BPSDB
The world’s ocean surface temperature was the warmest on record for June, breaking the previous high mark set in 2005. NOAA – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
For reasons I cannot explain I find this animation of the world going from blue to red over the course of the last century to be more emotionally powerful than the temperature anomaly data plots are, even the temperature anomaly data plots are terrifying in a more abstract, intellectual sense. That is probably true for others as well, so I hope people will post and share this video.
With that in mind I thought we could look at the theme of recent posts with some visuals. I refer of course to the complexity of global weather systems and the chaotic nature of the consequences when you start altering them.
Below is an animation of air pressure over the Southern Hemisphere from the (US) National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center
Two things to note, i) this is air pressure, not temperature, and while they are strongly related, they are not the same, and ii) this is weather, not climate.
What we see is the Southern Polar air circulation pattern over the Southern Hemisphere. You can see how Antarctica is almost in a world of it’s own, and hence manifesting the consequences of climate change somewhat differently than how those who expect uniform warming claim it should be.
And of course it’s just sort of mesmerizing, like a fireplace or lava lamp.
Two more looks at pressure:
In the 500 Height (hPa) (above) you can see the seasons progress between the hemispheres, and in the 850-hPa (below) you can see some of the major air circulation patterns that determine the weather at any given time or place.
Higher ocean surface temperatures as reported above will play havoc with these systems, but again, neither uniformly nor easily predictable (complexity will do that). As discussed, some regions will actually end up being cooler as a consequence.
The next two are outright ripoffs from Coby at A Few Things Ill Considered.
I probably should have just linked them, but they worked so well with the other animations that I wanted to present. Instead I will say little about them and strongly encourage you to go see his article. A Few Things Ill Considered is always worth visiting anyway, so no harm, no foul 😉
The first is from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) CCSM climate model and shows a single month of global weather in 25 seconds. Aside from being a beautiful thing to watch, I find it very fascinating.
The next one takes much longer and is output from Japan’s Earth Simulator running the Hadley Centre’s HadGEM1 model. Unfortunately it is too long for YouTube’s 10 minute limit (I tried).
In both you can clearly see the band of equatorial high pressure and how the weather systems extend from there, but not as uniform bands. You can find more information and links to the originals at What does Climate Model output look like?
Hopefully these reinforce the point that weather systems are complex and inter-related, and that the Denier claim that we should be experiencing uniform, even warming is pure idiocy. Given the complex nature of the systems in question, that is the last thing we would expect.
About 40 percent of Australia’s agricultural production happens in the Murray River Basin … the period since 2001 has featured the lowest inflows into the Murray River on record. Earth Gauge
We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 266 … still no evidence.
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Thank you, particularly for that first one.
You might emphasize that all the subsequent ones are much more short term – they almost belong in a different post.
Also, a Q: akin to Tamino’s “19 graphics” post, is there somewhere a compilation of _animations_ of climate change, along same lines as your first one above (“5-Year Average Global Temperature Anomalies”)?
(One candidate would be the year-by-year(?) arctic sea ice extent animation, which I’m having trouble finding.)
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Another Q – I’m not fluent enough in CSS to know how to do this w/o a ton of trial and error, but I’d like to tint my CO2Now widget orange, so it doesn’t look so soothing and cool.
(I already suggested that its proprietor do this, but this isn’t a high priority)
Anyone know how to position an orange rectangle right under the widget? That plus reducing the widget’s opacity should do the trick.
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Never mind on the CSS BTW, I figured it out.
(tomorrow it’ll be on warming101.com)
> I assume you are…
yes, it is I.
> …all worked well with the theme of the complexity of weather systems and the difficult to predict consequences of messing with them.
Yeah, ok; my needs (for what to show people) are rather more primitive. I’m in a community where the denialists and dont-care-acists(?) are prominent, and still too influential; so a set of animations to show the most important trends would help.
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[…] recently blogged… which included the amazing simulation below. This got us thinking about the visualisation of […]
The scoop on southern polar ice video has been removed. (So has the one on the medieval warm period, you may want to update your Climate Crock page.)
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More on animations –
NOAA’s animations on their site – well, the one that I tried anyway – are agonizingly slow. But they’ve got some on YouTube that are faster, here –
http://www.youtube.com/NOAAVisualizations.
However the context and significance of what these videos were showing wasn’t clear; looked like the NOAA “channel” just held all the animations they’d felt like putting up on YouTube. So I’m still in the market for a focused set of long-term, smoothed-data(preferably) animations, or links thereto.
As for static images, there’s the GlobalWarmingArt.com wiki (private site; no updates since Feb?) , and Wikimedia Commons Global Warming Art images (link), with 150 images.
Anna:
It’s been a long time since your question, but the site
http://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/seaice/Historical.html#yearly
has some annual animations. Not as many as desirable, and doesn’t cover the whole satellite period (1995-2004 at the moment). But it’s a start.