Tag Archives: satellite

Proposed NOAA cuts would make predicting extreme weather even harder.

by FreemanUZNB Posted on March 6, 2017

The Trump administration reportedly plans to make deep cuts to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, a key provider of information about the climate and weather.

All told, the proposed cuts amount to a full 17 percent of the agency’s budget, according to various reports. But the deepest would slash money for NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, which operates a squad of satellites monitoring the environment. These satellites tell scientists about climate variability, weather, oceans, and much else.

Roughly 90 percent of weather data in the United States comes from NOAA. So the cuts would stymie efforts by scientists and meteorologists to measure and predict not just everyday weather patterns, but also tornadoes, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorms.

Predicting hurricanes is already challenging enough, but it’s increasingly important as climate change adds fuel to big storms.

The administration would also scrap federal money for NOAA’s Sea Grant, a program that supports university research to assess the vitality of coastlines and their ecosystems.

Over the weekend, scientists and climate realists took to Twitter to vent their outrage.

Apart from accurate climate data, there’s another thing we’ll certainly miss if satellites wind up on the chopping block:

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Proposed NOAA cuts would make predicting extreme weather even harder.

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Over half of Antarctica’s badass Adélie penguins could get wiped out by climate change

by AsaBrumbaugh Posted on June 30, 2016

Have An Ice Life

Over half of Antarctica’s badass Adélie penguins could get wiped out by climate change

By on Jun 30, 2016Share

Adélie penguins are kind of the bad bitches of the Antarctic: They regularly fight turf wars with their Emperor penguin nemeses, and are also known to do some pretty serious sexual negotiating.

But climate change is heating up their home, and they’re not happy about it. A warming Antarctic might lead to declines in 60 percent of penguin colonies by 2099, a new study reports. The West Antarctic Peninsula is warming more rapidly than almost anywhere else on the planet — and it’s home to about half the world’s Adélie population. This isn’t the first time we’re hearing of threats to the tuxedo-clad birds — in February, we learned that a colony on Cape Denison had dropped from 160,000 penguins to 10,000.

Now, using a combination of satellite and climate data, the new Scientific Reports study finds that the temperature increase across the West Antarctic Peninsula has reached a tipping point toward a habitat that’s no longer suitable for Adélies. Additionally, warm sea surface temperatures could make chick-rearing particularly difficult for penguin fathers. (Yes, men help raise the kids in Penguinlandia — we said they were bad bitches.)

But there’s some hopeful news: Refugia — areas relatively unaffected by climate — may still exist in Antarctica beyond 2099, preventing a species-wide decimation.

“The Cape Adare region of the Ross Sea… has the largest known Adélie penguin rookery in the world. Though the climate there is expected to warm a bit, it looks like it could be a refugia in the future,” said Megan Cimino, lead author of the study, in a press statement. Understanding the ecology of these halfway homes for penguins is critical to understanding the future of the species.

So stay strong, little fighters. While the Emperors might be glad you’re gone, we won’t be.

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Over half of Antarctica’s badass Adélie penguins could get wiped out by climate change

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We just lost another critical climate satellite

by FloydHeady Posted on April 27, 2016

Pour one out

We just lost another critical climate satellite

By on Apr 26, 2016Share

One of climate change’s most important biographers — a 2,700-pound satellite orbiting 450 miles above the surface of the Earth — just recorded its last data point.

Earlier this month, the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced that, after nine years and five months in orbit, the satellite known as F17 had stopped transmitting sea ice measurements. That’s not unusual — satellites in F17’s series, all named sequentially, are normally expected to last about five years, though some make it much longer. But F17’s failure could preempt the end of the series entirely. Walter Meier, a sea ice researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, called the satellite program “one of the longest, most iconic datasets” illustrating climate change, particularly in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Since 1978, the satellites, each equipped with a set of passive microwave sensors, have been recording conditions on Earth, day in and day out. By measuring the amount of radiation given off by the atomic composition and structure of different substances, like ice or seawater, microwave sensing is a useful tool for pilots and military officers tracking weather conditions. Over time, these measurements can also track cumulative changes in sea ice. As early as 1999, scientists saw that sea ice cover was decreasing more quickly than it had in previous decades — and they’ve been observing similar trends ever since.

