Global Warming, Climate Change and solar activity

The number of sunspots (white area here) varies in multi-year cycles. 

As a result, solar irradiance, which influences the Earth's climate, also fluctuates. 

The photo shows a UV image of the sun. 

Credit Image: Trace Project / NASA

The number of sunspots (white area here) varies in multi-year cycles. 

As a result, solar irradiance, which influences the Earth's climate, also fluctuates. The photo shows a UV image of the sun. 

Credit: Trace Project / NASA

The average temperature on Earth has barely risen over the past 16 years. ETH researchers have now found out why, and they believe that global warming is likely to continue again soon.

Global warming is currently taking a break: whereas global temperatures rose drastically into the late 1990s, the global average temperature has risen only slightly since 1998, surprising, considering scientific climate models predicted considerable warming due to rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate sceptics used this apparent contradiction to question climate change per se, or at least the harm potential caused by greenhouse gases, as well as the validity of the climate models.

Meanwhile, the majority of climate researchers continued to emphasise that the short-term 'warming hiatus' could largely be explained on the basis of current scientific understanding and did not contradict longer term warming.

Researchers have been looking into the possible causes of the warming hiatus over the past few years. For the first time, Reto Knutti, Professor of Climate Physics at ETH Zurich, has systematically examined all current hypotheses together with a colleague.

In a study published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers conclude that two important factors are equally responsible for the hiatus.

El Niño warmed the Earth
One of the important reasons is natural climate fluctuations, of which the weather phenomena El Niño and La Niña in the Pacific are the most important and well known.

"1998 was a strong El Niño year, which is why it was so warm that year," says Knutti. In contrast, the counter-phenomenon La Niña has made the past few years cooler than they would otherwise have been.

Although climate models generally take such fluctuations into account, it is impossible to predict the year in which these phenomena will emerge, says the climate physicist.

To clarify, he uses the stock market as an analogy: "When pension funds invest the pension capital in shares, they expect to generate a profit in the long term."

At the same time, they are aware that their investments are exposed to price fluctuations and that performance can also be negative in the short term.

However, what finance specialists and climate scientists and their models are not able to predict is when exactly a short-term economic downturn or a La Niña year will occur.

Longer solar cycles
According to the study, the second important reason for the warming hiatus is that solar irradiance has been weaker than predicted in the past few years.

This is because the identified fluctuations in the intensity of solar irradiance are unusual at present: whereas the so-called sunspot cycles each lasted eleven years in the past, for unknown reasons the last period of weak solar irradiance lasted 13 years.

Furthermore, several volcanic eruptions, such as Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland in 2010, have increased the concentration of floating particles (aerosol) in the atmosphere, which has further weakened the solar irradiance arriving at the Earth's surface.

The scientists drew their conclusions from corrective calculations of climate models. In all climate simulations, they looked for periods in which the El Niño/La Niña patterns corresponded to the measured data from the years 1997 to 2012.

With a combination of over 20 periods found, they were able to arrive at a realistic estimate of the influence of El Niño and La Niña.

They also retroactively applied in the model calculations the actual measured values for solar activity and aerosol concentration in the Earth's atmosphere.

Model calculations corrected in this way match the measured temperature data much more closely.

Incomplete measured data
The discrepancy between the climate models and measured data over the past 16 years cannot solely be attributed to the fact that these models predict too much warming, says Knutti.

The interpretation of the official measured data should also be critically scrutinised. According to Knutti, measured data is likely to be too low, since the global average temperature is only estimated using values obtained from weather stations on the ground, and these do not exist everywhere on Earth.

From satellite data, for example, scientists know that the Arctic region in particular has become warmer over the past years, but because there are no weather stations in that area, there are measurements that show strong upward fluctuations. As a result, the specified average temperature is too low.

Last year, British and Canadian researchers proposed an alternative temperature curve with higher values, in which they incorporated estimated temperatures from satellite data for regions with no weather stations.

If the model data is corrected downwards, as suggested by the ETH researchers, and the measurement data is corrected upwards, as suggested by the British and Canadian researchers, then the model and actual observations are very similar.

