Crist unveils new solar panels at FAU - South Florida Business Journal:

The $250,000 array includes 240 individual panels producing 50,000 watts of power, which is expected to cut FAU’s power bill by 20 percent to 35 percent at its 12-story Higher Education Complex in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

Crist’s appearance comes as some fellow Republicans criticize him for embracing the recent stimulus plan backed and signed by President Barack Obama. The FAU solar project made use of some government grant money for solar power, more of which is included in the stimulus package.
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Graduate students in FAU’s School of Urban and Regional Planning proposed the project. The kicker was student Rachel Kalin’s idea to fund a scholarship with the power savings.

Breaking: Major "oops" from NSIDC

As some of our readers have already noticed, there was a significant problem with the daily sea ice data images on February 16. The problem arose from a malfunction of the satellite sensor we use for our daily sea ice products. Upon further investigation, we discovered that starting around early January, an error known as sensor drift caused a slowly growing underestimation of Arctic sea ice extent. The underestimation reached approximately 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) by mid-February. Sensor drift, although infrequent, does occasionally occur and it is one of the things that we account for during quality control measures prior to archiving the data. See below for more details.
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On February 16, 2009, as emails came in from puzzled readers, it became clear that there was a significant problem—sea-ice-covered regions were showing up as open ocean. The problem stemmed from a failure of the sea ice algorithm caused by degradation of one of the DMSP F15 sensor channels. Upon further investigation, we found that data quality had begun to degrade over the month preceding the catastrophic failure. As a result, our processes underestimated total sea ice extent for the affected period. Based on comparisons with sea ice extent derived from the NASA Earth Observing System Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (EOS AMSR-E) sensor, this underestimation grew from a negligible amount in early January to about 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) by mid-February (Figure 2). While dramatic, the underestimated values were not outside of expected variability until Monday, February 16. Although we believe that data prior to early January are reliable, we will conduct a full quality check in the coming days.

2/3/09 NSIDC update (from Google cache)

Also of note is that from January 15 to 26, ice extent saw essentially no increase; an unusual wind pattern appears to have been the cause.