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. Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnCy-R7mLHI More on Dot Earth: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/arctic

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.