About The SDO Mission

SDO: The Solar Dynamics Observatory is the first mission to be launched for NASA's Living With a Star (LWS) Program, a program designed to understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth. SDO is designed to help us understand the Sun's influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.

SDO's goal is to understand, driving towards a predictive capability, the solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity's technological systems by determining

• how the Sun's magnetic field is generated and structured
• how this stored magnetic energy is converted and released into the heliosphere and geospace in the form of solar wind, energetic particles, and variations in the solar irradiance.

SDO Science

SDO will help us to understand the how and why of the Sun's magnetic changes. It will determine how the magnetic field is generated and structured, and how the stored magnetic energy is released into the heliosphere and geospace. SDO data and analysis will also help us develop the ability to predict the solar variations that influence life on Earth and humanity's technological systems.

SDO will measure the properties of the Sun and solar activity. There are few types of measurements but many of them will be taken. For example, the surface velocity is measured by HMI. This data can be used for many different studies. One is the surface rotation rate, which must be removed to study the others. After subtracting the rotation, you have the oscillation and convective velocities. The latter look like billows of storm clouds covering the Sun. Hot gas moves outward at the center of the billows and downward at the edges, just like boiling water. By looking at these velocities you can see how sunspots affect the convection zone. By looking at a long sequence of data (more than 30 days), you see the oscillations of the Sun (like the picture). These patterns can be used to look into and through the Sun.

Mission Science Objectives

The scientific goals of the SDO Project are to improve our understanding of seven science questions:

1. What mechanisms drive the quasi-periodic 11-year cycle of solar activity?
2. How is active region magnetic flux synthesized, concentrated, and dispersed across the solar surface?
3. How does magnetic reconnection on small scales reorganize the large-scale field topology and current systems and how significant is it in heating the corona and accelerating the solar wind?
4. Where do the observed variations in the Sun's EUV spectral irradiance arise, and how do they relate to the magnetic activity cycles?
5. What magnetic field configurations lead to the CMEs, filament eruptions, and flares that produce energetic particles and radiation?
6. Can the structure and dynamics of the solar wind near Earth be determined from the magnetic field configuration and atmospheric structure near the solar surface?
7. When will activity occur, and is it possible to make accurate and reliable forecasts of space weather and climate?

SDO Instruments

SDO contains a suite of instruments that will provide observations leading to a more complete understanding of the solar dynamics that drive variability in the Earth's environment. This set of instruments will:

1. Measure the extreme ultraviolet spectral irradiance of the Sun at a rapid cadence
2. Measure the Doppler shifts due to oscillation velocities over the entire visible disk
3. Make high-resolution measurements of the longitudinal and vector magnetic field over the entire visible disk
4. Make images of the chromosphere and inner corona at several temperatures at a rapid cadence
5. Make those measurements over a significant portion of a solar cycle to capture the solar variations that may exist in different time periods of a solar cycle

The Science Teams will receive the data from SDO. They will process, analyze, archive, and serve the data.

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/site/HMI.jpg">

HMI (Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager)

The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager will extend the capabilities of the SOHO/MDI instrument with continual full-disk coverage at higher spatial resolution. PI: Phil Scherrer, PI Institution: Stanford University.

• http://hmi.stanford.edu/ - View Stanford instrument site

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/site/AIA.jpg">

AIA (Atmospheric Imaging Assembly)

The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly will image the solar atmosphere in multiple wavelengths to link changes in the surface to interior changes. Data will include images of the Sun in 10 wavelengths every 10 seconds. PI: Alan Title, PI Institution: Lockheed Martin Solar Astrophysics Laboratory.

• http://aia.lmsal.com/ - View Lockheed Martin instrument site

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/site/EVE.jpg">

EVE (Extreme Ultraviolet Variablity Experiment)

The Extreme Ultraviolet Variablity Experiment will measure the solar extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) irradiance with unprecedented spectral resolution, temporal cadence, and precision. Measures the solar extreme ultraviolet (EUV) spectral irradiance to understand variations on the timescales which influence Earth's climate and near-Earth space. PI: Tom Woods, PI Institution: University of Colorado.

• http://lasp.colorado.edu/eve/ - View Colorado instrument site

Image Resolution Comparison

The following image illustrates the resolution capabilities of the SDO, STEREO, and SOHO spacecrafts. SDO's AIA instrument (right image) will have 1/2 greater image resolution than STEREO (middle image) and 3/4 greater imaging resolution than SOHO (left image). The image cadience also varies. SDO takes 1 image every .10 of a second. At best STEREO takes 1 image every 3 minutes and SOHO takes 1 image every 12 minutes.

http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/site/resolution_comparison.jpg">  

....designed to watch for storm development and weather conditions on Earth.

............

Thanks Mahs... very interesting info...( still long on going green. )

............

Nasa's Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captures a rare solar event.

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CME Lashes Out

STEREO (Ahead) watched as a strong coronal mass ejection (CME) and an eruptive prominence rose up and stretched way out above the Sun's surface (Feb. 28, 2010). The composite image and movie show the action in both extreme UV wavelength (orange Sun) near and just above the solar surface overlaid on the frames from STEREO COR1 coronagraph that shows the material as it rises out into the corona. The video clip shows about 8 hours of activity. This is one of the brightest and most substantial CMEs we have seen in several years. And the presence of such bright prominence material in COR1 is very rare and has only been seen twice before.

Turboguy wrote: Trimalleolar break of my ankle. I snapped my Fibula right where the gap in the screws is on the eight hole plate and the two longer screws is where I snapped off the side of my Tibia and then another chip. The doctors have me moving it around to regain the range of motion and whoo boy does it hurt when I move it around.

NASA's New (Space Weather Media Viewer)      (Near Real-Time)

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/spaceweather/FlexApp/bin-debug/index.html# - http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/spaceweather/FlexApp/bin-debug/index.html

COOL WEBSITE MAN!!!

Imma favorite that one. Astronomy has always interested me like nothing else.

________________________________________________________________

 

Myself as well

 

Heres a few of my favorites

 

 

Incredible shot of Saturn

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2003/23/image/b/ - http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2003/23/image/b/

 

 

A rare alignment of three of Jupiter's largest moons

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/30/image/a/ - http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/30/image/a/

 

Two spiral galexies that appear to be colliding but are actually just passing by each other.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/45/image/a/ - http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2004/45/image/a/

 

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"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."   G Orwell

NOAA: U.S. Winter and February Cooler Than Average

March 10, 2010

NOAA�s State of the Climate report for the winter season (December through February) and the month of February, state that temperatures were below normal for the contiguous United States. The winter season was wetter than normal; however precipitation in February alone was slightly below average.

