Monday, September 24, 2012

Storm Battered

As I sit watching and listening to the wind and the rain outside ( not really wanting to get started out there this morning!) I looked at the blog for this day last year:



This is the picture in large format
September 2011


So I looked at the Nasa site:

Arctic Sea Ice Hits Smallest Extent In Satellite Era

and the latest map:

Sea ice extent maps are derived from data captured by the Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer aboard NASA's Nimbus-7 satellite and the Special Sensor Microwave Imager on multiple satellites from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program.



As the US NSICD director said:


“We are now in uncharted territory,” said NSIDC Director Mark Serreze. “While we’ve long known that as the planet warms up, changes would be seen first and be most pronounced in the Arctic, few of us were prepared for how rapidly the changes would actually occur.”

And today's headlines only seem to bear this out:


Wet weather sweeps across UK

Three die as warnings issued of fiercer winds and the chance of flooding in 88 areas of the south-west, midlands and north-east
'Planetary emergency' due to Arctic melt, experts warn