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 ShokalskiyThe 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:
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.
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!
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