Based on data going back to 1895, the monthly analyses, prepared by scientists at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov - NOAA�s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., are part of the climate services that NOAA provides to businesses, communities and governments so they may make informed decisions to safeguard their social and economic well-being.

U.S. Temperature Highlights

• For the winter season, 63 percent of the country experienced below normal temperatures. In contrast to this national trend, Maine experienced the third warmest winter.
• February�s average temperature was 32.4 degrees F, which is 2.2 degrees below the long-term average.
• Cold air in the wake of several reinforcing Arctic air masses dominated much of the United States during February, creating temperatures that were much-below average in the Deep South and below average in the Plains and mid-Atlantic states. Both the South and Southeast climate regions experienced their seventh coldest February on record. Meanwhile, warmer-than-average temperatures dominated the Northwest and Northeast climate regions.
• Florida had its fourth coldest February, Louisiana its fifth coldest, and Alabama, Georgia and Texas each had their sixth coldest. It was the seventh coldest February in Arkansas, while both Mississippi and South Carolina experienced their eighth coldest.

U.S. Precipitation Highlights

• Precipitation for the winter season was above average while it averaged slightly below the long term mean for the month of February.
• The season-long wet spell was notable for the Southeast, as Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina each had their eighth wettest winter. Precipitation was also much above normal for South Dakota, Virginia, New Jersey and Maryland. Wyoming and Idaho experienced their eighth and ninth driest winters, respectively.
• Regionally, the active weather pattern in the South, Southwest, and Northeast created above normal precipitation for the month. The Northwest, West North Central, East North Central, and Central climate regions each had below-normal February precipitation. On the state level, New Mexico experienced its seventh wettest February on record. Conversely, Idaho had its seventh driest, and Wyoming its eighth driest.

Other Highlights

• Major snowstorms on Feb. 4-7 and Feb. 9-11 plagued the Atlantic states. These storms ranked as Category Three (major) and Two (significant) storms respectively on the Northeast Snow Impacts Scale (NESIS). Combined and treated as one storm, they would become only the third Category Five (extreme) storm (the most extreme category) of the NESIS record.
• A third storm, also ranking as a Category Three on the NESIS scale, occurred across southern New England on Feb. 23-28. February 2010 is the first month during the NESIS period of record, since 1956, to place three storms of Category Two or greater.
• Several seasonal snowfall records were set: (previous record)
  • Baltimore: 79.9 inches (62.5 inches, 1995-96)
  • Washington (Dulles): 72.8 inches (61.9 inches, 1995-96)
  • Washington (National): 55.9 inches (54.4 inches, 1898-1899)
  • Wilmington, Del.: 66.7 inches (55.9 inches, 1995-96)
  • Philadelphia: 71.6 inches (65.5 inches, 1995-96)
  • Atlantic City, N.J.: 49.9 inches (46.9 inches, 1966-67)
• In several eastern cities, February was the snowiest month on record: (previous record)
  • Washington (Dulles): 46.1 inches (34.9 inches, February 2003)
  • Central Park, N.Y.: 36.9 inches  (30.5 inches, March 1896)
  • Pittsburgh: 48.7 inches (40.2 inches, January 1978)

Background information on this winter�s snowstorms and the links to climate change is available online: http://www.noaa.gov/features/02_monitoring/index.html - http://www.noaa.gov/features/02_monitoring/index.html .

NCDC�s preliminary reports, which assess the current state of the climate, are released soon after the end of each month. These analyses are based on preliminary data, which are subject to revision. Additional quality control is applied to the data when late reports are received several weeks after the end of the month and as increased scientific methods improve NCDC�s processing algorithms.

Scientists, researchers, and leaders in government and industry use NOAA�s monthly reports to help track trends and other changes in the world's climate. This climate service has a wide range of practical uses, from helping farmers know what and when to plant, to guiding resource managers with critical decisions about water, energy and other vital assets.

Short-term Cooling on a Warming Planet

By http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/author/michon-scott/ - Michon Scott

Dec 31st, 2009

There IS a problem with global warming, one headline recently quipped, it stopped in 1998. Making the same argument about declining temperatures since 1998, another headline proclaimed, Alarmists still heated even as world cools.

These articles suggest that climate scientists have misled the public. While climatologists warn that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are warming our planet, some people argue that Earth is actually cooling: they point to declining temperatures since 1998 as proof that global warming has stopped.

But this argument about global cooling begs an important question: Why measure temperatures since 1998? Why not 1997 or 1999?

Global temperature anomalies from 1992 through 2008 as estimated by the Hadley Centre. Temperatures are shown as the difference from the 1961-1990 average. The colored lines drawn on the graph illustrate how temperatures for 1997, 1998, and 1999 compare to 2008.

The answer might lie in the fact that 1998 was arguably the warmest year on record. The reason we had such a warm 1998 is that we had a very, very strong El Nino, probably one of the strongest El Ninos of the twentieth century, explains David Easterling, Chief of the Scientific Services Division at NOAAs National Climatic Data Center. If you have a very strong El Nino an extensive swath of the oceans surface with much-warmer-than-average temperatures that tends to warm the globally averaged air surface temperature.

If global temperatures from subsequent years are compared to those of 1998, warming since that time is certainly difficult to detect. Easterling himself pointed out in a 2009 paper that a linear trend line from 1998 to 2008 shows no statistically significant trend up or down. While a straight line drawn from 1998 to 2008 does indicate that 2008 was cooler, a line from 1999 to 2008 shows that the planet warmed, and a line from 1997 to 2008 is almost flat. But Easterling doesnt advocate starting the measurements from either of those years. Instead, he suggests looking at the bigger picture.

David Easterling of NOAA�s National Climatic Data Center.

The bottom line is that current temperatures are way above the long-term average, Easterling says. The United Kingdoms Met Office and the World Meteorological Organization concur; in December 2009, the organizations described the first decade of the twenty-first century as by far the warmest on record.

Average global temperature anomalies by decade, estimated by the Hadley Centre, shown as the difference from the 1961 � 1990 average. Vertical lines indicate the upper and lower 95% uncertainty ranges for each decade.

