No words needed ...

 

Land Surface Temperature in the Arctic, June 2021: Copernicus Sentinel

No words needed ...

If you have been thinking that this year’s summer is quite bad, spare a thought for the poor souls in the Arctic. Surface temperatures near Verkhojansk peaked at 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius) on June 20. The Arctic circle is known for its snow caps and sub-zero temperatures. 

The temperatures were recorded by the Copernicus Sentinel 3A and 3B satellites. The Copernicus program is run by the European Space Agency and monitoring land, ocean, and atmospheric conditions using radar and multi-spectral imaging. Each Sentinel mission consists of two constellation satellites to ensure coverage and robustness of data. 

Thinking yellow & L'Étranger

A touch of yellow

Life finds a way ... always

Black Eyed Susan

Buttercup

When taking these pix, yours truly indirectly thinks of Camus & L'Étranger... 

Comme si cette rage aveugle m'avait lavé, me débarrasse de l'espoir ; pour la première fois, dans cette nuit pleine de signes et d'étoiles, je m'ouvrais à la bienveillante indifférence du monde.

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the benign indifference of the world.

The Sentinel

The Copernicus Sentinel-6 Poseidon-4 dual-frequency (C- and Ku-band) radar altimeter uses an innovative interleaved mode that has improved performance compared to previous satellite altimeter designs. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

Monitoring sea level rise goes prime time with the Copernicus Sentinel.

Following liftoff last November and more than six months spent carefully calibrating the most advanced mission dedicated to measuring sea-level rise, Copernicus Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich is now operational – meaning that its data are available to climate researchers, ocean-weather forecasts and other data users.

Why it's important.

Sea-level rise is a key indicator of climate change so accurately monitoring the changing height of the sea surface over decades is essential for climate science, for policy-making and, ultimately, for protecting the lives of those in low-lying regions at risk.

Improvement of Sentinel-6 significant wave height with respect to Jason-3. Over the last six months Copernicus Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich has been orbiting in tandem with current altimetry reference mission, Jason-3, so that the satellites have the same ‘view’ of the ocean. Establishing the differences between Sentinel-6 and Jason-3 is important if stability in the sea-level rise time series from satellite altimetry is to be maintained. The plot shows the standard deviation of the significant wave height over ocean for different significant wave heights for a full 10-day cycle of Copernicus Sentinel-6 and Jason-3 using low-resolution mode data. Significant wave height is defined as the upper-third of wave height for a given sample of sea state. The plot highlights the improved (lower) significant wave height noise from Copernicus Sentinel-6 compared to Jason-3. The background bar chart shows the percentage number of data points as a function of the significant wave height (0.1 m binning). Credit: CLS

Sightings

 Yet another random walk. :)

Says it all ...

Illustration: Sam Rodriguez

Glen Gould, the electrified and connected recluse, is my favorite pianist. Intense, passionate, intellectual and equipped with technique to the 9s, his take on Bach, Beethoven and Scriabin remains forever timeless.

J.S.Bach "The Goldberg Variations" [ Glenn Gould ] (1955)

"No supreme pianist has ever given of his heart and mind so overwhelmingly while showing himself so sparingly,” said Gould's close friend, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Says it all indeed.

Random Walk XX

A short clip ranging from water to flowers in yet another random walk taken by yours truly. :)

Altogether now ...

Migrating cranes near Straussfurt, Germany. Climate change and biodiversity are “more deeply intertwined than originally thought,” one of the leaders of the new report said.Credit...Jens Meyer/Associated Press

Biodiversity and climate change are two sides of the same coin and both must be addressed simultaneously if we are to save ourselves from a dark future of our own making. Rewild the world as per David Attenborough is the first thing to do now as without the natural world and its inherent link to biodiversity, civilization, as we know it, will be gone in a flash. 

Some environmental solutions are win-win, helping to rein in global warming and protecting biodiversity, too. But others address one crisis at the expense of the other. Growing trees on grasslands, for example, can destroy the plant and animal life of a rich ecosystem, even if the new trees ultimately suck up carbon.

What to do?

Unless the world stops treating climate change and biodiversity collapse as separate issues, neither problem can be addressed effectively, according to a report issued Thursday by researchers from two leading international scientific panels.