Until now, there have always been three or four satellites in the series orbiting at a time, as part of one of the country’s oldest satellite programs, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP). Over time, as new satellites were launched and older models went dark, overlapping data have kept the 40-year sea-ice dataset consistent.

With F17 floating in unresponsive silence, the bulk of the responsibility has been placed on F18, launched in 2009, as the newest of the series still in working condition (a newer satellite, F19, was launched in 2014 but failed last February). It’s not ideal to rely on a 7-year-old satellite, says Meier, but at least it is possible to keep the dataset continuous — for now. If this one were to conk out, too (knock on wood), there are some other options, including a Japanese research satellite launched in 2011. But, Meier says, the sensors vary slightly, and the data simply won’t be as consistent.

“The real problem is that there’s nothing on the horizon,” said Meier. “There’s nothing funded, or planned right now.”

Arctic sea ice extent hit a new low in 2012, compared to the average minimum extent over the previous 30 years.

There is one other option — but it’s sitting in a storage room somewhere on Earth. This satellite, F20, was the last of its series to be built, and was tentatively planned to launch in 2018. That plan fell through last June, when the Senate Appropriations Committee revoked funding for the DMSP, even rescinding $50 million that had been specifically designated for launching F20. Without Congressional approval, F20 is grounded.

“It’s sitting there, ready to be launched,” said Meier. He pointed out that the data from the satellite series is also used to study snow cover on land, ocean currents, temperature change, drought detection, and many other natural cycles. “The benefit is beyond my own work on sea ice.”

That research, he said, has led to critical discoveries. One of the most important was the observation of record-low sea-ice cover in 2007 and in 2012, findings that Meier says went even further than those reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“All of sudden, it was like, ‘Whoa! The ice cover is not as resilient as we thought, and things are moving a lot faster than we expected,’” he said, worrying that if another satellite were to fail, these kinds of observations would be jeopardized. “It would be a real shame if this data gets interrupted.”

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Twilight of The Velvet Underground

by Roxana0876 Posted on November 14, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Velvet Underground
Loaded: Re-Loaded 45th Anniversary Edition
Rhino

The Complete Matrix Tapes
Polydor/UMe

Loaded was the most conventional of The Velvet Underground’s four studio outings. With gifted multi-instrumentalist John Cale long gone and drummer Maureen Tucker largely absent from the studio, Lou Reed steered the band away from the notorious sonic and emotional extremes of its early work, trying out a more mainstream pop approach, albeit with more wit and a darker undertone than your basic Top 40 song. The album features a few clunkers but also two of his most-lovable compositions in the form of “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll.” After the confrontational brilliance of early songs like “Heroin” and “Sister Ray,” these engaging anthems seem positively carefree.

This six-disc package includes a mono version, a surround-sound mix, a previously released live set from Max’s Kansas City, and a very lo-fi, previously unreleased live performance from Philadelphia. The high point is the disc containing demos and early versions, which offers hints of what Reed would have sounded like as a folk singer in an alternate universe, and shows him getting warmed up for his impending solo career. “Satellite of Love” would be one of the standouts of Transformer, his second post-Velvets effort and biggest commercial success, while “Sad Song” resurfaced on his third long-player, the harrowing masterpiece Berlin.

Prior to the sessions that produced Loaded, the Velvets played a series of shows at the San Francisco club the Matrix in November and December 1969. Four of those sets appear on The Complete Matrix Tapes and portray the quartet as a cohesive and efficient rock’n’roll band, not simply a vehicle for Reed’s solo aspirations. With Doug Yule taking over on bass and psychedelic keyboards, the group ranges from early gems like “I’m Waiting for the Man,” presented in a bluesy 13-minute version, and “Sister Ray,” which unfolds over 37 mesmerizing minutes, to the not-yet-recorded “Sweet Jane” and “Rock & Roll,” heard here in looser, funkier incarnations. Much of the material on this fine four-disc collection has previously been released piecemeal on other archival packages, but The Complete Matrix Tapes is the best way to get a feel for the later Velvet Underground onstage, no longer revolutionary but still compelling.

