Saturday, December 24, 2011

Last figure in the #Lego #StarWars 2011 Advent Calendar

Untitled

May the force stay strong in you.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

The grad students have been locked into the new lab for theholidays @uwophysastro #westernu


Img_1387


The building is so quiet you can hear a church mouse over the holidays and it’s an ideal time for the graduate Crows to actually get some work done. So I had the building workers put up a force field barricade to keep them on task until the New Year. I’m not an ogre, we have it set up so they get 2 hours a day of internet access and will be fed (occasionally). I wish I had thought of this sooner!


TheOldCrow 

Monday, December 19, 2011

Gonna be a little tight in here till summer especially when Justin returns


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Crow Emily can't contain her excitement about our renovated lab!


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Now it's a pain in the butt moving for the next 6 months. I'll have to remember to post this next to the lab v2.0 this summer.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Hope you like the new look of the PCL blog, let me know.

I took some time to day to play around with the look of the blog. I liked this particular theme because it uses the full width of the screen and I managed to make the type readable for my eyes, play with the colors, add some links, "eggs cetera". What do you think?

Monday, December 12, 2011

A Couple of Photos from #AGU11

Here's a photo album from our epic trip to the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting Dec 2011

Friday, December 9, 2011

Last Report from the Crow's Nest for now from #agu11. Safe travels homepeeps.

Posters



The morning was spend at my own poster. Well, actually the poster is the work of Crow Jaya who was not able to attend. And much of the work’s inspiration was due to Tom McElroy. I quick review of the poster: much of our temperature information in the middle atmosphere comes from measurements by lidars using the Rayleigh scatter technique, e.g. elastic scattering. The standard analysis used since (at least) the 80’s is a top down integration of the lidar returns for temperature. The problem with this method is you have to pick a pressure to start the integration. It turns out you then have to throw out the first 10 to 15 km of your retrieval. To get this 10 to 15 km back would require you to increase the lidar’s sensitivity by 4x, which would typically mean getting laser you couldn’t afford, a telescope you couldn’t afford or both.


We were able to get a non-linear inversion to work which allows the lidar returns to be integrated from the bottom up. The sensitivity to the initial pressure is not quite small, and the returns are useful over the entire height range.


Crow Robin had his poster showing off the capabilities of our system and our new observatory, Echo Base. He put a tremendous amount of work into moving the system and the rest of the team can’t thank him enough!


Ozone 2011 revisited



I did get to set in on Gloria Manney’s talk in the northern hemisphere ozone depletion section tying together the various measurements and meteorology to explain the record lost of Arctic ozone this spring.


It is interesting how this ozone destruction was not due to the temperatures being record cold but to the duration of temperature below the chlorine activation point and intensity of the vortex that caused the large ozone lost.


I also stayed for Rodica Linenmaier’s talk about the [CANDAC] (http://www.candac.ca) measurements. CANDAC operates the Polar Enviroment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) in Eureka. She did a great job summarizing the measurements and contrasted them to the 15 years of measurements prior to this winter, again highlighting the importance of supporting long term measurements particularly in the polar regions.


Better go check a few more posters (and remember to pick up mine :–) but I think my fingers are done for AGU 2011.

@robin_wing at his poster #agu11 @uwophysastro # 1945 stop by!


Image

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Life hectic at #agu11 ? Tell yourself that when all is calm a diapychal of an isopycnal surface points straight up.

Scientifically an exciting afternoon for me but nothing concrete to report. I had some great conversations and discussions including a detailed tour of Karen Rosenlof’s ozone poster which was in a sense, about teleconnections. Teleconnections in atmospheric science concerns how changes at one height and location in the atmosphere can have significant affects on other atmospheric regions (in this case water vapor variations in the tropics affecting Arctic ozone via modification of large scale planetary (Rossby) waves). Way cool.



