High Adventure Science 4/14

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/content/638831main_globe_east_2048.jpg

This week in class, we have been working on HAS. HAS stands for High Adventure Science. We have 5 modules to work on, ana this week we have completed 4 of them. I have learned a lot about climate change and this that cause or help it.

Module 1: Earth’s changing climates

In this module, we have explored some climate change data of the climates through the decades 1884-2012. It was quite an interesting video that shows how the global heat has changed as humans grow more experienced.



The light blue areas are colder areas; dark blue very cold. The orange is a mild warmth, and the dark orange to crimson is incredibly hot. Believe it or not, in the past 50 years, the area that has had the most change in temperature is the Arctic and Antarctic. The areas where it is the coldest becomes the warmest.




This graph shows the temperature change from 1880-2010.Each point on the graph is an average for the 12 months preceding it. It shows the temperature of the oceans, and for the most part, they have been getting hotter. Occasionally, the ocean temperature will drop, but mostly it is rising, which could pose huge problems for marine life.

This graph also shows the global temperature, but it has a slight more detail. The black points show the same data that the previous graph showed.The red line shows the 5 year average. The two lines, red and black, are not following each other because the black line is a little bit more detailed. The black line shows the yearly average of the ocean temperatures, whereas the red line shows the 5 year average, which would prove to be slightly different. Mostly they are following each other, but there are some slight differences.

The green bars on the graph show how unsure scientists are about the data. The longer they are, the more unsure they are. The reason that the green error bar near the 1880s is longer than the one in the 2000s is because back in the 1880s, scientists did not have the technology and data machines that they have today. It would make sense that they were very unsure, because they had no technology to make sure. In the 2000s, they still didn’t have as much as today, but they had more than they had in the 1880s, which would explain why they are slightly more sure.




Scientists have obtained the previous data using thermometers, which is slightly easier than trying to collect temperatures and data before it was even invented! The picture shows a 19 cm long section of an ice core from a Greenland ice sheet. Scientists examine the layers in the ice cores to try and predict the temperatures of the times back when the ice core was being formed. The winter layers are darker than the summer layers are because in the winter, the ice had a chance to freeze more thoroughly than in the summer.

This graph proves that over the past 10,000 years, the temperature has been slowly increasing. It is getting slightly warmer than before. Based on these graphs, scientists can infer that global warming is happening, but they still do not have enough data to know for sure what is going on.
Module 2: Interactions within the atmosphere

In this module, we began to learn about the effects of solar and infrared radiation on the Earth’s surface and atmosphere.




This was the interactive that we used for the first part of module 2. This shows the heat (red), carbon dioxide (green), and the infrared and solar radiation (yellow and purple arrows).




However, if you click the ‘Erupt’ button on the model, the volcano releases lots of the green carbon dioxide into the air. After clicking erupt about 10-15 times, this is what the model looks like.

The sunlight bounces off of the ground and rebounds back into the atmosphere. Sometimes it is absorbed into the ground and moves around underground.

When carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it warms it up. This is because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When the solar radiation penetrates the atmosphere, the greenhouse gases trap the light and the warmth from the sun inside the atmosphere. This makes the air around us and everything in the atmosphere a lot warmer.

Next we studied radiation-gas interactions. In this part of module 2, we had four models to choose from: sun on the ground, sun on CO2, infrared on CO2, and sun on ground and CO2.

In sun on the ground, the sunlight that came out of the sun hit the ground and bounced up. Occasionally, there were some infrared radiation waves coming up as well.






In sun on CO2, the sunlight heated the carbon dioxide molecules, which made the temperature (located on the right side of the screenshots) rise faster.






In infrared on CO2, the infrared radiation waves made the carbon dioxide heat much faster, and the temperature rose up a ton.



In sun on ground and CO2, the temperature rose a lot faster because the solar and infrared radiation are heating the ground and the carbon dioxide, increasing the temperature faster.



Module 3: Sources, sinks and feedback



This shows the carbon cycle. The sinks are any area that take in carbon. The atmosphere, land, ocean and sediments are all sinks because they all take in carbon. Reservoirs are where the carbon is stored. Like all matter on Earth, carbon is neither created or destroyed, only recycled.

In this module, we learned about carbon’s solubility, which is how easily it dissolves in different temperatures of water. For carbon, the colder the water, the quicker it dissolves.

Positive feedback is something that is like a cycle. You study for a test, so you get a good grade. The good grade motivates you to study more, so the more you study, the better grades you get. Example by HAS.

Module 4: Feedbacks of ice and clouds

The amount of ice coverage matters, as we found out in the next module. In the model we used, if we put no ice coverage, than the water and atmosphere grew very hot. If we put 100% ice coverage, then the radiation bounces off of it and back into space, cooling the atmosphere.



You can feel the difference between a cloudy day and a sunny day. When there are clouds around, the radiation actually mostly never makes it through the cloud cover and bounces back into space, cooing the atmosphere dramatically.



If there were cloudy days all the time, global warming would probably stop. It might not be fixed, but clouds sure are a good thing so far.

S&EP: SP2: Using Models

This week, we certainly used a lot of models! All of the previous screenshots in my summary are all shots of the models that we have used. There were actually more than this, but I only added a few. These models are very helpful to help us see the physical things that HAS was trying to teach us. In the modules, depending on the models, there were some graphs that showed temperature, water vapor levels, carbon dioxide levels in atmosphere and ocean, and some more. These graphs I found very helpful. But some of the models were less accurate. In the article we read on HAS, it said that clouds deflect radiation better based on their altitude. In the model, we could not place the clouds at the height we wanted. That I found unhelpful.

XCC: Scale, Proportion, and Quantity.

When we are looking at the models, like the volcano from module one, it matters the quantity of the carbon dioxide. When the model started, the amount of carbon dioxide was in proportion to everything else, so the graph was balanced out. But when we clicked ‘Erupt’, more carbon dioxide was released into the air, make the graphs non-proportional. This means that the quantity matters.