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Twilight of The Velvet Underground

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Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

by CharityMullens Posted on September 21, 2015

Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

By on 21 Sep 2015 4:20 pmcommentsShare

It’s always irksome when tech companies talk about their latest “moonshot.” The actual moonshot was one of the most incredible accomplishments of humankind. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged NASA to put someone on the moon by the end of the decade, and NASA, which hadn’t even put someone in orbit yet, was like, “On it, boss,” and then had three people on the moon eight years later. So sorry, Google, even if Google Glass hadn’t flopped, it wouldn’t have been a moonshot, and neither will anything else that comes out of the “moonshot factory.”

So it’s a real bummer to find out that the agency that today’s most powerful engineers and entrepreneurs so desperately want to emulate had a mind-blowingly awesome plan for a space-based solar factory back in the ’70s that never came to fruition. Here’s the scoop from Motherboard:

At the height of the oil crisis in the 1970s, the US government considered building a network of 60 orbiting solar power stations that would beam energy down to Earth. Each geosynchronous satellite, according to this 1981 NASA memo, was to weigh around 35,000 to 50,000 metric tons. The Satellite Power System (SPS) project envisaged building two satellites a year for 30 years.

To get said power stations into orbit, the once-powerful aerospace manufacturing company Rockwell International designed something called a Star-Raker, which, in addition to sounding like something from a sci-fi movie, also would have acted like one:

The proposed Star-Raker would load its cargo at a regular airport, fly to a spaceport near the equator, fuel up on liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and take off horizontally using its ten supersonic ramjet engines. A 1979 technical paper lays out its potential flight plan: At a cruising altitude of 45,000 feet, the craft would then dive to 37,000 feet to break the sound barrier. At speeds of up to Mach 6, the Star-Raker would jet to an altitude of 29km before the rockets kicked in, propelling it into orbit.

Just to recap: The Star-Raker would have broken the speed of sound by diving seven miles. And the spacecraft would have been making so many regular trips to orbit that it would have essentially been a 747 for space, Motherboard reports.

In terms of feasibility, here’s how one scientist put it at the time:

“The SPS is an attractive, challenging, worthy project, which the aerospace community is well prepared and able to address,” physicist Robert G. Jahn wrote in the foreword to a 1980 SPS feasibility report. “The mature confidence and authority of [the working groups] left the clear impression that if some persuasive constellation of purposes … should assign this particular energy strategy a high priority, it could be accomplished.”

Putting solar plants in space would’ve been hard, sure, but this proposal came just 10 years after NASA landed Apollo 11 on the moon, so doing seemingly impossible things was kind of their thing. Even if SPS hadn’t happened as planned (and for more details on what exactly that plan was, check out this in-depth look from Wired), there’s no doubt that with the right amount of support and funding, NASA could’ve done something incredible in the cleantech arena.

Today, NASA remains an indispensable source of climate change research. Unfortunately, politicians aren’t as eager to throw money at the agency now that we’re no longer trying to show up the Soviet Union (in fact, the U.S. government is now relying on Russia to take U.S. astronauts up to the International Space Station). And some members of Congress (lookin’ at you, Ted Cruz) have it in their heads that NASA shouldn’t even be doing Earth sciences research in the first place.

We know from the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars back in 2012 that NASA still has the ability to inspire and astonish. People geeked out hard over those “seven minutes of terror” and for good reason. Getting that same kind of support behind something that addresses climate change would be exactly what this world needs. If only the one organization proven capable of doing moonshots wasn’t beholden to a bunch of science-hating idiots.

Source:

The Space Plane NASA Wanted to Use to Build Solar Power Plants in Orbit

, Motherboard.

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NASA Launching Satellite to Track Carbon

by Myrna Posted on June 29, 2014

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 is scheduled to lift off Tuesday with the aim of getting better data on how carbon moves into and out of the atmosphere — a key to understanding climate change. Link to original:  NASA Launching Satellite to Track Carbon ; ;Related ArticlesU.S. Catfish Program Could Stymie Pacific Trade Pact, 10 Nations SayCreeping Up on Unsuspecting Shores: The Great Lakes, in a Welcome TurnaroundDot Earth Blog: The Agriculture Secretary Sees a Smart (Phone) Solution to GMO Labeling Fight ;

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Mangroves are marching northward

by deqc16rl Posted on January 2, 2014

Mangroves are marching northward

By

b-cline

Watch out, they’re coming for you!