Michael McIntyre lecture on the DIapychal Mixing by Baroclinic Overturning (DIMBO)



I’m no oceanographer but that was OK because Michael eased us into in by using the more familiar (to me) atmospheric example of jets. The talk was broken down into



Zoology




  1. tropospheric jets

  2. striations (ghost jets)

  3. Jovian jets (straight)

  4. Tokamak jets (apparently a similar phenomena occurs in these devices)




Physiology




  1. vortex dynamics is in balance

  2. PV invertibility: when PV has a step-like change a jet must form




Anatomy: 2 extremes




  1. strong jets: Rossby waves well guided like in the stratosphere

  2. weak jets: PV close to background beta and Rossby waves are unguided




The Physics




  1. strong jets cause eddy-jet barriers. Example: the polar vortex in the stratosphere, which “traps” air inside it and can be associated with regions of significant ozone loss if the air is cold enough and the vortex stable enough (e.g. the Antarctic Ozone Hole).

  2. PV mixing on the equatorward side sharpens the jets




Michael showed several neat videos of these phenomena.



If you want reprints, preprints, this talk etc you can grab it off Michael’s website, google “lucidity principles” and it should be the first hit.



Haven’t spend much time at MW, I’m a South-side g I guess, so I have noticed I think for the first time that on the 3rd floor there is a large terrace you can walk out on and I just ran out and had a look and it is neat, check it out if like me you have been oblivious to it. BTW the Moon is full and I’m going out to howl at it.

Morning #agu11 Core Dump...All my writowdy friends came by for lunch...On the taxpayer's dime back to work

Sagan Lecture: Geoff Marcy, Kepler measurements of exoplanets



“Don’t go there Robert”



“Step away from the soapbox”



“Remember your blood pressure”



You are all invited to buy me a beverage sometime and ask “Bob why are you so critical/cranky/contrary in regard to exoplanet research”?



And I will answer you in any length desired because I realize I’m the 1% and the rest of you have joined the #OccupyUniverse cult.



So the story today was beautifully told by Prof. Marcy. I’ve gone to most of the 1 hr extended play talks and this was one of the best in terms of being pitched at an appropriate level for all geoscientists at the meeting, though a bit more discussion of the limitations of the arguments as well as the sampling bias would have been appreciated. Personally I would have like to seen a guess at what the entire planet-size/period space might look like? Is our solar system the 1% (hey hey hey I used that like in the first verse). No wait I stole that from Kayne. Whatever.



In fact attention to such detailed what have saved many giggles when your Crow asked “Why does everything you measure go CCW, would you have expected that?”



The answer being they don’t know which way they are going so of course they made a UNCONSCIOUS ASSUMPTION to quote new AGU fellow Michael McIntyre. Why not show half the orbits going the other way in the animations then?



… cause that is relevant to this Habitability Zone stuff (started by Planetary Scientist Jimmy Carter after he got fired, originally called Habitability Zone for Humanity). Not going to do you much good knowing you can have liquid water it if is 700K on the surface cause your screwy planet is rotating the wrong way (as if that could every happen).



OK I’m starting sorry and it would be petty of me to mention I can show from the Drake equation that all stars around inhabited planets have active magnetic fields.



But seriously it was an excellent talk and a simple but powerful instrument and I hope they can get many years of measurements.



Shoemaker Lecture, Sean Solomon, Messenger



and speaking of interesting magnetosphere how about Mercury? Sean Solomon filled us in his comprehensive summary of the Messenger, which is literally re-writing the book about Mercury.



As an airhead as opposed to a hard rock geoscientist I thought it was neat how they could show that the rocks on Mercury’s surface are more Earth-like than Moon like. I’m glad they have a good ahead to continue their measurements into solar max in 2013.



Posters



Only report is on a group of poster in the 140 to 160 region of Atmospheres concerning the record spring ozone depletion in the Arctic. One of the major successes in my scientific lifetime has been our ability to so thoroughly explain the ozone hole chemistry. We are even doing a good on the dynamics. I had the opportunity to have a long chat with Gloria Manney, who’s recent science paper made a comprehensive study of the situation. I had hoped to report we were getting closer to being able to predict the extent of ozone loss in the Arctic at least a few months before but no dice. Despite in some ways the stratosphere being simpler than surface weather we have about as much chance making a prediction up there than on the surface, despite what some of the model results might suggest.



