Explainer: Animated 3-D Arctic Ice Volume Graph
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Andy Lee Robinson describes his creation of a 3D graph illustrating the alarming decline of Arctic sea ice volume over recent decades. Using his background in engineering and graphic design, he produced an animation to present this data clearly to a non-technical audience, automating the process from data collection to production. Robinson hopes that his work will raise awareness of the urgent climate issues surrounding Arctic ice loss, despite media neglect of the topic.
Explainer: Animated 3-D Arctic Ice Volume Graph
- 1. Posted for the Dot Earth blog, this is an explanation by Andy Lee Robinson -- a remarkably interesting mix of engineer, musician and other things -- of how he produced his three-dimensional graph of changes in Arctic sea ice volume over recent decades: I'm an Englishman in Budapest, a Linux system administrator/programmer/integrator, graphic designer, consultant and pianist/composer passionately interested in everything to do with science, technology and nature. I used to work for Cap Gemini years ago and until recently was CTO of a social networking software development company trying to compete with Facebook in native languages but lost. I designed the server infrastructure and maintained the application platform, and still do out of my own pocket for the few users that are left. I've been lucky to be relatively financially independent for the last few years beholden to noone, and this gave me freedom to spend far too much time reading and following the state of climate and the denial industry in the mainstream media, twitter, realclimate, skepticalscience, youtube, Neven's blog, thinkprogress etc etc and of course your blog and nytimes. I have been through some battles with denial trolls on youtube and other places, but it gets to be a bit soul destroying after a while, like playing tennis with smoke or playing chess with pigeons and there is no shortage of them! I also became quite fascinated with what was happening in the Arctic. (The closest I have been to it was spending an amazing weekend in Iceland in 1999). After seeing the PIOMAS Sea Ice volume data last year on https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/ and Jim Pettitt's graph on http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/sia_5.png it struck me how utterly profound and frightening this was, and that few seemed to be aware of it. While alarmists and deniers were squabbling, this was the real Titanic going down. I read a tweet from Richard Betts last month about an animated gif graph that Tamino did, where he would have liked the x-axis to cross where y=0, so I proactively modified it for him: https://twitter.com/richardabetts/status/236377175912235009 and shared it on my site: http://haveland.com/share/piomas2012.gif followed by: http://haveland.com/share/piomas2012.avi http://haveland.com/share/piomas2012.m4v http://haveland.com/share/piomas2012.mp4 and half-size versions: http://haveland.com/share/piomas2012-50pc.avi http://haveland.com/share/piomas2012-50pc.gif http://haveland.com/share/piomas2012-50pc.m4v http://haveland.com/share/piomas2012-50pc.mp4 After these, I thought it would be nice to see the data in proper 3D, and with some sense of urgency, as it looked like the ice was going to crash.
- 2. So as a personal project, I used my graphics and programming experience to make a professional looking animation that I hoped would illustrate what was happening to the Arctic sea ice in a clear and digestible way to a wide non-technical audience, and hoped it would attract some attention. I used a raytracing program called PoVRay (http://www.povray.org) which processes a script-like object and scene description language and lends itself well to rendering scenes that have been generated by other programs. The data comes from http://psc.apl.washington.edu/wordpress/research/projects/arctic-sea- ice-volume-anomaly/ and I wrote a program to unpack the daily PIOMAS sea ice volume data into an x,y,z set of smooth spline strips separated by year, and designed a graph to place them onto. I wanted to show the data evolving over time, expand and rotate the graph, so wrote another program to control the parameters in the script and iterate over them for the various stages over 453 frames at 1920x1080 resolution. 1. Start with Year 1979 data and pause for a second for viewer to take in. 2. Slide the year traces backwards in depth and add new years on top to show evolution. 3. Pause on current year 2012 for viewer. 4. Rotate to show the trend of all years and their months heading inexorably downwards. 5. Rotate back to end on current year. I have automated the entire process from data download to animation production, and I can produce variations on request, but it takes many hours of processing. I am working on a slightly different spiral version, and hope to have something within a few days. Seems obvious and inevitable that September will reach the floor in a few year's time, and I think (hope?) that the general population would be able to infer that too, and that it could be a bad, or even *really bad* thing to happen. I think they are starting to connect the dots, even if the media are doing everything they can to avoid the subject.