations. Humanity is a plague on the Earth, to quote David Attenborough.

Those questions were originally directed at the religious bodies of our rich developed world but with the sure and certain expectation of nothing in reply, not only because they were rhetorical but because the churches are by now in denial or wilfully blind to the moral issues presented by those questions.

They’ve fallen so far down into the abyss of the governing elite’s unquestioned dogma, which puts the Earth before the human cost of protecting it, that they now effectively worship a graven but green image in their desert of moral desolation. They’ve lost touch with that most basic imperative of all religions – the duty of care we all have towards the poor and vulnerable. Common decency, if you will.

Those questions, like this article, are now being addressed to the footsoldier clergy of those churches; the priests and the pastors, the imams and the rabbis, the holy men, the human beings representing their respective faiths and trying to make a difference in the lives of their local congregations.

This issue is not about science, since climate science has long ago allowed itself to become a compliant and willing harlot to politics. Like the great whore of Babylon, it sucks greedily on the teat of notoriety and all integrity has long since fled. Political sentiment can be changed because it’s driven by the fickle beast of popular opinion, which you still have a measure of influence over. What can’t be changed is that this is at heart a basic moral issue and morality is an invariant which should never be subject to the passing vicissitudes of fashion or alarmed public opinion.

The killing of the innocents is wrong, standing idly by when that’s done for nothing better than a mistaken idea grown into a well-intentioned but homicidal monster or for a quick buck, is wrong. Don’t delude yourself, the moneylenders are busy at work in your temples, doing brisk business under the righteous cloak of that false goddess Gaia but in reality serving nothing other than their own god Mammon. Your silence is helping them.

I’ll pose some new questions just for you, but I’m going to help you out by giving you the answers to them.

Will you ever read this article? Probably not. Will you ever read past the first page of Google’s reassuring results from various well-heeled green NGOs about any of the above questions? No. Will you ever stop to wonder how we eradicated malaria in the developed world using DDT and still have plenty of birds and bees? No. Will you ever try to calculate how many lives have been saved by us being malaria-free for over half a century? No. Will you think about why we’ve spent 800 billion dollars to fight global warming when the Earth’s temperature hasn’t risen in nearly two decades? No. Will you consider the effect that amount of money could have had on poverty relief around the world? No.

Will you at least admit that standing idly by and not speaking out means there’s some blood on your hands? Just a touch, a smidgen even? No.

You are this very day in the midst of a silent ongoing genocide, a slowmo invisible annihilation, a new shoah of such dimensions as to put the Nazis to shame and yet you will not acknowledge it or speak out about it. You do nothing. Nothing, nada, nada and nada every time. It’s Hemingway’s prayer and that’s the prayer of those who not only believe they’ve been abandoned by God, but have ceased to believe there can even be such an entity.

“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

Can there actually be a god? What sort of god could countenance such needless cruelty, suffering and callous waste of innocent lives? Deus irae? An angry god? Is there a reason? Do you have a reason? An excuse? Anything?

All those millions of preventable deaths are the direct result of political policies driven by nothing more than fashionable ideas about what our relationship with the Earth should be. In the midst of it all, you ignore the pressing issues, preferring instead to hotly debate schismatic irrelevances like female or gay priests. It’s no wonder that whole sections of churches in the developing word are considering decoupling themselves from what they consider to be out of touch mother churches in the developed nations, who simply won’t engage with real problems.

You plant saplings in your leafy suburbs doing your bit to save the Earth while the poor in the developing countries are running out of shrubs to burn to keep themselves alive. You talk about living in harmony with God’s good green Earth to your plump congregations while the world’s poor can do nothing more than lay damp towels over their dying children and hope for the fucking best. Tell me, who exactly needs your God’s forgiveness there? All my tears outside the walls of Babylon have long ago been wept; there’s nothing left in me now but an abiding anger towards you.

You are a part of the problem when you should by any decent notion of religious conviction be a major part of fixing it.

I am nothing and nobody, a small man with a small voice who long ago despaired of any faith in some sort of god. And yet I beseech you in the name of whatever god you follow to do something, or at least speak out. Like the Nazarene, you will not be rewarded for telling the simple truth.

Don’t tell me why god allows such things because there can be no reason, don’t bother debating god’s existence with me or his mysterious ways, just tell me why as a human being and a supposed man of god with some influence, you aren’t standing in your pulpit at every opportunity, raging and thundering to your congregation against such an obscene and preventable waste of human life and worse still, allowing that inhumanity to grind on day after pitiless day without doing a single thing about it.

Tell me why.

©Pointman

With up to 6 ft. of snow on tap for Alaska in the coming week…

…one can only marvel at a state that reaches -80 deg. F in the winter, grows pumpkins that weigh more than a Smart Car, and was purchased from Russia for only $7.2 million. I’ll bet Putin is still pi$$ed.

Newsminer.com is calling today’s event a “winter storm”…but isn’t it still early Fall?

As winter slowly sinks southward, all of the Canadian provinces can also expect some snow in the coming week:

The Version 5.6 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for September, 2014 is +0.29 deg. C, up from the August value of +0.20 deg. C (click for full size version):

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 21 months are:

YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2013 1 +0.497 +0.517 +0.478 +0.386
2013 2 +0.203 +0.372 +0.033 +0.195
2013 3 +0.200 +0.333 +0.067 +0.243
2013 4 +0.114 +0.128 +0.101 +0.165
2013 5 +0.082 +0.180 -0.015 +0.112
2013 6 +0.295 +0.335 +0.255 +0.220
2013 7 +0.173 +0.134 +0.211 +0.074
2013 8 +0.158 +0.111 +0.206 +0.009
2013 9 +0.365 +0.339 +0.390 +0.190
2013 10 +0.290 +0.331 +0.249 +0.031
2013 11 +0.193 +0.160 +0.226 +0.020
2013 12 +0.266 +0.272 +0.260 +0.057
2014 1 +0.291 +0.387 +0.194 -0.029
2014 2 +0.170 +0.320 +0.020 -0.103
2014 3 +0.170 +0.338 +0.002 -0.001
2014 4 +0.190 +0.358 +0.022 +0.092
2014 5 +0.326 +0.325 +0.328 +0.175
2014 6 +0.305 +0.315 +0.295 +0.510
2014 7 +0.304 +0.289 +0.319 +0.451
2014 8 +0.199 +0.244 +0.153 +0.061
2014 9 +0.294 +0.188 +0.400 +0.182

It should be remembered that during ENSO, there is a 1-2 month lag between SST change and tropospheric temperature changes, so what the SST anomaly is doing lately gives you a rough idea of how the tropospheric temperature anomaly will be changing in a couple of months.

The global image for September should be available in the next day or so here.

Popular monthly data files (these might take a few days to update):

uahncdc_lt_5.6.txt (Lower Troposphere)
uahncdc_mt_5.6.txt (Mid-Troposphere)
uahncdc_ls_5.6.txt (Lower Stratosphere)