reinvention of the wheel been done for years now Scientific Dishonesty
Neven, thanks for bringing this to our attention. I'm afraid I don't share Espen's enthusiasm for this effort. First I double-checked the date 26 November 2015 as it is easy to mistakenly come across an old piece on the internet and think it is new, say 26 November 1995 but no, they somehow thought this was new and cutting edge, not noticing apparently that the gif89 animation spec utilized dates back, as the name itself states, to 1989.
The authors and EGU seem extremely naive -- compare this to the knock-your-socks off photorealistic effort posted today on Antarctica ocean bottom waters.
http://forum.arctic-sea-ice.net/index.php/topic,622.msg66462.html#msg66462The journal and press release don't actually offer the animations. That is a separate 64 MB zip download and unpack. The format is nice and large, 1736 × 1231, but there are a only a meagre number of frames (7) from unspecified years of the much much longer Landsat record looping at 100 ms (which makes no scientific sense as last year is not particularly relevant to the first).
The co-registration looks good but the colors are awful (given Landsat has long offered an online tutorial on natural color.) The resolution isn't specified but looks way off -- Landsat is much better than this and the project purpose really required full resolution. They should have tiled it down to 15 m and probably just stuck with band 8 grayscale. However there doesn't seem to be anything of scientific interest in the scene I looked at.
I clipped a forum-sized piece out of it, retaining original resolution, below. In the US at least, this would not be a satisfactory submission to a high school (ages 12-16) science fair project.
This is likely not a case of scientific dishonestly. Picture instead a distinguished elderly professor enjoying a three pint lunch with a old friend now a journal editor, office desks piled high with scientific reprints, shelves sagging from the weight of books and conference procedings, no need here for that internet thingamjigie, that's best left to the grandkids but hey look at what one of them showed me the other day on her portable telephone, a picture that moves, we could maybe use that in glaciology?
I've proposed elsewhere a massive pre-compute to animate the entire Landsat and Sentinel catalogs, all years, storing it at Amazon AWS, and serving whatever region visitor selected at the portal. This would have to be done by professionals because of contrast and cloud issues, not to mention significant but not insurrmountable CPU time. The end user just makes the final selection of frames and tweaks the defaulted animation speed.
This is what they do in the rest of science. Climate change is too important; we don't have time any more for people clowning around pretending to do research. They're hogging a university chair that should go to a productive young scientist.
I am getting really fed up with glaciology on the data sharing and informatics side. We don't have time for mickey mouse any more. This means intervention on the peer review side: learn it, fix it, or forget it.