Talks associated with this topic are tomorrow (Friday) starting at 13.40 in MW 3006. Gloria will be speaking first, highly recommended.



Commercial



The Canadian government is in the processes of ending all ozone research at Enviroment Canada. This ain’t a political forum and I’m not a political guy but I’m not on board with this, IMHO Canada as part of its stewardship role in the North critically needs to maintain its ozone monitoring program.



If you want more information or want to know what you can do to help follow @saveEC for further information.



Remember: 1650 today in MW 3005 Michael McIntyre will be talking.



The subject is irrelevant, please just go and you’ll thank me. As I keep saying one of the best lecturers I have ever heard.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Hey #agu11 people I have some questions for you #Experts. Feedback please? Whipple Lecture & mo' posters..

Whipple Lecture: Cometary nuclei



After a great salad at an uncrowded, close, inexpensive lunch spot that you would have as much luck getting the location from me as my favorite fishing hole (if I fished) I attended the Whipple Lecture given by Prof. Whipple’s last PhD student, Joseph Veverka. Prof. Veverka discussed the Deep Impact and Stardust measurements of comet Tempel 1, the first comet with sufficiently high resolution images to explore the geology of the body.



The observations are a neat story because Deep Impact first visited Tempel 1, impacted it, but no observations of the resulting crater were possible as the dust didn’t settle fast enough. So they were lucky enough that 5.5 yr later they could return to the same spot with the Stardust spacecraft. And by some amazing orbital tinkering they came back at the right time for closest approach over exactly the spot they wanted. That being said, the results were, well, modest. More like “Cursory Impact”.




  • Experts: Prof. Veverka suggested the dust could have resettled on the body filling in the hole, but it is a 6 km body, is the gravity field sufficient given the other motions (e.g. rotation) to bring the material back or would it disperse in a cloud about the body?




Anyway, there modeling work suggests the surface is similar to “lightly packed mountain snow”. A surprising thing I learned in the talk was the unlike mountain snow there is virtually no frozen water on the surface of this dirty snowball (sounds like one of those drinks on the bar menu I never order).



Another interesting results: the surface is covered with craters but they are not impact craters. They appear to be caused by material from the interior bubbling up to the surface. Also present on the surface are regions of melt which have flowed to the valleys of the surface (this little guy has a 850 m elevation gain on a body with a radius of 3 km!).




  • Experts: Planetary science heavily rely on crater counts for all kinds of inferences about planetary bodies. Does one attempt to correct for this on larger bodies, or does this process not happen. For instance on the Moon could a significant number of craters be non-impact in nature?




So the hallmark of a good talk, it raised lots of questions in my mind.



Posters




  • 1948: kudos to the University of Alberta who has begun a High Altitude Balloon program specifically designed for student participation. The have built a particle detector and have made a successful flight. Excuse the pun but I hope this program takes off!


  • 260: hey experts need your help again. This posters by Daniels et al measured high altitude waves due to lightning on Venus. They said that lightning occurs on Venus due to sulfuric acid droplets creating charge separation on “other particles”. In my mind lightning is intimately tied to strong vertical convection. Dynamics not required on Venus?


  • 276: Johnson et al., Energy and Power Spectrum of Thunder. Ms. Johnson has in my eyes a very interesting MSc thesis. I’ve seen lots of work on lightning but I didn’t realize that you can get important complementary information from the thunder (below 600 Hz). Apparently quantities due to charge compression can be discerned by these measurements.


  • 187: experts need you yet again. Didn’t get to ask the authors, who have developed a model of what a habitable planet would look like from space, but want a mission to L1 to make these measurements on Earth to test it. I would think plenty of data sets exist that could be convoluted to the appropriate observing bias you want to test?