The cooling argument is challenged even further in that not every estimate pegs 1998 as the warmest year. One group of climate researchers instead finds 2005 to be the warmest year. The difference doesn�t result from error or whim, but from the inherent difficulty in measuring global temperatures.

The Challenge of Measuring the Past

Michael Schlesinger, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Michael Schlesinger is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he has devoted almost four decades to studying global climate. He has worked extensively with global temperature records, and he recognizes their limitations. “The observations of temperature over Earth were not made for the purpose of climate, they were made for the purpose of weather,” he says. People naturally built weather stations where weather conditions would affect human activity, which excluded sparsely populated or rarely traveled areas. The addition of new weather stations over the years has enhanced recent temperature records, but not historical records. Meanwhile, some older weather stations have been moved, for instance, from city centers to airports. More importantly, the weather stations have focused on land even though oceans cover 70 percent of our planet.

“Earth is unique in our solar system in that it has an ocean,” Schlesinger explains. “The atmosphere stirs the ocean by wind, and as warm surface waters mix with cooler waters below, they take heat away from the surface. This reduces the amount of surface warming that would occur if Earth were all land.” This complicates the task of calculating a representative average temperature for the entire globe, and different research groups choose different methods to account for the complexities.

“If you had the ability to uniformly distribute thermometers over the planet, and gather measurements from this regular grid, then I think everybody would analyze the data in the same way,” Schlesinger says. On our real world, however, climatologists must work with “a hodgepodge of measurements over the continents.” Not surprisingly, climatologists have developed more than one approach to understanding historical temperature records based on weather station measurements.

Global temperature anomalies estimated by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISTEMP) and the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (HadCRUT3). The consistently higher temperature indicated by GISTEMP is the result of the two groups measuring anomalies from different base periods: GISTEMP values show how much the world has warmed compared to the average from 1951 – 1980 while HadCRUT3 values show the change from the 1961 – 1990 average. Differences in how each group calculates global temperature result in differences in each year’s ranking. HadCRUT3 lists 1998 as the warmest year, followed by 2005 and 2003. GISTEMP shows 2005 as the warmest year, followed by 2007 and 1998.

Two of the world’s foremost global temperature data sets are from the Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom, and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS) in the United States. Both groups use a combination of land-surface air temperature and sea-surface temperature records, incorporated from satellite observations and historical records, to calculate values for global temperature. Though the groups use different equations in processing the data, they do so consistently so their successive values indicate how global temperature has changed over time.

One area that has experienced some of the most dramatic warming in recent years—but lacks permanent weather stations—is the Arctic, and the Hadley Centre and GISS handle the lack of observations in the region differently. The Hadley Centre offers a data set that works only with existing temperature measurements, essentially excluding the Arctic from its global temperature calculations. GISS offers a data set that accounts for Arctic temperatures by interpolating from the surrounding region. Like the Arctic, the high-latitude region around it has seen greater rates of warming than the global average over the last decade, including substantial warming in 2005. As a result, the Hadley data set identifies 1998 as the warmest year on record whereas the GISS data set identifies 2005 as the warmest year on record.

“It’s a question of whether you interpolate or not, and different people handle it differently,” observes Easterling. “There’s no exactly right or wrong way.” And his overriding conclusion remains: Recent years rank among the warmest on record.

Deciphering Natural Variability

“There are two components influencing temperatures over time,” Easterling says. “You have a trend due to increasing greenhouse gases and you have natural variability superimposed on that trend.”

Beyond our control, natural variability includes large-scale oceanic changes affecting regional and global temperatures. Cooling between 2006 and 2008, for instance, has likely been driven by La Niña. Opposite of El Niño conditions, the area of cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures that defines La Niña conditions can push global temperatures downward, if the phenomenon is strong enough.

Schlesinger, who has served as a co-author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, knows quite a bit about natural variability. In 1994, he described the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, an alternating pattern of heat-distributing ocean circulation that brings warmed waters from the tropics to high latitudes. “On average, ocean circulation transports a petawatt of heat,” Schlesinger explains. “A petawatt is the numeral 1 with 15 zeros after it, or a million billion watts of heat energy. If you could just acquire one percent of that heat, you could satisfy all your energy needs for planet Earth.” One cycle of the oscillation takes about 65 to 70 years. Over that time, the amount of heat moved northward along the western side of the North Atlantic Ocean waxes and wanes, increasing and decreasing temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean and the surrounding continental margins.

Although not directly dictated by this decades-long phenomenon, global temperatures are influenced by the oscillation, just as average temperatures can be driven up or down by El Niño and La Niña events. The transport of such a massive quantity of heat helps explain some counterintuitive temperature trends during the twentieth century. Despite the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations that began in the mid-1800s, between 1850 and 1900, global temperatures showed little significant change. Between 1900 and 1940, temperatures rose. After 1940, temperatures declined for 35 years. The lack of a direct correlation between greenhouse gas concentration and global temperature over this time span “was confounding understanding of the observed temperature record,” Schlesinger recalls, “and it was allowing people to make the argument, ‘If there was this early twentieth-century warming when humanity was putting relatively fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, why wasn’t there a larger temperature increase later when humanity was putting vastly more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere?’ By discovering this oscillation, we were able to refute this argument.”

This graph shows Global Average Temperature compared with the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) Index. The AMO Index is the average sea-surface temperature over the North Atlantic Ocean. The roughly parallel curves of the two parameters show that they are related: the increase in global temperature over time, coincident with the increase in greenhouse gases observed since the Industrial Revolution, is alternately obscured and enhanced by the AMO.

Like Schlesinger, Easterling is also familiar with natural variability, and his knowledge of such variability caused him to question the cooling-since-1998 argument. Working with his co-author Michael Wehner, Easterling examined both observed temperatures and model simulations. Confident that the “cooling” was a short-term trend, Easterling wanted to see if he could find periods of no trend or with slight cooling over other time spans. He could.

For observed temperatures, Easterling relied on a data set generated by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, incorporating globally averaged surface air temperatures from 1901 to 2008. In that data set, he found two periods—1977 to 1985 and 1981 to 1989—that showed slight cooling, similar to what appears in the Hadley Centre’s data set from 1998 to 2008.

Global temperature anomalies calculated by NOAA for 1975 through 2008. Despite the long-term warming trend evident in the graph at the bottom, global temperature decreased slightly from 1977 to 1985 and from 1981 through 1989, as shown by blue arrows in the insets. Graph modified from Easterling, 2009.