A botanical sea change is underway along the Floridian coastline, where new research suggests that global warming is helping mangroves stretch their strange tentacle-like roots northward.

Mangrove forests — coastal trees and shrubs that live semi-submerged lifestyles – are among the world’s most productive and valuable ecosystems, home to many fish and other wildlife in tropical climates. But experts worry that their northerly march will come at the expense of other habitats.

Mangroves cannot survive if nighttime temperatures get too cold. The decline in frosty nights of less than 25 degrees appears to be helping them displace cold-tolerating marshy grasslands.

Scientists analyzed nearly 30 years of satellite data and concluded that the density of mangroves has doubled in some parts of Florida’s northeast corner.

“Our results indicate that mangroves are expanding poleward along the east coast of North America, and further suggest that this expansion is associated with recent warming,” the scientists wrote in a paper published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Other authors have documented expansion of mangrove into saltmarsh on local scales in Florida, Louisiana, and Australia, but with uncertainty regarding the mechanisms behind these expansions.”

Lead author Kyle Cavanaugh, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University and at the Smithsonian Institution, warned that “there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty” regarding how such changes in mangrove areas will affect food webs as the globe continues to warm. ”The mangroves are expanding into and invading salt marsh, which also provides an important habitat for a variety of species.”

PNASClick to embiggen.


Source
Poleward expansion of mangroves is a threshold response to decreased frequency of extreme cold events, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Fewer cold snaps: Mangroves head north, Brown University

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Logging on the rise again in the Brazilian Amazon

by AdelaidaH Posted on November 18, 2013

Logging on the rise again in the Brazilian Amazon

By

Sam Beebe, Ecotrust

Can you tell which part has been logged?

Buried amid the bleak news in a forest study that we told you about last week was a glimmer of hope: Analysis of satellite images taken from 2000 to 2012 revealed that deforestation was slowing down in Brazil.

But new Brazilian government figures, from August 2012 to July 2013, indicate that bad news is back: Amazonian deforestation over that period increased by 28 percent compared to the preceding 12 months. The Guardian reports:

The [increase], boosted partly by expanding farms and a rush for land around big infrastructure projects, fulfilled predictions by scientists and environmentalists that destruction was on the rise again. …

The reasons for the rebound in deforestation are numerous. Changes to Brazil’s forestry laws have created uncertainty among landowners regarding the amount of woodland they must preserve.

High global prices for agricultural commodities have also encouraged growers to cut trees to make way for farmland.

Loggers, squatters and others are also rushing to exploit land around big infrastructure projects, including railways, roads and hydroelectric dams under construction in the Amazon.

Brazil’s environment minister tried to put the focus on the “positive” decade-long trend rather than the one-year uptick, but activists weren’t buying it. “You can’t argue with numbers,” said Marcio Astrini of Greenpeace Brazil. “This is not alarmist — it’s a real and measured inversion of what had been a positive trend.”


Source
Deforestation in Amazon jungle increases by nearly a third in one year, The Guardian

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Take a photo of a glacier — it’ll last longer

by Gwenda Bischof Posted on May 17, 2013

Take a photo of a glacier — it’ll last longer

By John Upton

ShutterstockGlaciers, such as this one in Argentina, are melting and releasing their reserves of water.

Farewell, great lakes of ice and frozen rivers.

Scientists used satellite images and gravity measurements to peer more closely than ever before at the torturous drip-drip-drip from the world’s glaciers. What they discovered is not really much of a surprise: Ice Age glaciers have been methodically chiseled away by the warming effects of fossil fuel burning.

Global warming and black carbon are working fast: Glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are collectively losing an estimated 571 trillion pounds worth of ice annually, the researchers reported in a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.

Glaciers? Icesheets? Potatoes, potatoes, you say. Here’s the difference: The world’s ice sheets cover vast swaths in Greenland and Antarctica. Meanwhile, glaciers are rivers and lakes of slow-moving ice. You can find them at high altitudes in alpine regions around the world, and you’ll find them in lower elevations (including on and around ice sheets) as you approach the poles.

Although these glaciers contain just 1 percent of land ice reserves, they contribute about as much to the rising seas as the major stores of ice. The individual contributions of glaciers to the rising seas may be relatively small, but the cumulative impacts of their melts are substantial.

