We’ll give you the same update here each month, in the same order Ryan does, starting and ending closest to our home city, San Francisco.

Where’s the Snow?
Some of us were looking forward to sledding down our great neighborhood hills… On February 23rd, the San Francisco Chronicle reported “there is a good chance for snow at sea level in San Francisco for the first time since February 1976, the National Weather Service opines.” But on February 25th, it declared a “love-hate relationship with weather predictions.”

But everyone else got snow, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory:

January 2011 was marked by a series of crippling snow storms across the United States. By January 12, about 71 percent of the country had snow on the ground, the fifth-largest snow cover extent in the last 45 years.

While the snow-pack in the Sierras has been good for California, other states are not so lucky:

With all the snow, it would be easy to think that the United States received plenty of winter moisture, but snow is deceptive… January 2011 was the ninth-driest January in the United States in 117 years. The southern half of the country was particularly hard hit. New Mexico experienced its driest January on record.

Expedition to the Philippines
We mentioned this in Earth Update last month, but head Academy researcher Terry Gosliner outlined his plans, hopes and dreams for the upcoming Hearst Expedition to the Philippines at Nightlife last night. Academy scientists, working with Filipino researchers, will explore three research arenas in the country: shallow-water reefs, deep-sea,  and terrestrial and freshwater. The expedition will take place from April 25th through June 10th– look for updates here.

Australia and New Zealand Updates
Australia, land of floods, droughts and cyclones. Tropical Cyclones Diane and Carlos both hovered off the coast of Western Australia last month and Atu approached the north island of New Zealand. (Click on the links for more stunning images from the Earth Observatory.)

The 6.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Christchurch last month was surprising in the amount of damage it amassed. From Earth Observatory:

Besides striking closer to a major population center, the 6.3-magnitude Christchurch earthquake had a depth of just 5 kilometers (3 miles). The New Zealand Herald reported that, whereas the Darfield quake [September 2010] happened in the early morning hours, the February 22 quake struck at the “worst possible time” of day—at the lunch hour when city streets were crowded with shoppers, diners, office workers, and school children. Moreover, some of the buildings that collapsed may have been weakened by the September 2010 quake.

It’s also possible that the quake could have been magnified by volcanic rock.

Let’s look to some beauty of the area. The image above is not a painting; it shows the annual summer phytoplankton bloom, taken February 10th.

Goodbye Glory
Ryan reported on the Glory satellite launch to his NightLife crowd last night. Sadly, only a few hours later, early this morning, the climate-data gathering spacecraft failed to separate from the Taurus XL rocket and plunged somewhere into the South Pacific. We saw this same thing only two years ago with the Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite. You can read more here.

If you’re in the area, come visit the Academy for NightLife on April 7th for the next “Earth Update,” when Ryan and Tim will give you more of the latest news on Academy research and our home planet.

NASA image by Norman Kuring

Glory was to lift-off last week, but technical issues with ground support equipment for the Taurus XL launch vehicle postponed the event. NASA says those issues have been resolved and Glory is back on track!

Glory will be an important tool in understanding the Earth’s climate. One of its missions is to detect and measure the small particles in the Earth’s atmosphere called aerosols. Aerosols, or the gases that lead to their formation, can come from vehicle tailpipes and desert winds, from sea spray and fires, volcanic eruptions and factories. Even lush forests, soils or communities of plankton in the ocean can be sources of certain types of aerosols.

The ubiquitous particles drift in Earth’s atmosphere, from the stratosphere to the surface, and range in size from a few nanometers, less than the width of the smallest viruses, to several tens of micrometers, about the diameter of human hair.

The particles can directly influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the sun’s radiation. In broad terms, this means bright-colored or translucent aerosols, such as sulfates and sea salt aerosols, tend to reflect radiation back towards space and cause cooling. In contrast, darker aerosols, such as black carbon and other types of carbonaceous particles, can absorb significant amounts of light and contribute to atmospheric warming.

Aerosols are short-lived and their impacts are not fully understood. From Scientific American:

NASA climate expert and Glory science team member James Hansen has said the range of uncertainty associated with the climate impact of aerosols is three or four times that of greenhouse gases.

Glory hopes to remedy that uncertainty.

In addition, Glory will monitor variations in solar activity by measuring the amount of radiation that strikes the top of Earth’s atmosphere. The sun has been in a relatively quiet phase, even as we head to the solar maximum. The satellite could allow scientists to understand how this and future solar cycles influence climate here on Earth.

As Glory monitors the Earth’s climate, we’ll be monitoring news from the mission. Stay tuned!