Thursday, June 27, 2013

Upstaged by NASA in Jennifer Francis's Arctic Amplification (Extreme Weather)

Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University has a 1/2 hour talk on YouTube on arctic amplification in which she explains how climate change is affecting our weather. The presentation can be viewed here:
Extreme Weather, by Jennifer Francis

At about 17-18 minutes into the presentation, she uses some animations I created for a post on the jetstream by John Mason, of Skeptical Science. The complete post is here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/jetstream-guide.html

Both Dr. Francis's presentation and John Mason's article are excellent sources for understanding weather and how long term climate change will affect weather. Specifically, climate change is warming the arctic which changes the behavior of the jetstream which determines our weather.

The must-see item in the presentation, however, is the video she includes from NASA that shows the jetstream in action. This video improves on my schematic, but it was an eerie, pleasant feeling for me to see it after creating animations that depict the same effects.

Unfortunately, the color choice I made for one of the schematics didn't show up well in the video (the animation is projected onto a screen and then captured by a video camera). The original animations can be seen with the Skeptical Science jetstream article (above) and are posted on my website here:

http://www.brightstarstemeculavalley.org/science/jetstream.html

Dr. Francis's video includes the following for more information on climate:

https://www.facebook.com/ClimateState

jg

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