NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: “New maps of Greenland’s coastal seafloor and bedrock beneath its massive ice sheet show that two to four times as many coastal glaciers are at risk of accelerated melting as previously thought. Researchers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI), NASA and 30 other institutions have published the most comprehensive, accurate and high-resolution relief maps ever made of Greenland’s bedrock and coastal seafloor. Among the many data sources incorporated into the new maps are data from NASA’s Ocean Melting Greenland (OMG) campaign.”
Tag: global warming
Mapping Glacial Retreat
Using elevation data from stereo satellite observations, David Shean is mapping the retreat of some 1,200 mountain glaciers in the continental United States. “Until recently, glaciers in the United States have been measured in two ways: placing stakes in the snow, as federal scientists have done each year since 1957 at South Cascade Glacier in Washington state; or tracking glacier area using photographs from airplanes and satellites.” Shean’s method, which measures each glacier twice a year and uses automated software to track changes, seems to cover a lot more territory. [GIS and Science]
Extreme Event Attribution
Whenever a cataclysmic weather event occurs—like Hurricane Harvey right now—there’s usually a heated political argument over whether or not it can be blamed on climate change. It turns out that there’s a field of research dedicated to assessing whether extreme weather can be attributed to climate change: it’s called extreme event attribution. There have been more than 140 peer-reviewed attribution studies of extreme weather events around the globe, which Carbon Brief has mapped here.
Carbon Brief’s analysis suggests 63% of all extreme weather events studied to date were made more likely or more severe by human-caused climate change. Heatwaves account for nearly half of such events (46%), droughts make up 21% and heavy rainfall or floods account for 14%.
FEMA Flood Maps Don’t Account for Future Sea Level Rise
NPR last month, reporting on a problem with FEMA’s flood insurance maps: they’re not keeping up with reality. “FEMA’s insurance maps are based on past patterns of flooding. Future sea level rise—which is expected to create new, bigger flood zones—is not factored in. So some communities are doing the mapping themselves. Like Annapolis, the state capital of Maryland.” [Leventhal]
A Map of Rising Global Temperatures
This animated map from NASA (Flash-only, sorry) illustrates global temperatures since 1880: “reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average.” News flash: the planet’s getting warmer. More information here.
Previously: Global Temperature Changes by Decade.