Warming to recommence
Despite the warming hiatus, Knutti is convinced there is no reason to doubt either the existing calculations for the climate activity of greenhouse gases or the latest climate models.

"Short-term climate fluctuations can easily be explained. They do not alter the fact that the climate will become considerably warmer in the long term as a result of greenhouse gas emissions," says Knutti.

He believes that global warming will recommence as soon as solar activity, aerosol concentrations in the atmosphere and weather phenomena such as El Niño naturally start returning to the values of previous decades.

More information: Huber M, Knutti R: Natural variability, radiative forcing and climate response in the recent hiatus reconciled. Nature Geoscience, online publication 17 August 2014, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2228

Earth's Upper-tropospheric water vapour is a global warming amplifier

This is a colour enhanced satellite image of upper tropospheric water vapour. 

Credit: NASA

A new study from scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and colleagues confirms rising levels of water vapour in the upper troposphere, a key amplifier of global warming, will intensify climate change impacts over the next decades.

The new study is the first to show that increased water vapour concentrations in the atmosphere are a direct result of human activities.

"The study is the first to confirm that human activities have increased water vapor in the upper troposphere," said Brian Soden, professor of atmospheric sciences at the UM Rosenstiel School and co-author of the study.

To investigate the potential causes of a 30-year moistening trend in the upper troposphere, a region 3-7 miles above Earth's surface, Soden, UM Rosenstiel School researcher Eui-Seok Chung and colleagues measured water vapour in the upper troposphere collected by NOAA satellites and compared them to climate model predictions of water circulation between the ocean and atmosphere to determine whether observed changes in atmospheric water vapour could be explained by natural or man-made causes.

Using the set of climate model experiments, the researchers showed that rising water vapour in the upper troposphere cannot be explained by natural forces, such as volcanoes and changes in solar activity, but can be explained by increased greenhouse gases, such as CO2.

Greenhouse gases raise temperatures by trapping the Earth's radiant heat inside the atmosphere.

This warming also increases the accumulation of atmospheric water vapour, the most abundant greenhouse gas.

The atmospheric moistening traps additional radiant heat and further increases temperatures.

This is an illustration of annual mean T2-T12 field that provides a direct measure of the upper-tropospheric water vapour. 

Purple = dry and Red = moist. 

Credit: Eui-Seok Chung, Ph.D., UM Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science

Climate models predict that as the climate warms from the burning of fossil fuels, the concentrations of water vapour will also increase in response to that warming.

This moistening of the atmosphere, in turn, absorbs more heat and further raises the Earth's temperature.

More information: PNAS. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1409659111

Runaway Glacier melt in West Antarctica Ice

The leading edge of the floating ice tongue of the Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica. 

Credit: M. Wolovick

Reports that a portion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has begun to irretrievably collapse, threatening a 4-foot rise in sea levels over the next couple of centuries, surged through the news media last week.

But many are asking if even this dramatic news will alter the policy conversation over what to do about climate change.

West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS)

Glaciers like the ones that were the focus of two new studies move at, well, a glacial pace. Researchers are used to contemplating changes that happen over many thousands of years.

This time, however, we're talking hundreds of years, perhaps—something that can be understood in comparison to recent history, a timescale of several human generations.

In that time, the papers' authors suggest, melting ice could raise sea levels enough to inundate or at least threaten the shorelines where tens of millions of people live.

"The high-resolution records that we're getting and the high-resolution models we're able to make now are sort of moving the questions a little bit closer into human, understandable time frames," said Kirsty Tinto, a researcher from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who has spent a decade studying the Antarctic.

"We're still not saying things are going to happen this year or next year. But it's easier to grasp [a couple of hundred years] than the time scales we're used to looking at."

The authors of two papers published last week looked at a set of glaciers that slide down into the Amundsen Sea from a huge ice sheet in West Antarctica, which researchers for years have suspected may be nearing an "unstable" state that would lead to its collapse.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is mostly grounded on land that is below sea level (the much larger ice sheet covering East Antarctica sits mostly on land above sea level).

Advances in radar and other scanning technologies have allowed researchers to build a detailed picture of the topography underlying these glaciers, and to better understand the dynamics of how the ice behaves.