For model simulations, Easterling used a database of predicted temperatures, validated by its ability to retroactively “predict” temperatures for years past. He assumed a “business-as-usual” scenario in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, with little future reduction. When projecting temperatures for the twenty-first century, he found two more periods—2001 to 2010 and 2016 to 2031—that showed no trend, again similar to 1998 to 2008. Every one of these no-trend periods occurred against a backdrop of rising temperatures.

“The supposed cooling is really a non-issue,” Easterling explains. “It’s just natural variability.”

What the Future May Hold

Easterling’s finding that natural variability can cause short-term cooling, or no-trend periods within longer-term warming, correlates with other predictions about future temperatures.

In May 2008, a group of climate modelers in Germany published projections that incorporated current understanding of natural cycles to make a climate forecast for the next decade. The group forecast that global surface temperatures might not increase much over the next decade, as cooling driven by natural variability offsets human-caused warming. After a decade or so of stability, however, the model indicates that temperatures would begin to rise. In contrast, the UK Met Office predicted warming beginning in a few years from 2009. Both groups, however, agreed that after a short period of negative or no trend in the early 2000s, global temperatures would begin to rise, perhaps quickly.

In other words, the no-trend period in the Hadley Centre’s data set not only doesn’t surprise these climatologists, it’s consistent with what they have predicted. “You’re going to see these episodes where you don’t get warming in the surface air temperature and then it starts back warming very strongly,” Easterling says.

“If it kept cool for the next 25 years, I’d think maybe I was wrong,” Easterling continues, “but you can see periods as long as 16 years in our model run where temperatures stay the same without changing the long-term trend.”

http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/npseaice_ams_2009255.png">
http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/npseaice_ams_2009255_palette.png">

Each year, the area covered by Arctic sea ice melts to its smallest extent by the end of summer in September. This map shows the median extent of sea ice during September from 1979-2000 (in yellow), and the minimum extent observed in 2009. Image courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory and National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center also offers an http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20091005_Figure6.mov - animation of images showing ice extent each September from 1979 to 2009 .

Besides global temperatures, other lines of evidence point strongly to a warming planet. Since 1998, the extent of Arctic sea ice reached new record lows in 2002, 2005, and 2007. Arctic sea ice retreated so dramatically in 2007 that it broke all previous records a month before the end of melt season. And dramatic changes haven’t been unique to the Arctic. In 2002, some 3,250 square kilometers of the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula shattered over a period of just five weeks. In the wake of the ice shelf disintegration, glaciers feeding the shelf accelerated on their route into the Weddell Sea. “The reason people believe strongly that Earth has warmed is not just the temperature record, but all these other things,” Easterling explains.

http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/seaice_min_max_2009_465px.jpg">

Maximum Arctic sea ice extent for 2009 occurred in March, and minimum Arctic sea ice extent occurred in September 2009. In each image, the magenta line indicates the median extent of ice cover for that month for the period 1979–2000. /wp-content/uploads/2010/02/seaice_min_max_2009.jpg - View larger version in a new window . Images courtesy of http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/ - National Snow and Ice Data Center.

http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/seaice_min_max_trends_465px.jpg">

Both minimum and maximum sea ice extents have decreased over the period of satellite observation. This graph shows the trends in minimum extent (red) and maximum extent (black) from 1979–2009 as the percentage difference in ice extent compared to the mean from 1979-2000. /wp-content/uploads/2010/02/seaiceextent_min_max_trends.jpg - View larger version in a new window . Graph courtesy of http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/seaice.html - Arctic Report Card .

http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/seaice_age_thickness.png">

The colors on these maps show Arctic sea ice distribution in March 2007, 2008, and 2009. Multiyear ice is shown as white, mixed ice is aqua, first-year ice is teal, and ice with melting on the surface is red. Dark blue represents open water and gold is land. These images were prepared using a combination of satellite observations and drifting ice buoys. Courtesy of Son Nghiem and http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/seaice.html - Arctic Report Card .

“When you’re in a court of law, you have to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The people who have been focusing on the ‘cooling’ have not been telling the whole truth,” Schlesinger remarks. “Natural variability may mask the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in the short term, but once an oscillation changes back to a mode that increases global temperatures, it will reinforce the effects of burning fossil fuels, and we could face a double whammy. So the worst mistake we could make is to confuse short-term cooling for a reversal of global warming.”

http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/2009/articles/short-term-cooling-on-a-warming-planet - http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/2009/articles/short-term-cooling-on-a-warming-planet

 

NOAA: Imminent Flood Threat in Midwest, South and East Also at Risk

March 16, 2010

Major flooding has begun and is forecast to continue through spring in parts of the Midwest according to NOAAs National Weather Service. The South and East are also more susceptible to flooding as an El Nino influenced winter left the area soggier than usual.

Overall, more than a third of the contiguous United States has an above average flood risk  with the highest threat in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa, including along the Red River Valley where crests could approach the record levels set just last year.

Supporting the forecast of imminent Midwest flooding is a snowpack more extensive than in 2009 and containing in excess of 10 inches of liquid water in some locations. Until early March, consistently cold temperatures limited snow melt and runoff. These conditions exist on top of: above normal streamflows; December precipitation that was up to four times above average; and the ground which is frozen to a depth as much as three feet below the surface.

Its a terrible case of deja vu, but this time the flooding will likely be more widespread. As the spring thaw melts the snowpack, saturated and frozen ground in the Midwest will exacerbate the flooding of the flat terrain and feed rising rivers and streams, said Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. We will continue to refine forecasts to account for additional precipitation and rising temperatures, which affect the rate and severity of flooding.

In the South and East, where an El Nino-driven winter was very wet and white, spring flooding is more of a possibility than a certainty and will largely be dependent upon the severity and duration of additional precipitation and how fast existing snow cover melts, said Jack Hayes, Ph.D., director of the National Weather Service. Though El Nio is forecast to continue at least through spring, its influence on day-to-day weather should lessen considerably.

Without a strong El Nino influence, climate forecasting for spring (April through June) is more challenging, but NOAAs Climate Prediction Center says odds currently favor wetter-than-average conditions in coastal sections of the Southeast; warmer-than-average temperatures across the western third of the nation and Alaska; and below-average temperatures in the extreme north-central and south-central U.S.