  • 123: Hurst et al. had an interesting paper on stratospheric water vapor measurements. They showed using 2 long term data sets that the variability between the sets would cause a larger radiative forcing difference that the observer increases of stratospheric water vapor in the last decade. Lots of work to do here NDACC! I hope our stratospheric water vapor campaign with our colleagues at NASA will help in some small way with this important issue for climate modeling.


  • 26: Scary poster: Mahlsten and Knotti argue that if the global mean temperature increases 1.2 K above the current value that should be sufficient to cause the lose of all the Arctic sea ice. This result is based by a linear dependence basically all models find on global mean temperature and sea ice extent. So Experts my question is, as you approach the limit of less and less ice and the amount of water vapor is increasing, dynamics changing etc. would you expect this relation to continue to be linear? My nose tells me no but I’m out of my league here.


  • 1794: end with a planetary poster on Titan that answered something I was wondering, at least in the Arctic regions of Titan how much does it actually rain? Lorenz estimates it is cloudy 2.5-7% of the time and it only rains 1% of the time during these periods. Still that is a few meters per year, with a rate of about 0.1m/hr.





Evening science meeting now so gtg. Enjoy your science.

Michael McIntyre's Fellow talk at #agu11. WOW. @theagu I demand Michael get his own session next year. I'm #GyroscopicallyPumped

I can’t do justice to one of Michael’s talk. He is my favorite physicist to listen and learn from. If you go to one talk at AGU please go to his talk tomorrow (1650, OS44A MW 3005).



Quotes.




  • lucidity principles


  • unconscious assumption


  • stupid: energy budgets can solve everything


  • small is unimportant assumption


  • CO2 is the most important “non-condensing” gas


  • negative viscosity makes no sense


  • anti-frictional


  • gyroscopic pumping


  • thermally-driven is an unconscious assumption. And stupid.


  • A = B assumption (equation A = B means B causes A, only for computers)


  • pressure gradient does not cause the geostrophic wind


  • The Taylor Bretherton identity rocks.





Note to AGU: can Michael please have his own session next time?

My Tuesday afternoon poster/talk summary from #agu11. Did you see the IR spectrum of the pork loin chop?

A few poster comments and the Bowen Lecture.



P23C-1727: Start by being a homer and plugging my colleague Paul Wiegert who was part of a team led by Martin Connors that found the first Earth trojan asteroid.



1629: an interesting lidar paper about taking vertical profiles of biomass, plankton (by florescence) and even sea surface wind speeds. I thought the laser power to get significantly deep would be excessive by some initial tests using CALIPSO looked promising.



SA41A-180: some results using the Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter radar to estimate the amount and size of mesospheric smoke particles (aged meteoric material). Promising start.



A21D-87 Johnson et al showed a portable DIAL carbon monitoring lidar the was pretty small and could measure over a horizontal range of several km.



U-7: Mrs Crow and I occasionally travel to Milwaukee on the Lake Express hydrofoil ferry out of Muskegon. Little did we know we may have been sharing the boat with some ozone monitoring equipment. Cleary et al got permission to measure ozone on multiple crossings and showed that synoptic flow and lake breezes drive the plumes of high ozone across the lake, with no preference of being higher on one side than the other. Very clever.



My #2 of the day was the sentence in one of the Atmospheric Electricity posters:



“Jellyfish sprites are a superposition of carrot sprites driven by a very large current moment.”



Admit it, how many of you really knew that until now?



First prize was hands down Niedziela et al, Poster 75, concerning Aerosols produced from cooked meats, including IR spectra of a chicken breast. There measurements showed the differences in aerosols produced from cooking chicken compared to pork loin chops. If this was Mad magazine the empty balloon with “insert your comment here” would be visible.



The day ended with Marc Hirschmann giving a Bowen lecture “By Permission of the Mantle”. He did an excellent job for people not in this area like myself allowing us to appreciate the effect of the mantle on the atmosphere. His talk explored the interesting problem of the hydrogen to carbon ratio on the surface compared to the mantle and the current ideas about how to reconcile the differences.

The Merry Christmas Poster at #agu11. Plus Delta Airlines is a co-author.