Where the forward, bottom edge of the ice meets the land is called the grounding line. Friction between the ice and the land holds back the glacier, slowing its progress to the ocean.

Beyond that line, however, the ice floats on the sea surface, where it is exposed to warmer ocean water that melts and thins these shelves of ice.

As the ice shelves thin and lose mass, they have less ability to hold back the glacier.

What researchers are finding now is that some of these enormous glaciers have become unhinged from the land – ice has melted back from earlier grounding lines and into deeper basins, losing its anchor on the bottom, exposing more ice to the warmer ocean water and accelerating the melting.

The glaciers studied by Eric Rignot’s research team. 

Red indicates areas where flow speeds have increased over the past 40 years. 

The darker the colour, the greater the increase. 

The increases in flow speeds extend hundreds of miles inland. 

Credit: Eric Rignot.

In their paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, Eric Rignot and colleagues from the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., described the "rapid retreat" of several major glaciers over the past two decades, including the Pine Island, Thwaites, Haynes, Smith and Kohler glaciers.

"We find no major bed obstacle upstream of the 2011 grounding lines that would prevent further retreat of the grounding lines farther south," they write.

"We conclude that this sector of West Antarctica is undergoing a marine ice sheet instability that will significantly contribute to sea level rise in decades to come."

More information: Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011, E. Rignot, J. Mouginot, M. Morlighem, H. Seroussi, B. Scheuchl, Geophysical Research Letters (2014)

Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Underway for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica, Ian Joughin, Benjamin E. Smith, Brooke Medley, Science (2014)

2012 Greenland Ice Melt Strongest On Record, More to Come

New data shows that melting of the vast ice sheet that covers more than three-quarters of Greenland is the strongest ever seen -- and there are still four weeks to go in the melting season.

Marco Tedesco, a researcher at the City College of New York, says the melting that scientists have observed in 2012 has already outstripped the melt in 2010. The melting season typically lasts from June to early September.

"With more yet to come in August, this year's overall melting will fall way above the old records," Tedesco said in a statement Monday.

"That's a goliath year, the greatest melt since satellite recording began in 1979."

This latest observation has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but Tedesco and his colleagues have a forthcoming paper looking at models projecting gains and losses to the ice sheet throughout the rest of this century.

NASA announced in July that its Earth Observation satellites (Modis, Aqua, Terra) had found that about 97 percent of the ice sheet's 660,000 square-mile surface had undergone melting.

This latest data from Tedesco and his colleagues jives with that finding. They used data from microwave satellite sensors in order to calculate the cumulative melting index, which gauges the "strength" of the melting season.

The index is generated by multiplying the number of days the ice sheet has melted by the total area of the ice sheet that has melted.

Rutgers University in Greenland

Åsa Rennermalm, a Rutgers University Hydrologist and researcher unaffiliated with the current project, studies the streams and rivers both on the ice sheet and those that are fed by meltwater.

She says the residents of Kangerlussauq, a town near her research site, confirm that this season's melt is the biggest they remember.

Kangerlussauq, which contains Greenland's major airport, was directly impacted by the higher melt on July 11, when a major bridge was destroyed by rising river, fed by melt-water.

"It was pretty dramatic," Rennermalm said.

Byrd Polar Research centre

Tedesco's colleague Jason Box, a researcher at Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center, says there's a positive feedback mechanism at play in the ice sheet's melting; as the surface melts, it gets darker, which absorbs more heat from the sun.

In a downward spiraling action, the melted surfaces absorb more heat and this encourages further melting.

NASA Terra Satellite Image: Arctic Ice Melt in Northwest Passage

This image, taken on Aug. 3, 2012, shows that most of the ice in the Parry Channel, part of the Northwest Passage, has melted away.

CREDIT: NASA Earth Observatory

Sea ice has melted and part of the Arctic's Northwest Passage has opened, images captured by NASA's Terra satellite show.

An image taken on July 17 shows ice filled Parry Channel, part of the Passage, at that point. The second photo, taken two weeks later on Aug. 3, shows that most of the ice has melted away.

The Canadian Ice Service reported that ice cover in Parry Channel began to fall below the 30-year median level in mid-July, and the melting sped up in the following two weeks. At the end of July, there was only an ice cover of 30 percent, compared to a median of 79 percent.