Meteorologists and hydrologists with the National Weather Service issue timely and accurate flood forecasts and warnings from local weather forecast offices and regional river forecast centers across the nation. They constantly monitor precipitation, temperature, snowpack and waterway levels using a network of gauges, some of which are operated by vital partners such as the U.S. Geological Survey, and using NOAA aerial surveys of snowpack and its water content.

The National Weather Service provides a suite of decision support services ranging from direct briefings with emergency management agencies at all levels to its graphical Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service available at weather.gov/water.

This is also national http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100315_flood.html - Flood Safety Awareness Week . Floods are the deadliest weather phenomena  claiming an average of 100 lives annually. Many of these deaths occur in automobiles and are preventable. If confronted with a water-covered road on foot or in an automobile, follow National Weather Service advice: Turn Around, Dont Drown.

rmouse

When Glaciers Melt, What's in the Water?

Measuring the movement of nutrients in Alaska's glacial streams is a "hot topic" for an NSF-supported research team

Being on top of an Alaskan glacier was not as cold as Michael Nassry expected.

Nassry grew up hunting, fishing, hiking and camping in western Pennsylvania, near his home in Hopwood. "I like the outdoors," he said.

With that motivation, he decided he wanted to be an environmental engineer, and found himself in the agricultural and biological engineering program at Penn State University, where he focused on soils and water research. Now a doctoral student in biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, he has fine-tuned his interest to nutrient transport in rivers and streams.

"I look at what is taken up, what is used, what is passed through to down-river systems," he said, referring to the nutrients in waterways that exercise tremendous control over whether aquatic life thrives, or collapses. He is guided in this focus by his advisor, Durelle "Scotty" Scott.

"Scotty has a lot of projects going on, but I was attracted to the Alaska project because I haven't had a lot of exposure to glacial systems," Nassry said. "What is happening to these watersheds is a hot topic."

"Within a small area, you can examine watersheds that range in glacial coverage," Scott said. "This allows us to look at how these systems respond to climate change."

Nassry traveled to Alaska with Scott and undergraduate student Andrew Jeffrey, who has since graduated, to join Eran Hood, associate professor of hydrology at the University of Alaska Southeast, and his two students, for two weeks in July 2009. It was all part of Scott's NSF-funded research to measure the movement of nutrients out of glaciers.

All of the study sites were close to, and accessible from, Juneau, and the July period, when the glaciers are melting, offered better weather for the helicopters carrying the researchers to the glacier tops.

In addition to the milder-than-expected temperatures, Nassry was surprised at how quickly the ice melted around the ground covers the scientists slept on. "When we picked up the tarp, the ice underneath was about an inch higher than the surrounding ice." Nassry also noticed a lot of streams on top of the glacier, some of them large. "I didn't expect so much surface flow," he added. "I thought more melt would be through the ice."

The research team was atop the ice to perform an injection experiment. First, they put dye in a stream so they could measure its speed. The next day, for three hours straight, they injected a salt solution and several other solutions containing nutrients into the stream. The team then collected water samples at three downstream locations, after the injection pumps were turned off, to determine what flowed out and what was absorbed. Nassry's jobs were to calibrate the injection pumps and collect background samples above the injection point.

The task and clean-up took until 10 or 11 p.m., by which time the helicopters had quit for the day, so the researchers slept on the ice--or not. "It was so bright, I couldn't sleep at all," Nassry said. Hood had been prepared for the overnight and provided the sleeping bags. The one Nassry used came complete with teddy bear, having previously been used by Hood's young daughter.

The next task was to sample the base of the different watersheds, some of which had more glacial coverage than others. "For the Lemon Glacier, Andrew, Eran, Scotty and I were dropped at the face by a helicopter early in the morning; then, we sampled and hiked the whole length of Lemon Creek--six to eight hours," Nassry said.

"Scotty and Andrew biked up a path to the Herbert glacier and sampled the stream on the way back. And Eran and I hiked a trail at http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ak/nwis/uv/?site_no=15052800&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060 - Montana Creek and sampled on the way down. That only took a few hours," Nassry said. The Mendenhall River is shrinking at a far more rapid pace, as evidenced by data from its stream http://waterdata.usgs.gov/ak/nwis/uv/?site_no=15052500&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060 - gauges .

"Eran analyzed samples for carbon in his lab and shipped us the remaining samples," Nassry said. "In Scotty's lab, we're measuring nutrients, carbon, anions and water isotopes. We used a U.S. Geological Survey computer model, called OTIS, to simulate the downstream flow of water and salts along the reach. Once we achieved a calibrated model for the salts, we knew the hydrology--or what the water was doing. Our next step is to apply the model to each of the biologically available nutrients added during the injection experiment."

In summer 2010, the researchers, including Nassry, will work in streams between the glaciers and the gulf. "This spring," Nassry said, "I'll be designing those experiments and testing them in Stroubles Creek [near the Virginia Tech campus]."

And when they head back, the summer 2010 team will include a local K-12 teacher so that she can learn what it's like to do environmental research--experiences she can share with other teachers and her students.

-- Susan Trulove, Virginia Tech, mailto:STrulove@vt.edu - STrulove@vt.edu

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/goodbye?http://www.livescience.com/ - LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Investigators
Michael Nassry
Durelle Scott
Eran Hood
http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116555&org=NSF - http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116555&org=NSF

Mahs..  really enjoy this thread.

Kewl Mary008

I was starting to wonder?  

 

Also fun, the sheer amount af data that is available on the subject is amazing, especially in the last 6 months to a year.

The Origin and Impacts of Ocean Acidification

Videos, Sun, Mar 21st, 2010

Richard Feely discusses new findings about how increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is making the oceans more acidic, and how that will affect ocean ecosystems and the marine animals that inhabit them.

http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/2010/videos/origin-impacts-ocean-acidification -

Illustration depicting the overturning circulation of the global ocean. Throughout the Atlantic Ocean, the circulation carries warm waters (red arrows) northward near the surface and cold deep waters (blue arrows) southward. Image credit: NASA/JPL

PASADENA, Calif. – New NASA measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years. The data suggest the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.

The findings are the result of a new monitoring technique, developed by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using measurements from ocean-observing satellites and profiling floats. The findings are reported in the March 25 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The Atlantic overturning circulation is a system of currents, including the Gulf Stream, that bring warm surface waters from the tropics northward into the North Atlantic. There, in the seas surrounding Greenland, the water cools, sinks to great depths and changes direction. What was once warm surface water heading north turns into cold deep water going south. This overturning is one part of the vast conveyor belt of ocean currents that move heat around the globe.