2 photos, one author whose handwritten note told it all, another group with proof there is a Santa Claus!

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

ComicCon for Geoscience Day 2: The Crow's take on the #Bjerkes #Charney Atmospheric Science talks at #agu11

Went to 2 of the hour invited talks today. Both excellent and thought provoking.



Bjerkes Lecture: Paul Newman The 2010 Ozone Assessment



Well there can be too much doom and gloom among scientists so we get a bit of a feel-good story inre: stratospheric ozone. The only monkey wrench on the horizon is the HFCs, which are not yet regulated. The good news is if we regulate them soon we will be OK, but if we do nothing in about 50 years we’ll be back to where we started in terms of ozone lost. Let’s get on this politicians.




  • did you know there have been 6 amendments to the original Montreal Protocol.


  • decreasing ozone is good for increasing Vitamin D production, but of course the long list of health issues associated with it means I stick to my 1g a day of D in the winter.


  • no consensus on the term Northern Ozone Hole yet but the fact remains when it gets very cold in the Arctic winter stratosphere we will lose significant ozone similar to the South.





Charney Lecture, Graeme Stephens, Clouds & Climate Change



Excellent tour for the non specialist to the issues involved incorporating realistic cloud physics into global models. As an experimentalist I feel his pain in trying to communicate to the modeling community that sometimes you can’t do something a certain why because it is easy and/or efficient it if isn’t correct. Examples included the models producing (in certain situations) twice as much rain at half the amount of the measurements. Not really agreement




  • Learned with a Taylor diagram is, new one for me.


  • Nice example at end of the affect of mixed-phase clouds on forecast.





Poster time!

Monday, December 5, 2011

Well got through 500 posters today, more rambles within from #agu11. @znarfoz check out 143. Time to Soiree

Got through about 400 U & A posters then blitzed the P & SA with a little bit of geology for the heck of it.



Noted




  • don’t put your picture on your poster. I understand why you would, but I look at it and see a car or real estate ad and expect 25% off at least for reading your posters


  • don’t use the same logo on your poster as you’re football team does on the helmet. Use the staid one on the letterhead your University uses for deaths and termination notices. I can’t explain why just trust me on this.


  • OK, gtg, late for the Social Media Soiree and I have no idea what the heck it is? I thought Soiree was ice cream made with water instead of cream?





Posters Ramblings




  • a couple posters dealing with teleconnections. I find this fascinating, the notion/fact that the atmosphere responses in a non-local manner to different effects. Ferreting them out is useful and I imagine fun, understanding them is tough. Posters 109 and 269 had some interesting results.


  • not giving number but poor ### printed their poster 4'x6' but it the boards are 4' HEIGHT by 6' width


  • Poster 128 makes available to us all the HIPPO data base of recent aircraft measurements and analysis for flight paths all over North America (maybe more?). Looks worth checking out.


  • Trending: several people have put instruments on cargo ships to get a wide range of latitudes/longitudes covered. No pirates appeared to be co-investigators.


  • 143: Yo @znarfoz: Bruhl et al showed results for background stratospheric aerosols. They estimate carbonyl sulfide (COS) is the source for 70%, with some volcanic contributions by SO2.


  • 212: Pfister et al. showed aircraft measurements from the AATREX campaign of water vapor in the tropical troposphere layer. Changes in water vapor in this region have a huge affect on global temperature. Look forward to seeing more of these excellent measurements.


  • 221: Loved this (Canadian!) student paper by Haga et al on ice nucleation in mixed phase clouds due to fungal spores. Wished I had been able to talk to her. I overheard her saying they were wondering if the spores could be lofted in the high arctic. At the CANDAC lab in Eureka we have an experiment that measures pollen brought up from middle latitudes to the high arctic. So why not fungal spores?


  • 263: another interesting Canadian student paper by Normand et al using OSIRIS satellite measurements to find cloud tops in the UTLS.


  • 379: Enviroment Canada sciences show that NO2 and SO2 hot spots are present over the minds at the tar sands. Nuff said.