While the Parry Channel appears almost entirely free of ice, it's not necessarily open for ships to pass through, according to a NASA release. Sea ice can be thin enough to avoid detection by satellite sensors yet still thick enough to impede ships.

Whether or not ships can easily pass, recent studies have suggested that certain organisms have begun to take advantage of the open water. When the Northwest Passage opened in 2007, a study found that a type of plankton usually found in the Pacific had turned up in the North Atlantic.

Another study found that Pacific and Atlantic populations of Bowhead whale began to overlap in the Northwest Passage in 2010, according to the release.

The search for a shortcut between Europe and Asia though the Arctic dates back to Columbus's journey to the Americas. For centuries, attempts failed due to unfamiliar geography and unforgiving ice.

The passage was first successfully navigated by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906. He used the southern route through the Northwest Passage; Parry Channel is part of the northern, shorter route.

NASA LandSat: Catastrophic growth of China’s megacities and Pollution levels

In 1973, NASA and United States Geological Survey’s Landsat 3 satellite took the image above of quiet, rural land (plant-covered land is red) along China’s Pearl River Delta. 

Six years later, in 1979, the region began to grow as China set up two economic zones north of Hong Kong. 

Then, 30 years later, in 2003, Landsat 7 satellite took this dramatic shot:

Images: NASA/USGS

It’s a catastrophic urban shift, happening all over China, with an unsupportable increase in demand for natural resources and the associated suchoking rge in pollution levels.

You can see the booming urban areas in gray, a major contrast to the mostly red image from 1973.

In the image you can see part of Guangzhou, the most populous urban area in the region today with 12,700,000 people; Dongguan, an urban area with more than 8 million people; and Foshan with more than 7 million. As of 2010, the Pearl District Economic Zone had a population of 36 million.

You can see more before and after images from 10 other cities across the globe. Or, at The Atlantic Cities, check out Nate Berg’s slightly jarring animated GIF rendition of the urban shift.

NASA Earth Observation Satellites reveal sudden Greenland ice melt

Image Credit: Reuters

Greenland's massive ice sheet has melted this month over an unusually large area, Nasa has said.

Scientists said the "unprecedented" melting took place over a larger area than has been detected in three decades of satellite observation.

Melting even occurred at Greenland's coldest and highest place, Summit station.

The thawed ice area jumped from 40% of the ice sheet to 97% in just four days from 8 July.

Although about half of Greenland's ice sheet normally melts over the summer months, the speed and scale of this year's melting surprised scientists, who described the phenomenon as "extraordinary".

Nasa said that nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its centre, which is 3km (two miles) thick, experienced some degree of melting at its surface.

"When we see melt in places that we haven't seen before, at least in a long period of time, it makes you sit up and ask what's happening," Nasa chief scientist Waleed Abdalati said.

"It's a big signal, the meaning of which we're going to sort out for years to come."

He said that, because this Greenland-wide melting has happened before, Nasa is not yet able to determine whether this is a natural but rare event, or if it has been sparked by man-made global warming.

Scientists said they believed that much of Greenland's ice was already freezing again.

Until now, the most extensive melting seen by satellites in the past three decades was about 55% of the area.

Ice last melted at Summit station in 1889, ice core records show.

The news comes just days after Nasa satellite imagery revealed that a massive iceberg, twice the size of Manhattan, had broken off a glacier in Greenland.

"This event, combined with other natural but uncommon phenomena, such as the large calving event last week on Petermann Glacier, are part of a complex story," said Nasa's Tom Wagner.

ESA Astronaut and Earth Hour: The 2012 Official Video - YouTube

This Earth Hour 2012: 8.30pm, Saturday 31 March, celebrate your action for the planet with the people of world by switching off your lights for an hour, then go beyond the hour.

André Kuipers takes Earth Hour into orbit
For the first time, Earth Hour will extend to the International Space Station, where ESA astronaut and WWF ambassador André Kuipers will keep watch over our planet as the lights switch off on 31 March, sharing photos and live commentary of his experience.

Since inception in the city of Sydney, Australia, in 2007, Earth Hour has become the world's largest voluntary action highlighting climate change and the need for sustainability.