Everything's connected including GW and biodiversity

Young mangrove trees on the outskirts of Ziguinchor, the main town in the Casamance region of Senegal. Credit...John Wessels/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The two groups have operated largely in their own silos. But their subjects are connected by something elemental, literally: carbon itself.

The same element that makes up heat-trapping carbon dioxide, methane and soot is also a fundamental building block of the natural world. It helps form the very tissue of plants and animals on earth. It’s stored in forests, wetlands, grasslands and on the ocean floor. In fact, land and water ecosystems are already stashing away half of human-generated emissions.

Another connection between climate and biodiversity: People have created emergencies on both fronts by using the planet’s resources in unsustainable ways.

Time to shape up, right?

 

The Alien ... Earth style :)

Morays are Earth's version of the Alien as seen by the clip above. Awesome without question. :)

All bony fishes — those with skeletons made mostly of bone, rather than cartilage — have pharyngeal jaws in addition to their main jaws. Pharyngeal jaws lie behind the pharynx, or throat. They are smaller than the jaws in fishes' mouths and are used for gripping and piercing or crushing food, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. 

But unlike most fishes' pharyngeal jaws, those in moray eels "are highly mobile" and can spring past the throat and into the morays' mouths, said Rita Mehta, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC).

Long muscles pull morays' pharyngeal jaws forward to grasp prey and then slide it down their throats. (Image credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation (after Rita Mehta, UC Davis))

Our homegrown alien indeed. :)

Draught 101

Source: U.S. Drought Monitor·Conditions during the first week of June.

Anybody buying a house in AZ is nuts.

An intense drought is gripping the American West. Extreme conditions are more widespread than at any point in at least 20 years, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the government’s official drought-tracking service.

And the hottest months of summer are still to come.

The same applies to FL.

Source: U.S. Drought Monitor

Any questions?

It's getting worse ...

A temperature "misery index" shows peak levels across the Southwest (orange and yellow), and the upper air flow shows how the jet stream is being pushed north, away from the heat dome parked over the Four Corners region. (Earth.nullschool.net)

By the numbers: In Death Valley, Calif., which holds the distinction of having recorded the hottest temperature on Earth, the June high-temperature record of 129°F is likely to be threatened Wednesday and Thursday. Death Valley hit 124°F on Tuesday.

The average temperature there for this time of year is about 110°F.

Several noteworthy records were tied or fell on Tuesday, including:

• 107°F in Salt Lake City, tying the city’s all-time record for anytime of the year and beating its previous record for hottest temperature in June, which had stood at 106°F.
• Billings, Montana also tied its all-time hottest temperature on record for any month with a high of 108°F on Tuesday.
• Laramie, Wyo. tied its all-time high temperature record of 94°F on Tuesday.

Again, we did it to ourselves.

20%

 The ice shelf on Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier lost about one-fifth of its area from 2017 to 2020, mostly in three dramatic breaks. (Image credit: Joughin et al./Science Advances)

Global warming, the 900lb gorilla, is alive and well but we already know that, right?

Pine Island Glacier, one of the fastest-shrinking glaciers in Antarctica, hastened its slide into the sea between 2017 and 2020, when one-fifth of its associated ice shelf broke off as massive icebergs, a new study reveals.

The glacier sped up another time in recent history, between the 1990s and 2009, when warm ocean currents ate away at the underside of the ice shelf, destabilizing its structure and causing the glacier to accelerate toward open water, according to a 2010 report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. 

(a) Modeled velocity constrained to match the 1996 (GL96) flow speed. The lower-right inset shows the grounding-line positions as observed in 1996 (cyan) and 2009 (magenta). Figure 1a shows the modeled grounding lines, which for simplicity exclude the isolated, grounded region in 2009. (b) Profiles (along black line in Figure 1a) of measured (color) and modeled flow speed (grayscale). Only the average for the three pre-retreat models constrained by the 1996 data (GL96) are shown, since they are almost identical. The GL09 curves show the different model responses to instantaneously moving the grounding line from the 1996 to 2009 position. Black bar indicates the region that ungrounded.

GW acceleration enters primetime 24/7.