  • quick tour of the planetary papers, the Mars ionospheric work is neat and I enjoyed Girzain et al poster SA13A-1879 that derived a Chapman profile for the Mars ionosphere. Definitely stealing that for my course next term, nice complement to the derivation I do for Earth. Or an exam problem maybe, ssshhhhh thank Goodness my students don’t read this.


  • promised Geology: 1577 Lebrun et al showed the affects on cooling on a magma ocean on Earth on the choice of atmosphere. As the amount of water vapor increases relative to CO2 the cooling can slow down by 2x.


@uwophysastro here's Crow Emily at her poster #agu11


P163

My picture with the mayor of San Francisco #agu11


P100

My picture with the mayor of San Francisco's picture

Monday Morning, coming down... 85 down ? 1000 to go... Rivers of Air... Proxy Fruvious? #agu11

The Crow is rapidly going to summarize the morning before total fatigue sets in (this use to take until Thursday, not 1300 Monday?). My promise to walk the entire poster hall and report on Monday is on track, except it is now Monday Dec 12. I did get to #85 this morning. To whit.



Note: a lot of posters I go to and find interesting are in areas that I know little about, which are most areas, so pre-apologies for the misrepresentations of your hard work below.



Union posters




  • 8: Dogma is that mineral dust when blown by wind get smaller as the wind gets stronger. This poster looked at many different measurements and concluded they are not consistent with this, the size does not depend on wind.


  • 11: affect of deep convection on dust storm in west Africa in the summer. Looks like ½ the dust is associated with cold pool outflows of air called haboobs. OK, I just wanted to type haboobs.


  • 16, 18, this group of Union posters were about media, including one about NCAR outreach and another on a general “model” for effective ways to set up exhibits at a science museum.


  • U13A-0035 As always Dick Peltier from U Toronto has some interesting work he is doing with collaborator Liu. The had made a “soft” Snowball Earth model, i.e. the equatorial regions still have liquid water. However, there model had a very simple atmosphere. They are trying to improve the atmospheric model to find the point at which the system goes from soft to hard snowball.





Atmospheric




  • A11 46 to 52 (or so): series of posters on the CALWater campaign that introduced your Crow to the atmospheric phenomena of a atmospheric river (AR). ARs are low atmosphere (2-4 km altitude) regions of rapidly moving air with high water vapor content, which occur at mid-latitudes and apparently in the sub-tropics as well. The have widths of 400 to 1000 km and move an amount of water per s 17x greater than leaving the Mississippi River discharge. In laymans terms that is a lot of water. Actually it is in scienctific terms as well. Another poster estimated that half the water in the Sierra Madre water basin is from these events. The ARs can interact with cyclones and/or orography and cause extremely heavy precipitation. Will have to look at our lidar water vapor measurements and see if we have encountered these and not realized it.


  • 65: Utah State Aggie almnus Durga Kafle is now at Argonne National lab working with the ARM program micropulsed lidars. His posters showed the value of these small lidars for continuous, long-term and eye safe measurements of aerosol optical depth. I need to find out if Mike Fromm knows about this data source.


  • 66-67 I found these posters terrifying but only because I may not know lots but I know enough geophysics to be terrified of the concept (let allow actual application) of geo-engineering. But then I teach first year physics to engineers. Sorry people, but to me this is asking for the atmospheric equivalent of cane toads. Thes posters describe techniques to implement the Latham Satter cloud albedo modification scheme, where clouds are generated over the oceans to give a global rise in albedo of 1%.


  • 82 Dr. Hui Su at JPL is doing some interest modelling of UTLS (upper troposphere lower stratosphere) water vapor. Since we make these measurements both with the PCL but in concert with many other lidars as part of the Network for Detection of Atmospheric Composition and Chemistry (NDACC) it was a good exchange, we need to interact with the modellers and vice versa as this problem is an important long term issue for Atmospheric Change research.





that’s it for now, I have a few 1000 more to cover before dinner.