In 2011, 5251 cities took part, reaching 1.8 billion people in 135 countries across all seven continents.

This year, Earth Hour will take place at 20:30–21:30, at participants' local time, on Saturday, 31 March, and the event will be observed from space by ESA Astronaut André on the International Space Station. 

Exploding iceberg in Antarctica! - YouTube

The terrifying scene of a collapsing Antarctic iceberg has been captured by tourists.

Seeing icebergs in the Antarctic region is a common phenomenon, but seeing a huge iceberg self-destruct, with icy chunks flying out close to passengers in an inflatable boat, has left them shaken and horrified.

Some of the passengers, who saw the last moment of the iceberg with the flying debris of ice, screamed out with fear.

Dutch video editor Lex Coppoolse, who captured the footage in Wihelmina Bay, Antarctica: "The thing just exploded very close to our boat - or I should say imploded! It spat big chunks of thousands year old ice to our heads."

Seeing the video, some people left comments saying, "It is a natural occurring event", or "It must be warning of 'global warming'."

NASA GRACE: Global Warming Melts Billions of Tons of Ice Annually (VIDEO)

Researchers from NASA and the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered that glaciers and ice caps are shedding 150 billion tons of ice annually because of global warming. They discovered this using Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.

The researchers measured ice loss percentages across all of Earth's ice reserves between 2003 and 2010, with particular emphasis on glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica.

They discovered that these geological formations were shedding roughly 150 billion tons of ice annually. The most alarming conclusion was that ice caps and glaciers from within Greenland and Antarctica were shedding 385 billion tons (100 cubic miles) of ice every year.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Colorado 

Average changes in ice thickness in centimeters per year from 2003 to 2010, as measured by NASA’s Grace satellites, in each of the world’s ice caps and glacier systems outside of Greenland and Antarctica. Blue represents ice mass loss, while red represents ice mass gain.

The study also suggested that mountains on the Asian continent - the Himalayas, the Pamir and the Tien Shan - were shedding approximately 4 billion tons of ice annually.

As strange as it may sound, this figure actually comes as a relief. Earlier ground-based estimates suggested ice loss in high Asian mountains may range up to 50 billion tons, annually.

The total ice loss from Greenland, Antarctica and all of Earth's glaciers and ice caps from 2003 to 2010 was about 4.3 trillion tons (1,000 cubic miles) which is about eight times the water volume of Lake Erie in the U.S.

These measurements were made with the NASA-developed GRACE satellite. GRACE was launched in 2002 and is a twin satellite that measure changes in the Earth's gravity field, as caused by regional changes in the planet's mass, including ice sheets, oceans and water stored in the soil and in underground aquifers.

"Earth is losing a huge amount of ice to the ocean annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet's cold regions are responding to global change," said John Wahr, a Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.

"One possible explanation is that previous estimates were based on measurements taken primarily from some of the lower, more accessible glaciers in Asia and extrapolated to infer the behaviour of higher glaciers. But unlike the lower glaciers, most of the high glaciers are located in very cold environments and require greater amounts of atmospheric warming before local temperatures rise enough to cause significant melting. This makes it difficult to use low-elevation, ground-based measurements to estimate results from the entire system," he added.

"This study finds that the world's small glaciers and ice caps in places like Alaska, South America and the Himalayas contribute about .02 inches per year to sea level rise," said Tom Wagner, a program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, "While this is lower than previous estimates, it confirms that ice is being lost from around the globe, with just a few areas in precarious balance. The results sharpen our view of land ice melting, which poses the biggest, most threatening factor in future sea level rise."

NASA Video Shows Increase in Global Warming

Global temperatures have warmed significantly since 1880, the beginning of what scientists call the "modern record." 

At this time, the coverage provided by weather stations allowed for essentially global temperature data. 

As greenhouse gas emissions from energy production, industry and vehicles have increased, temperatures have climbed, most notably since the late 1970s. 

In this animation of temperature data from 1880-2011, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average. 

(Data source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Visualization credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis, released an updated analysis that shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century.

The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.

"We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting," said GISS Director James E. Hansen. "So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record."