Without the heat carried by this circulation system, the climate around the North Atlantic -- in Europe, North America and North Africa -- would likely be much colder. Scientists hypothesize that rapid cooling 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age was triggered when freshwater from melting glaciers altered the ocean's salinity and slowed the overturning rate. That reduced the amount of heat carried northward as a result.

Until recently, the only direct measurements of the circulation's strength have been from ship-based surveys and a set of moorings anchored to the ocean floor in the mid-latitudes. Willis' new technique is based on data from NASA satellite altimeters, which measure changes in the height of the sea surface, as well as data from Argo profiling floats. The international Argo array, supported in part by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, includes approximately 3,000 robotic floats that measure temperature, salinity and velocity across the world's ocean.

With this new technique, Willis was able to calculate changes in the northward-flowing part of the circulation at about 41 degrees latitude, roughly between New York and northern Portugal. Combining satellite and float measurements, he found no change in the strength of the circulation overturning from 2002 to 2009. Looking further back with satellite altimeter data alone before the float data were available, Willis found evidence that the circulation had sped up about 20 percent from 1993 to 2009. This is the longest direct record of variability in the Atlantic overturning to date and the only one at high latitudes.

The latest climate models predict the overturning circulation will slow down as greenhouse gases warm the planet and melting ice adds freshwater to the ocean. "Warm, freshwater is lighter and sinks less readily than cold, salty water," Willis explained.

For now, however, there are no signs of a slowdown in the circulation. "The changes we're seeing in overturning strength are probably part of a natural cycle," said Willis. "The slight increase in overturning since 1993 coincides with a decades-long natural pattern of Atlantic heating and cooling."

If or when the overturning circulation slows, the results are unlikely to be dramatic. "No one is predicting another ice age as a result of changes in the Atlantic overturning," said Willis. "Even if the overturning was the Godzilla of climate 12,000 years ago, the climate was much colder then. Models of today's warmer conditions suggest that a slowdown would have a much smaller impact now.

"But the Atlantic overturning circulation is still an important player in today's climate," Willis added. "Some have suggested cyclic changes in the overturning may be warming and cooling the whole North Atlantic over the course of several decades and affecting rainfall patterns across the United States and Africa, and even the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic."

With their ability to observe the Atlantic overturning at high latitudes, Willis said, satellite altimeters and the Argo array are an important complement to the mooring and ship-based measurements currently being used to monitor the overturning at lower latitudes. "Nobody imagined that this large-scale circulation could be captured by these global observing systems," said Willis. "Their amazing precision allows us to detect subtle changes in the ocean that could have big impacts on climate."

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ - http://www.nasa.gov .

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Interesting article on the bees, boy do we need to find out the answer to this one. Not just the bees but bats and other polinators.

Mysterious bat-killing illness previously seen in the U.S. now in Ontario

19/03/2010 4:04 PM |

New Science Shows Carbon Storage Potential of U.S. Lands

U.S. Geological Survey scientists have found that the lower 48 states in the U.S. presently store 73 billion metric tons of carbon in soils and 17 billion metric tons in forests. This is equivalent to more than 50 years of America�s current CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels.  

The http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2009/1283/ - national assessment of biologic carbon sequestration estimates there is the potential to store an additional 3-7 billion metric tons of carbon in forests, if agricultural lands were to be used for planting forests. This potential is equivalent to 2 to 4 years of America�s current CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels.

America�s forests and soils currently absorb about 30 percent (0.5 billion metric tons of carbon) of the nation�s fossil fuel emissions per year (1.6 billion metric tons of carbon). Enhancing the carbon storage capacity of America�s and the world�s ecosystems is an important tool to reduce carbon emissions and help ecosystems adapt to changing climate conditions. 

�The tools the USGS is developing�and the technologies behind those tools�will be of great use to communities around the world that are making management decisions on carbon storage,� said http://www.doi.gov/bio/McNutt_bio2.htm - USGS Director Marcia McNutt . �The USGS is conducting a national assessment of biologic carbon sequestration, as well as an assessment of ecosystem carbon and greenhouse gas fluxes, which will help determine how we can reduce atmospheric CO2 levels while preserving other ecological functions.�

To determine how much more carbon could be stored in forests and soils, USGS scientists analyzed maps that represent historical vegetation cover before human alterations, as well as maps of vegetation that might occur if there were no natural disturbances, such as fires, pests and drought. These maps were compared to maps of current vegetation and carbon storage.

The next phase of this work will assess the additional amount of carbon stored in Alaska's ecosystems, including its soils and forests.

DOT, EPA Set Aggressive National Standards for Fuel Economy and First Ever Greenhouse Gas Emission Levels For Passenger Cars and Light Trucks

Release date: 04/01/2010

Contact Information: Cathy Milbourn Milbourn.cathy@epa.gov 202-564-7849 202-564-4355 NHTSA Press Office: 202-366-9550

WASHINGTON - Responding to one of the first major directives of the Obama Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today jointly established historic new federal rules that set the first-ever national greenhouse gas emissions standards and will significantly increase the fuel economy of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules could potentially save the average buyer of a 2016 model year car $3,000 over the life of the vehicle and, nationally, will conserve about 1.8 billion barrels of oil and reduce nearly a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the lives of the vehicles covered.

This action is one important step in fulfilling the Obama Administration’s commitment to moving towards a clean energy, climate friendly economy.

“These historic new standards set ambitious, but achievable, fuel economy requirements for the automotive industry that will also encourage new and emerging technologies,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “We will be helping American motorists save money at the pump, while putting less pollution in the air.”

“This is a significant step towards cleaner air and energy efficiency, and an important example of how our economic and environmental priorities go hand-in-hand,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “By working together with industry and capitalizing on our capacity for innovation, we’ve developed a clean cars program that is a win for automakers and drivers, a win for innovators and entrepreneurs, and a win for our planet.”

Sometimes its just an amazing shot

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DEFENSE: Accelerating Arctic changes pose long-term risks for the U.S. Navy (03/24/2010)

Lauren Morello, E&E reporter

LAUREL, Md. -- Climate change is poised to turn the Arctic into a new military frontier, but that doesn't mean it's likely thaw out as a new "Wild West."

A Russian expedition made headlines in 2007 when it planted a Russian flag in an Arctic seabed, spurring headlines suggesting a new Cold War was imminent. But for the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, the challenge posed by climate change -- in the Arctic and beyond -- is more complex, long-term and tinged with uncertainty.

