Beneath the Aurora Borealis an oil tanker glides through the night past the Coast Guard ice breaker Amundsen and vanishes into the maze of shoals and straits of the Northwest Passage, navigating waters that for millennia were frozen over this time of year.
Warming has forced a retreat of the polar ice cap, opening up a sea route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for several months of the year.
Commander Alain Lacerte is at the helm as the vessel navigates the Queen Maud Gulf, poring over charts that date from the 1950s and making course corrections with the help of GPS.
[...] Today, taking this route cuts 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) off a trip from London to Tokyo, saving time and fuel.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @05:18PM
No, it is warmer. Because of the way photons work at particular wavelengths, CO2 allows more photons in at higher energies than the ones it lets out. True, there is no additional energy from the Sun to the Earth as visible and ultraviolet photons; but there is less being radiated away from the Earth to space, in the form of infrared photons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @05:30PM
What project has this data?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 21 2015, @08:21PM
What I am looking for is W/m^2 by latitude and time of day. Does this data exist?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 22 2015, @03:44AM
There are solar insolation tables all over for various places. Solar panel companies and the like will probably have the data for your area. Another is to do the math yourself using nearby installations on sites like http://pvoutput.org [pvoutput.org] or using climate and weather data from NOAA and the NWS.