The difference between 2011 and the warmest year in the GISS record (2010) is 0.22 degrees F (0.12 C). This underscores the emphasis scientists put on the long-term trend of global temperature rise. Because of the large natural variability of climate, scientists do not expect temperatures to rise consistently year after year. However, they do expect a continuing temperature rise over decades.

The first 11 years of the 21st century experienced notably higher temperatures compared to the middle and late 20th century, Hansen said. The only year from the 20th century in the top 10 warmest years on record is 1998.

Higher temperatures today are largely sustained by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. These gases absorb infrared radiation emitted by Earth and release that energy into the atmosphere rather than allowing it to escape to space. As their atmospheric concentration has increased, the amount of energy "trapped" by these gases has led to higher temperatures.

While average global temperature will still fluctuate from year to year, scientists focus on the decadal trend. Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have occurred since the year 2000, as the Earth has experienced sustained higher temperatures than in any decade during the 20th century. As greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, scientists expect the long-term temperature increase to continue as well. (Data source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory, Robert Simmon)

The carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was about 285 parts per million in 1880, when the GISS global temperature record begins. By 1960, the average concentration had risen to about 315 parts per million. Today it exceeds 390 parts per million and continues to rise at an accelerating pace.

The temperature analysis produced at GISS is compiled from weather data from more than 1,000 meteorological stations around the world, satellite observations of sea surface temperature and Antarctic research station measurements.

A publicly available computer program is used to calculate the difference between surface temperature in a given month and the average temperature for the same place during 1951 to 1980. This three-decade period functions as a baseline for the analysis.

The resulting temperature record is very close to analyses by the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

Hansen said he expects record-breaking global average temperature in the next two to three years because solar activity is on the upswing and the next El Niño will increase tropical Pacific temperatures. The warmest years on record were 2005 and 2010, in a virtual tie.

"It's always dangerous to make predictions about El Niño, but it's safe to say we'll see one in the next three years," Hansen said. "It won't take a very strong El Niño to push temperatures above 2010."

ESA CryoSat: Greenland, the Netherlands and maldives look for answers on ice

ESA’s Earth Explorer CryoSat mission is dedicated to precise monitoring of changes in the thickness of marine ice floating in the polar oceans and variations in the thickness of the vast ice sheets that blanket Greenland and Antarctica.

Credits: ESA/AOES Medialab

As the impact of climate change is felt in the Arctic, ESA’s CryoSat ice mission is highlighted as a source of vital information at an exhibition in the Netherlands.

The exhibition, called Roots2Share, opened on 13 October at the museum of culture and science, Museon, in The Hague.

The aim of the exhibition is to highlight the cultural relationship between Greenland and the Netherlands and their interests in understanding more about the Arctic and how changing ice cover will affect both countries.

ESA's ice mission
Around 100 students were present at the opening to learn more about Greenland and how ice is central to the way of life in the Arctic.

The reduction of ice cover around Greenland may offer new opportunities for navigation and the exploitation of natural resources. At the same time, ice melting from the vast ice sheet that blankets the country is likely have serious consequences for low-lying lands such as the Netherlands and the Maldives.

One of the most important issues is to understand exactly how the ice is changing and what impacts this may bring to all.

By measuring variations in the thickness of the ice floating the in polar oceans and lying on land, CryoSat is collecting essential information to help answer these pressing questions.

Playing an active role in field of water management, Prince Willem-Alexander stated how important it is that CryoSat is providing detailed information on ice so that effective strategies to adapt to climate change can be adopted.

Read more on CryoSat at ESA Portal

NASA NPP: New Type of Earth-Observing Satellite for Launch

NPP inside a clean room at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Credit: NASA/30th Communications Squadron, VAFB.

NASA is planning an Oct. 27 launch of the first Earth-observing satellite to measure both global climate changes and key weather variables.

The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) is the first mission designed to collect critical data to improve weather forecasts in the short-term and increase our understanding of long-term climate change.

NPP continues observations of Earth from space that NASA has pioneered for more than 40 years.

NPP's five science instruments, including four new state-of-the-art sensors, will provide scientists with data to extend more than 30 key long-term datasets.

These records, which range from the ozone layer and land cover to atmospheric temperatures and ice cover, are critical for global change science.

