Good morning,
With the weather looking great for the weekend, I thought I would take a more worldly and universal look at weather. I came across this first item while perusing the internet earlier today. Below is an image from that article. It is a picture of the north pole on the planet Mars. Scientists used the Mars Reconnaisannce Orbiter to probe the pole with radar. The scans reveal the ice cap at the pole may be thicker than first originally thought. It may be as thick as 1.2 miles deep and may cover a land area the size of Pakistan.
You can read a lot more about this at www.space.com Speaking of great images. Check out this Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer image from NASA's aqua satellite.
As the MODIS passed over the North Sea, off the coast of Scotland recently, it captured this amazing image of phytoplankton. The "phytoplankton" is the area shaded bright blue & green. Let's go back to science class for a moment. Phytoplankton are organisms that use chlorophyll and other pigments to capture light for photosynthesis. Because these pigments absorb sunlight they change the color of the light reflected from the sea surface back to the satellite. Why look at phytoplankton? The biggest reason may be they are the base of the oceans' food chain. In the North Sea, monkfish and herring feed off plankton. As photosynthesizers, they also play a crucial role in the carbon cycle, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Some oceanographers are concerned rising ocean temperatures will slow phytoplankton growth rates, thus harming marine ecosystems and causing carbon dioxide to accumulate more rapidly in the atmosphere. I hope you enjoyed the science lesson as much I enjoyed finding out more about these topics.
Have a great weekend,
Brett