Antarctic Ice - a question from the ship lands in Anthony's lap
Sometimes a simple question can land in the most unusual place.
From
Watts Up With That:
WUWT and WeatherBell help KUSI-TV with a weather forecasting request from ice-trapped ship in Antarctica Akademik Shokalskiy
Today, while shopping at lunchtime for some last minute year end supplies, I got one of the strangest cell-phone calls ever. It was from my friend John Coleman, the founder of the Weather Channel and Chief meteorologist at KUSI-TV in San Diego. He was calling via cell phone from his car, and he was on his way into the TV station early.
He started off by saying, �Anthony, we have a really strange situation here�.
Then to my surprise, he relayed a conversation he had just had; a person on the Akademik Shokalskiy had reached out, because they didn�t have adequate weather data on-board. At first, I thought John was pulling my leg, but then as he gave more details, I realized he was serious.
What had happened was that the US Coast Guard had received a message from the ship, requesting weather and wind information for Antarctica. That got relayed to someone at the Scripps oceanographic Institute in San Diego, and it went to John�s weekend KUSI meteorologist Dave Scott. Dave had worked with a scientist who is now on the US Coast Guard IceBreaker Polar Star, and they had logged the request for weather for forecast data from Akademik Shokalskiy. That�s how all this got started.
The wind is pushing the sea ice into the ship and they wanted to see when the wind would shift and open up a lead for them. Anthony also made this comment:
I also pointed out that the Australian scientists on-board were climatologists, and not operational weather forecasters, and finding this sort of weather data probably wasn�t in their skill set.
Very charitable -- the passengers were all of a similar mindset and were looking for proof of global warming and would not report anything else. Greater ice than in recent history? Global Warming! No ice in 1912? Global Warming!
Posted by DaveH at January 1, 2014 11:22 AM