"NPP's observations of a wide range of interconnected Earth properties and processes will give us the big picture of how our planet changes," said Jim Gleason, NPP project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"That will help us improve our computer models that predict future environmental conditions. Better predictions will let us make better decisions, whether it is as simple as taking an umbrella to work today or as complex as responding to a changing climate."

NPP serves as a bridge between NASA's Earth Observing System of satellites and the planned Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), which will collect climate and weather data. JPSS will be developed by NASA for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

NOAA meteorologists will incorporate NPP data into their weather prediction models to produce forecasts and warnings that will help emergency responders anticipate, monitor and react to many types of natural disasters.

"The timing of the NPP launch could hardly be more appropriate," said Louis W. Uccellini, director of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction in Camp Springs, Md. "With the many billion dollar weather disasters in 2011, NPP data is critical for accurate weather forecasts into the future."

A Delta II rocket will carry NPP into an orbit 512 miles above Earth's surface. Roughly the size of a mini-van, the spacecraft will orbit Earth's poles about 14 times a day. It will transmit data once each orbit to a ground station in Svalbard, Norway, and to direct broadcast receivers around the world.

NPP is set to launch from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Oct. 27. The launch window extends from 5:48 a.m. to 5:57 a.m. EDT.

The launch recently was delayed two days due to the repair of the Delta II's hydraulic system. The NPP spacecraft is scheduled to be transported to the launch pad for attachment to the Delta II on Oct. 12.

Antarctica rising as ice caps melt

ANTARCTICA is rising like a cheese soufflé: slowly but surely. 

Lost ice due to climate change and left-over momentum from the end of the last big ice age mean the buoyant continent is heaven-bound.

Donald Argus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and colleagues used 15 years of GPS data to show that parts of the Ellsworth mountains in west Antarctica are rising by around 5 millimetres a year (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2011gl048025). 

Elsewhere on the continent, the rise is slower.

A faster rise has been seen in Greenland, which is thought to be popping up by 4 centimetres a year.

Ongoing climate change could be partly to blame: Antarctica is losing about 200 gigatonnes of ice per year, and for Greenland the figure is 300 gigatonnes. Earth's continents sit on viscous magma, so the effect of this loss is like taking a load off a dense foam mattress.

But there is another possible contributor. "The Earth has a very long memory," says Argus. As a result, "there is also a viscous response to ice loss from around 5000 to 10,000 years ago going on".

Despite this effect, the known ice loss at both poles suggests that embedded in the local rises is a signal of current climate change - researchers just have to tease it out.

NASA - How Warm Was This Summer?

This map, based on land surface temperatures observed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, shows temperature anomalies for the Russian Federation from July 20–27, 2010, compared to temperatures for the same dates from 2000 to 2008. 

For more information about this image, please visit NASA’s Earth Observatory. 

Credit: NASA/Goddard/Earth Observatory

An unparalleled heat wave in eastern Europe, coupled with intense droughts and fires around Moscow, put Earth’s temperatures in the headlines this summer.

Likewise, a string of exceptionally warm days in July in the eastern United States strained power grids, forced nursing home evacuations, and slowed transit systems.

Both high-profile events reinvigorated questions about humanity’s role in climate change.

But, from a global perspective, how warm was the summer exactly? How did the summer's temperatures compare with previous years? And was global warming the "cause" of the unusual heat waves?

Scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, led by GISS's director, James Hansen, have analyzed summer temperatures and released an update on the GISS website that addresses all of these questions.

Record-breaking current found deep in Southern Ocean

Record-breaking current found deep in Southern Ocean

MORE than 3 kilometres down in part of the freezing Southern Ocean, water is flowing at more than 700 metres per hour, making this the fastest-moving deep ocean current ever found.

The powerful current was discovered thanks to a 175-kilometre string of sensors on the eastern flank of the submerged Kerguelen plateau, some 3000 kilometres south-west of Australia (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo842).

With a flow of more than 8 million cubic metres per second, the current transports 40 times as much water as the Amazon. It is likely to be an important component of the global ocean "conveyor belt", which pushes water from the ocean surface to its greatest depths and back again, and has a direct influence on global temperatures.