"For the U.S. Navy, climate change is a challenge -- and not a crisis," said Rear Adm. David Titley, who is leading the Navy's Task Force Climate Change. "I would say that my Russian friends probably did us more help than anything by putting that flag on the North Pole. It got us to focus on the Arctic. But there was a great article in National Geographic that indicates that was kind of a tourist expedition."

That doesn't mean there isn't reason for concern about changes in the high North.

"The thing is that the Arctic is not a vacuum," Titley said yesterday at a conference at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab. "What happens there will have repercussions in mid-latitude, and vice versa."

That holds true for changes in the Arctic atmosphere and its geopolitics. Results from Navy war games suggest conflicts that arise in the far North may spread beyond the Arctic Circle, Titley said.

But there are some factors that may temper the pace of change -- and its political and national security fallout.

Take talk about new shipping routes that are likely to emerge as the Arctic thaws. In 2008, the long-sought Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route were open simultaneously -- though briefly -- for the first time in recorded history.

Search-and-rescue capability may set the pace

Some cruise ships and even a few sailboats have been sighted in the Arctic in recent years. But Richard Engel, a retired Air Force major general who leads the National Intelligence Council's climate change program, said that even if Arctic summers are free of sea ice in the 2030s, shippers may not pounce immediately.

Their operations will depend on putting in place infrastructure -- like search-and-rescue capability -- that is now absent.

"It won't be quite as fast as people lead you to believe," Engel said. "It's commercial and economic interests that may slow it up a little bit."

Debate over just how climate change will play out in the Arctic highlights the uncertainty faced by military planners who recognize climate change's disruptive potential.

The Navy last year commissioned its first ship bearing a hybrid gas-electric drive, the USS Makin Island. And next month, on Earth Day, the force will conduct an airborne test of an F/A-18 aircraft powered by biofuels -- the "Green Hornet."

But amid those concrete steps to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels that contribute to climate, the Navy is wrestling with more fundamental questions posed by climate change.

"Uncertainty is very tightly linked with risk," said Jay Gulledge, senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. "And that's what the security implications of climate change is about -- risk, and how we're going to manage that risk."

Generation-spanning issues

Climate change is a complex problem that involves predicting changes in nonlinear systems, where even slight shifts in key variables can cause major shifts in outcomes. Adding to that, Gulledge said, is the fact that climate change is a problem that spans generations.

The temptation for many people is ignoring the problem, because the risk seems hard to define or far off. Tackling that uncertainty head-on isn't simple.

For Titley, who's heading a Navy task force shaping that force's response to climate change, one major problem is that current climate models make predictions on a continent-by-continent, not region-by-region, basis, at time scales well beyond the Navy's planning horizon.

"The paradox with climate is, in some ways, the forecasts for 2100 are a lot more confident than the forecasts for 2013," he said.

And science is developing rapidly.

Last month, the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review made headlines with its assessment that climate change has become a "threat multiplier" for the nation's armed forces.

But experts noted that that review, mandated by Congress in the 2008 defense authorization bill, relied on middle-range predictions of future warming taken from the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That science, in many cases, is already out of date.

The IPCC predicted the world's seas would rise between 7 and 23 inches by 2100 -- but issued a giant caveat. The IPCC cautioned that an additional rise could come from rapid and unpredictable melting of massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, which it didn't attempt to estimate.

Three years later, a crop of new scientific analyses paint a picture of 1 to 2 meters of sea level rise -- roughly 3 to 7 feet -- by the end of the century.

Predictions become more severe

But the quadrennial review, directed by Congress to rely on the IPCC's mid-range projections, didn't capture those recent scientific advances. The IPCC report, published in 2007, relied on analyses from 2005 or earlier.

"Climate risks are loaded to the more severe side," Gulledge said. "It's more likely that we're underestimating than overestimating at this point."

There are risks that may be overstated -- and potential threats that are true wild cards.

Dabelko said he puts climate migration in the first category, as something that is frequently sensationalized.

"There's a very large uncertainty with migration, but it can be a good thing," Dabelko said. "It can defuse conflict when people move. It really matters how it's done."

"We are pushed to oversimplify," he said, offering blunt advice: "Embrace the uncertainty. The mindset and tools that the security community brings to this are very well positioned in terms of planning for the worse and hoping for the best."

Meanwhile, there are the wild cards. One of them, according to the Navy's Titley, is shifting ocean chemistry.

The world's seas help sop up carbon dioxide emissions, but as output of the greenhouse gas has risen, that has made ocean water more acidic. Scientists say that will cause problems for marine species -- including shellfish, corals, plankton and other marine animals -- that grow hard shells made of a chalky mineral called calcium carbonate. If ocean water becomes too acidic, it can begin dissolving those shells, sometimes faster than the creatures can rebuild them.

Scientists at sea on ocean chemistry change

"It's a wild card as to whether or not, or how, the living ecosystem, from tiny critters to big fish, is going to adapt," Titley said. "If they don't, we have to start asking ourselves where the 1 billion people today who get protein from the ocean are going to get that from."

Experts also said they are eyeing talk of geoengineering closely, figuring that many of the proposed schemes to engineer a cooler planet have the potential to spark geopolitical havoc.

One oft-mentioned geoengineering approach is to mimic the cooling effects of a volcano by spraying sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere, where they would increase the amount of sunlight reflected away from Earth.

Scientists say it's cheap enough that a very wealthy individual or an individual nation might be able to act unilaterally and deploy the scheme without international oversight.

"We know very little about this," said Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center. "It holds big potential for challenges in the political realm, the security realm, that we have not fully grappled with. ... It's not a stretch that the Navy would be asked to monitor or interdict these activities."

Other potential wild cards, experts at the conference said, include the possibility that a climate-related push for new technology and new forms of energy will spur demand for a new set of natural resources in short supply.

Increased production of electric car batteries, for example, is driving a new global hunger for lithium. Half the world's supply is found in Bolivia, whose president, Evo Morales, is an outspoken critic of the United States.

NOAA Scientists Peek at Places Pikas Populate

Climate Assessment on American Pika Habitat Reveals Warming Trend

Unless you are an avid mountain hiker, you have probably never seen a pika. This small, furry relative of the rabbit relative lives in high, rocky, alpine areas. They have become a symbol of climate change impacts for some environmental groups.