The researchers concluded that melting glaciers are causing the oceans to surge by 0.03 inches yearly, which works out to 30 percent of the total annual rise in recorded sea levels.

From a press release by NASA, which provided the data to the researchers from its Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE):

Current estimates predict all the glaciers in the world contain enough water to raise sea level by as much as 24 inches (about 60 centimeters). In comparison, the entire Greenland ice sheet has the potential to contribute about 20 feet (about 6 meters) to sea level rise and the Antarctic ice sheet just less than 200 feet (about 60 meters).

“Because the global glacier ice mass is relatively small in comparison with the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, people tend to not worry about it,” said study co-author Tad Pfeffer, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “But it’s like a little bucket with a huge hole in the bottom: it may not last for very long, just a century or two, but while there’s ice in those glaciers, it’s a major contributor to sea level rise.”

The largest glacial losses during the study period from 2003 to 2009 were recorded from Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes, and high-mountain Asia. That’s pretty much all the major glacial regions, the exception being in Antarctica, where loss was minor.

So, there’s some good news for Antarcticans: Glacial melt is not as bad there as everywhere else.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

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, and

blogs about ecology

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Greenland’s ‘extraordinary’ summer ice melt may have been caused by tundra fires

by Myrna Posted on December 7, 2012

Greenland’s ‘extraordinary’ summer ice melt may have been caused by tundra fires

By Philip Bump

Last July, over the course of a week, 97 percent of Greenland’s ice surface melted. The response from scientists can be summarized as: “Um, shit.” Or, by way of a direct quote: “This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: was this real or was it due to a data error?”

It was real. And it’s one of the things that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2012 Arctic report card cites as an unexpected anomaly in a season full of them.

Researchers now think they know why it happened. Like so much of what’s happening in the Arctic, the melt likely stems from another aspect of climate change: fire.

From the Guardian:

Satellite observations, due to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Friday, for the first time tracks smoke and soot particles from tundra wildfires over to Greenland.

Scientists have long known that soot blackens snow and ice, reducing its powers of reflectivity and making it more likely to melt under the sun.

But the satellite records, due to be presented by the Ohio State University geographer Jason Box, go a step further, picking up images of smoke over Greenland at the time of last summer’s extreme melt.

Byrd Polar Research

Click to embiggen.

The study, from a team centered at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, works backward from the presence of smoke over Greenland (seen above) to possible sources. A series of tundra fires in Alaska and Western Canada and wildfires in Labrador earlier in the summer appear on this June 25 thermal map.

Byrd Polar Research

Click to embiggen.

Analysis of barometric pressures in the week preceding the start of the melt suggests that winds passing over the areas of wildfire could have carried the smoke seen in the image at top.

Byrd Polar Research

Click to embiggen.

Along with the smoke came soot, particulate matter of the type that’s also prompting concern over Arctic air travel. Such pollution demonstrably contributes to ice melt.

And, in yet another feedback loop, those tundra fires themselves are exacerbated by and contribute to climate change. From NPR:

Tundra fires have become more common over the past two decades as average temperatures in the Arctic have risen and sea ice has receded. And according to scientists, there has been a marked increase in lightning activity on the North Slope in the last two decades. Warmer temperatures may allow more vegetation to grow — which, in turn, makes it more of a fire risk when lightning strikes.

Normally, the tundra in this region of Alaska, near the Anaktuvuk River, takes up more CO2 from photosynthesis than it gives off every year from natural decomposition. …

Overall, the amount of carbon released — about 2.1 terragrams — is comparable to what comes from forest fires in warmer parts of the planet, according to Dr. Mack. “But what’s surprising to me,” she says, “is that forests have huge trees, and tundra has six-inch-tall, tiny little plants. All that extra carbon is coming from the soil.”

And the extra carbon heads into the atmosphere. In school kids learn about the water cycle. Maybe the carbon circle should be added to the curriculum.

The link between these fires and the Greenland melt is still circumstantial. So the team behind the initial research has launched Dark Snow, a proposed 2013 expedition to Greenland for which they are soliciting contributions. Once there, they plan to analyze the extent to which soot affects the melt.

If they raise the money for the trip, a bit of good news: They can probably leave the ice cleats at home.

Source

Smoke from Arctic wildfires may have caused Greenland’s record thaw, Guardian

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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