Star City in Winter

Star City in Winter

Snowy Owl Invasion - YouTube

Snowy Owls lead nomadic lives and travel vast distances from year to year searching for productive feeding areas. Some years, most recently in the winter of 2011/2012, conditions cause them to come south in great numbers.

Get an intimate look at these white owls from the north through video and photographs captured by the Cornell Lab's, Gerrit Vyn.

Steam train the Snow at Schierke, Germany

A narrow-gauge railway makes its way through a snow covered forest at the Harz national park near Schierke, central Germany. 

After a period of relatively mild weather a cold spell has reached central and eastern Europe

NASA MODIS Image: Winter Storm in the Pacific Northwest

The image is a false-colour scene that better distinguishes between snow and clouds. The Ice and snow appear red.


A severe winter storm pummeled the Pacific Northwest in January late 2012, icing roads, downing power lines, and prompting avalanche warnings.

On January 20, more than 250,000 customers were without electricity, as utility crews struggled to restore power, news sources said.

Rising temperatures and potential new rainfall raised the possibility of flooding in the days that followed.

Snow still blanketed much of Washington state on January 23, 2012, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured these images.

Liquid-water clouds are white, and ice clouds are peach. Vegetation is bright green.

Snow blankets the region east of Seattle and Portland, stretching all the way to the Idaho border. In the band of forest along the Pacific Coast, snow may be more prevalent than it appears, as it is sometimes hidden from satellite imagers by trees.

Warmer air blew into the region soon after the storm, adding to hazardous conditions. Flooding closed roads and forced some residents into emergency shelters.

On January 23, KVAL reported that a fresh storm was approaching the region and might drop several inches of rain.

The National Weather Service issued a flood warning for the Portland area, as the new round of rain had the potential to push rivers into flood stage.

Russian Winter Wonderland ImageLunar halo

Russia in a winter wonderland. The north. Yakutia. Settlement Ajhal. Night with 8 for January, 9th. 

The full moon was accompanied bright halo! The taiga all was shone in a moonlight ! - 37 degrees on цельсию. 

Removed chamber Nikon D3, a lens 16 mm the fish eye.

See more at Lunar halo

Winter Solstice: The Shortest Day

The solstice will occur Thursday, Dec. 22, 2011. On this day, the sun is at its farthest southern declination, and is 6.5 degrees away from the center of the Milky Way.

CREDIT: Starry Night Software

This week, the sun will reach that point where it will appear to shine farthest to the south of the equator, marking the moment of the winter solstice, the shortest day of 2011 in the Northern Hemisphere.

The winter solstice occurs Thursday at 12:30 a.m. EST (0530 GMT), which corresponds to 9:30 p.m. PST on Wednesday for observers further west. At the time, the sun will be passing over the over the Tropic of Capricorn.

Here's how northern winter solstice works: Since June 20, the altitude of the midday sun has been lowering as its direct rays have been gradually migrating to the south.

The sun's altitude above the horizon at noontime is 47 degrees lower now, compared to six months ago.

As we often mention, your clenched fist held at arm's length measures roughly 10 degrees, so the sun at midday is now nearly "five fists" lower in the southern sky compared to June 21.

BBC Nature: 'Brinicle' ice finger of death filmed in Antarctic - YouTube

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/15835017 (video extracted with StreamTransport)

As brine from the sea ice sinks, a 'brinicle' forms threatening life on the sea floor with a frosty fate.

A bizarre underwater "icicle of death" has been filmed by a BBC crew.

With timelapse cameras, specialists recorded salt water being excluded from the sea ice and sinking. The temperature of this sinking brine, which was well below 0C, caused the water to freeze in an icy sheath around it.

Where the so-called "brinicle" met the sea bed, a web of ice formed that froze everything it touched, including sea urchins and starfish. The unusual phenomenon was filmed for the first time by cameramen Hugh Miller and Doug Anderson for the BBC One series Frozen Planet.

Creeping ice
The icy phenomenon is caused by cold, sinking brine, which is more dense than the rest of the sea water. It forms a brinicle as it contacts warmer water below the surface. Mr Miller set up the rig of timelapse equipment to capture the growing brinicle under the ice at Little Razorback Island, near Antarctica's Ross Archipelago.

"When we were exploring around that island we came across an area where there had been three or four [brinicles] previously and there was one actually happening," Mr Miller told BBC Nature.
The diving specialists noted the temperature and returned to the area as soon as the same conditions were repeated.

"It was a bit of a race against time because no-one really knew how fast they formed," said Mr Miller. "The one we'd seen a week before was getting longer in front of our eyes... the whole thing only took five, six hours."

Against the odds
The location - beneath the ice off the foothills of the volcano Mount Erebus, in water as cold as -2C - was not easy to access. "That particular patch was difficult to get to. It was a long way from the hole and it was quite narrow at times between the sea bed and the ice," explained Mr Miller.

"I do remember it being a struggle... All the kit is very heavy because it has to sit on the sea bed and not move for long periods of time." As well as the practicalities of setting up the equipment, the filmmakers had to contend with interference from the local wildlife.

The large weddell seals in the area had no problems barging past and breaking off brinicles as well as the filming equipment. "The first time I did a timelapse at the spot a seal knocked it over," said Mr Miller.
But the team's efforts were eventually rewarded with the first ever footage of a brinicle forming.

HOW DOES A BRINICLE FORM?
Dr Mark Brandon
Polar oceanographer, The Open University

Freezing sea water doesn't make ice like the stuff you grow in your freezer. Instead of a solid dense lump, it is more like a seawater-soaked sponge with a tiny network of brine channels within it.

In winter, the air temperature above the sea ice can be below -20C, whereas the sea water is only about -1.9C. Heat flows from the warmer sea up to the very cold air, forming new ice from the bottom. The salt in this newly formed ice is concentrated and pushed into the brine channels. And because it is very cold and salty, it is denser than the water beneath.

The result is the brine sinks in a descending plume. But as this extremely cold brine leaves the sea ice, it freezes the relatively fresh seawater it comes in contact with. This forms a fragile tube of ice around the descending plume, which grows into what has been called a brinicle.

Brinicles are found in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, but it has to be relatively calm for them to grow as long as the ones the Frozen Planet team observed.

Missing Link Between Solar Activity and The UK's Cold Winters

A link between low solar activity and jet streams over the Atlantic could explain why, despite global warming trends, people in regions North East of the Atlantic Ocean might need to brace themselves for more frequent cold winters in years to come.

A new report published in IOP Publishing's Environmental Research Letters describes how we are moving into an era of lower solar activity which is likely to result in UK winter temperatures more like those seen at the end of the seventeenth century.

Lead author Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading said: "This year's winter in the UK has been the 14th coldest in the last 160 years and yet the global average temperature for the same period has been the 5th highest. We have discovered that this kind of anomaly is significantly more common when solar activity is low."

The new paper, 'Are cold winters in Europe associated with low solar activity?', differs from previous efforts to explain the UK's recent cold winters by comparing the most comprehensive, but regionally specific, temperature dataset available (the Central England Temperature dataset) to the long-term behaviour of the Sun's magnetic field, and to trends across the entire Northern Hemisphere.

The paper is being published now as the researchers have just had the opportunity to put this year's data to the test and found that this year's results fit well with the trends they have discovered.