The seemingly mundane life of the behemoth container ship is far more beautiful than one might think.
The above time lapse video follows one such ship on a day's journey as it navigates through sea and port.
In this otherworldly life on the sea, the skies are deceptive: what looks like a sunrise sparkling in the distance turns out to be the bright lights of a port that the ship pulls into.
Even the skies and sea do not look of this earth, and seem to belong to some other planet in a strange galaxy.
Some particularly wondrous moments that the container ship bears witness to on this journey are lightning strikes, a sea "highway" made of red and green buoys, and a game of container Tetris.
StratoBus is a stationary stratospheric airship, offering autonomous operation and suited to multiple missions.
It measures 100 meters long with a maximum diameter of 33 meters (328 x 108 ft), and weighs less than 5 metric tons.
Designed to operate at an altitude of 20 kilometers (about 66,000 ft), above the jet stream and air traffic, StratoBus can carry a payload of up to 250 kg (550 lb), with 5 kilowatts of onboard power.
StratoBus doesn’t need a launch vehicle to reach “orbit”.
It takes just four hours to reach the stratosphere, and about the same to come back down.
Its operating economics make it a real “low-cost” product, extremely competitive for regional civil or military applications, including telecommunications, navigation, observation (especially surveillance), etc.
The program is led by Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor.
Over the years, scientists have attempted to visually communicate the
Earth’s warming in many ways. They’ve developed an array of maps,
charts, and animations that present an unmistakable picture of a warming
world.
But I’ve seen no visual as striking and effective as the infographic posted to Twitter Monday by climate scientist Ed Hawkins.
Hawkins illustrates the warming in a series of circles, each one
portraying a year in the historical climate record spanning 1850 and the
present.
As time passes and the planet warms, the circles expand
outward.
Together the circles are part of one unwinding spiral,
which serves as a fitting metaphor for the long-term course of the
Earth’s temperature.
Individually, the circles behave somewhat
erratically.
At times, especially early in the record, the circles
contract, conveying periods of cooling.
There are also periods when the
circles are packed close together, signifying little temperature
change.
But as time wears on, especially over the past few decades, you
see more outward leaps, when climate warming is speeding up.
Of
particular interest is the most recent burst coincident with the
temperature increase of 2016. It is clearly warmer than anything
preceding it by some distance and approaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above
the baseline average.
The graphic plainly illustrates how unusual this
year is in a long-term context, and it’s not difficult to see why
climate scientists believe it is nearly certain to be the warmest year on record.
Hawkins also created a more conventional chart, shown below, which is also extremely effective at showing how anomalous 2016 is.
But the motion of the spiral animation makes it stand out among
climate warming visualizations.
It unambiguously shows the planet’s
relentless march toward higher temperatures, but without losing the
interesting complexity seen in the year-to-year movements.
“The
animated spiral presents global temperature change in a visually
appealing and straightforward way,” Hawkins wrote on his blog, the Climate Lab Book.
“The pace of change is immediately obvious, especially over the past few decades.”
The animation uses global temperature data from the Hadley Centre of the United Kingdom’s Met Office.
Below are some other visuals which, in my view, also do a good job illustrating global warming:
This visualization illustrates Earth’s long-term warming trend, showing temperature changes from 1880 to 2015 as a rolling five-year average.
Orange colors represent temperatures that are warmer than the 1951-80 baseline average, and blues represent temperatures cooler than the baseline.
Produced by NASA, the chart illustrates how temperatures have compared
to “normal” (or the 1951-1980 average) from 1880 to present, from pole
to pole (-90 latitude to 90 latitude).
NOAA’s powerful new supercomputers paved the way for another upgrade to
the U.S. Global Forecast System (GFS), NOAA’s primary model for weather
prediction.
Today’s upgrade builds on last year’s significant boost to the GFS, which more than doubled the resolution of the model grid from 27 kilometers to 13 kilometers, resulting in higher resolution model output and more precise weather forecasts and warnings.
Today’s shift to 4-D ensemble hybrid data assimilation takes into account how weather systems evolve on a 3-D spatial grid over time, with time now becoming the fourth dimension.
This approach makes better use of earth observations used to initialize the model which gives forecasters a more accurate and timely picture of evolving weather situations.
“The GFS is the foundation for all of our weather and climate models, so today’s upgrade will add skill across all NOAA's forecast mission areas, including hurricanes and other high-impact weather,” said Louis Uccellini, Ph.D., director of NOAA’s National Weather Service.
“Current investments in more powerful supercomputers, advanced modeling capabilities, and better earth observing systems are creating more precision in the forecast process and strengthening America's resiliency to extreme weather, water and climate events."
Uccellini added that this GFS upgrade is the latest of a number of model improvements rolling out this spring and summer, thanks to increased supercomputing power NOAA acquired earlier this year.
"America's needs for weather, climate, and water information and prediction are growing, and we're advancing our capabilities to meet current and future demand," he said.
The GFS model is run four times a day with each update forecasting out to 16 days.
With the new GFS, the model delivers hourly forecast guidance out to five days, instead of every three hours as before.
Hourly forecasts will help forecasters better predict the onset of a storm and critical details of its evolution, which will be particularly helpful to decision-makers, emergency managers and commuters in preparation for morning and evening rush-hour.
Hourly output has also allowed for new and improved icing information for the aviation community.
This upgrade also prepares the GFS to make use of highly anticipated satellite observations from JPSS and GOES-R.
GOES-R is scheduled to launch later this year and will provide images of weather patterns and severe storms as frequently as every 30 seconds, which will contribute to more accurate and reliable weather forecasts and severe weather outlooks.
Today’s improvements will allow for hundreds of thousands more earth observations from these satellites and other observations to inform GFS model output.
For example, using satellite radiance information the new GFS can collect and ingest observations in both clear and cloudy sky conditions.
In addition, the new GFS will make weather observations from commercial aircraft more reliable by filtering out poor data points and correcting biases.
When tested, the new GFS improved forecasts over grass and cropland in the Great Plains to more readily identify instability in the atmosphere that could lead to severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.
The upgrade also improved precipitation forecasts for the continental U.S., and better predicted the development, track and intensity of tropical storms.
NOAA’s weather and climate models, including the GFS, are free and available to the public.