Deep ocean currents are now being monitored for signs of change. The measurements already suggest that deep Antarctic waters are warming and becoming less buoyant, perhaps because of climate change.

Mammoth iceberg could alter ocean circulation: study

Mammoth iceberg could alter ocean circulation: study

An iceberg the size of Luxembourg knocked loose from the Antarctic continent earlier this month could disrupt the ocean currents driving weather patterns around the globe, researchers said Thursday.

While the impact would not be felt for decades or longer, a slowdown in the production of colder, dense water could result in less temperate winters in the north Atlantic, they said.

The 2550 square-kilometre (985 square-mile) block broke off on February 12 or 13 from the Mertz Glacier Tongue, a 160-kilometer spit of floating ice protruding into the Southern Ocean from East Antarctica due south of Melbourne, researchers said.

Some 400 metres (1300 feet) thick, the iceberg could fill Sydney Harbour more than 100 times over.

It could also disturb the area's exceptionally rich biodiversity, including a major colony of emperor penguins near Dumont d'Urville, site of a French scientific station, according to the scientists.

"The ice tongue was almost broken already. It was hanging like a loose tooth," said Benoit Legresy, a French glaciologist who has been monitoring the Metz Glacier via satellite images and on the ground for a decade in cooperation with Australian scientists.

The billion-tonne mass was dislodged by another, older iceberg, known as B9B, which split off in 1987.

Jammed against the Antarctic continent for more than 20 years, B9B smashed into the Metz tongue like a slow-motion battering ram after it began to drift.

Both natural cycles and manmade climate change contribute to the collapse ice shelves and glaciers.

Tide and ocean currents constantly beat against exposed areas, while longer summers and rising temperatures also take a toll.

"Obviously when there is warmer water, these ice tongues will become more fragile," said Legresy, who works at the Laboratory for Geophysics and Oceanographic Space Research in Toulouse, southern France.

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Information is Beautiful: When Sea Levels Attack

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Information is Beautiful: When Sea Levels Attack

Another day, another set of bewildering climate figures. Today, key climate scientists withdrew their predictions of a metre sea-level rise by 2100.

Other scientists meanwhile claimed the 1m figure was way too conservative anyway. They predict anything up to 2m sea level rises over the next century.

It's difficult to keep track of all this shifting research. And, in the midst of this reporting, there is one consistent but bewildering assumption made of us: that we understand what a one metre sea level rise means in reality.

A "1 metre sea level rise" is in the same domain as "1 ton of carbon" or "£1 billion." That is, it's meaningless without context or some link to our everyday lives.

So, in this diagram, I've tried to sum up all the current research on sea level rises. What will happen, when it will happen, and where the sea water is coming from. You can see the data and sources in this spreadsheet.

In an effort to make the information easier to relate to, I've also thrown in which key cities around the world will be most affected by the rises.

I hope it helps.

Netherlands adds to UN climate report controversy

Netherlands adds to UN climate report controversy

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.

According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.

The incident could cause further embarrassment for the IPCC, which recently admitted a claim in the same report that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was wrong.

IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level -- 26 percent -- to the area threatened by river flooding -- 29 percent -- Vallaart said.

"They should have been clearer," Vallaart said, adding that the Dutch office for environmental planning, an IPCC partner, had exact figures.

Correcting the error had been "on the agenda several times" but had never actually happened, Vallaart said.

The spokesman said he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed and said it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC's numbers.

The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

Climate Control: Scientists measure methane at the source

In a lush pasture near Buenos Aires, this cow and its compatriots are digesting important information: how much methane—a greenhouse gas 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide—is released by the country’s 55 million bovines.

Researchers from Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology connected inflatable tanks to the cows’ first stomach, where methane is made, through a small hole between their ribs.

By measuring methane production directly inside each cow, biologist Silvia Valtorta hopes to more accurately determine the country’s overall agricultural contribution to global warming. According to the data, an average cow releases more than 70 gallons of the stuff every day. But a change in diet could reduce that. Cows that eat mostly grain produce 20 to 25 percent less methane than grazing cows, and adding tannin—a bitter chemical found in wine—to the feed could lower it further.