A Good Indicator of Habitat Change

The American pikas thrive in cool, rocky fields generally above the tree line in mountainous areas (usually between 8,000 – 13,000 ft). They eat plants and do not hibernate. Rather, they store hay to survive the long mountain winters. And aside from the occasional hiker, they rarely encounter humans.

“Because of where they live, they are relatively unaffected by other human activities, but if climate change forces their preferred habitat upslope, populations could be left isolated, on ‘sky islands’ with nowhere to go.” says Andrea Ray, a physical scientist with NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

Climate Assessment Determines Species’ Future

At the request of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Ray and NOAA partners from the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences recently conducted a climate assessment for the pika — the first-ever for a non-marine mammal — to help the FWS decision on whether it should be listed as a threatened or endangered species.

An endangered species designation can have broad environmental and economic impacts. They can boost dwindling animal populations and restrict hunting, logging and other human activities in the endangered species’ habitat.

Earlier research, published in the Journal of Mammalogy in 2003, showed a decline in pika populations. It also raised concern that rising temperatures were threatening pikas with extinction. 

“We were approached by Fish and Wildlife to conduct a rapid review of the area’s climate that they could use in reviewing the pika’s status,” says Ray. “We brought different threads of scientific study together to bear on the particular problem and completed the report in about six months.”

Pika Habitat is Warming

The NOAA team assessed climate data and projections of change in the western United States and discovered a distinct warming trend and consistent projections of warming into the future.

They found that by midcentury, the average summer temperatures will be about 5 degrees F warmer than in the recent past.  That means that summer temperatures will equal or exceed the warmest summers of the recent past. Observations from Nevada and Oregon, for example, show statistically significant warming of 2-4 degrees F in summers over the past 30 years.

The assessment brought together findings from the latest research, observations from a number of sources, studies of past climate, and global models to project future climate. NOAA’s rapid climate review for the pika was possible because the agency has monitored climate data in many parts of the world for many decades, and has ongoing research on climate at elevation, and applications of climate models.

Ultimately, the Fish and Wildlife Service ruled in February 2010 that pikas did not need protection under the http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/laws/esa/ - Endangered Species Act . But this process offers an excellent example of how NOAA’s scientific research informed the decision makers by ensuring that they had best available science was available.

Water Supply Forecasts

Key to Successful Water Management

People who live in the semi-arid western United States often refer to water as the lifeblood of their land. And there’s a delicate balance between water supply and snow fall. Nearly all water used to supply cities, farms, and industry in the West comes from melting snow in the high mountains.

NOAA’s vigilance in monitoring and understanding mountain snow pack helps the agency forecast the availability of water resources for the upcoming year. Managers of this precious resource rely on NOAA forecasts when making decisions about water allocation and management.

NOAA leads the National Integrated Drought Information System, which is a collaborative effort between federal, state, and local governments tasked to ensure a high level of drought-related information sharing and awareness. The National Integrated Drought Information System maintains a http://www.drought.gov/ - Web portal where water management officials access current drought status, forecasts, effects and planning information.

Managing Water Supplies in Drought

As shown by the http://www.drought.gov/portal/server.pt/community/drought_indicators/us_drought_monitor - U.S. Drought Monitor , drought occurred in every Western state last year. And drought conditions in the West will continue to be a major concern in the future. Increasing population in Western cities has further stressed water management and has added concern to the already dry region.

Before the snow melts each spring, http://www.nws.noaa.gov/ - NOAA’s National Weather Service River Forecast Centers project how much water the melting snow will supply to hundreds of river basins in the western United States. Coordinating with many other agencies, NOAA scientists generate water supply forecasts monthly between December and June for the western United States.

Water supply forecasters use mathematical models of the mountain snow pack, water flow, soil infiltration, evaporation, and precipitation to develop forecasts. These models are based on scientific understanding of snow and the land surface coupled with forecasts for weather and climate.

Forecasters create detailed water supply forecasts using observations of precipitation, snow totals, temperatures, and stream flow from networks operated by NOAA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and state and local agencies.

More Effective Resource Management

With this combined information, NOAA scientists provide forecasts that are essential for helping water resource managers keep water flowing in homes and communities throughout the western United States.

NOAA scientists post seasonal water supply forecasts on their http://www.nwrfc.noaa.gov/westernwater - Water Resource Forecasts Web site. This Web site not only gives residents in the western United States a glimpse of the expected water supply in their area, but it also houses useful information to help water resource managers do their job. 

A large number of federal and state agencies and interest groups are responsible for managing the physical, legal, and economic constraints of the water supply. The starting point for these efforts begins with an accurate water supply forecast from NOAA’s National Weather Service.

The Facts About Snowstorms &
Climate Change

Q. Do the recent snowstorms suggest that global warming is not really happening?

No. Although record low temperatures were experienced in February 2010 in some regions, these are part of the short-term regional variability that has always been a characteristic of weather and will continue to be even as the Earth’s climate experiences an overall warming trend.

The data showing that the world as a whole has been warming on the average are unequivocal, and over time this means there will be fewer (but not zero) cold spells and more (but not constant) hot spells. In the 1950s, the number of record hot days was about the same as the number of record cold days, but in the 2000s we saw twice as many record highs as record lows.

Q. What caused this cold spell, if not global cooling?

The February record snowstorms and the heavy snow from December 2009 were heavily influenced by the current – and predicted – El Niño combined with an unusually strong, long-lasting occurrence of a climate pattern that delivers cold air from the Arctic to the middle latitudes around the globe, called the Arctic Oscillation.

These phenomena are a naturally occurring part of the climate system. We have a good understanding of what causes the El Niño that leads to a wet southeast part of the country for example, but we do not have a good understanding of what leads to the large oscillation in atmospheric circulation we have seen this past year. Understanding of phenomena such as these and their implications for future climate and climate change will be a priority for the newly proposed NOAA Climate Service.

Q. Can you elaborate on the Arctic Oscillation?

An important cause of short-term regional variability in winter weather in the Northern Hemisphere is a cyclic change in the strength and waviness of the jet stream that circles the globe at the southern edge of the Arctic.

When the jet stream is strong it is less wavy and Arctic cold does not penetrate very far southward. When the jet stream is weaker, it zig-zags, with the southward excursions allowing frigid Arctic air to reach ordinarily warmer climes. This cycling between a weak and strong circumpolar jet stream is called the Arctic Oscillation.

This winter we’ve been experiencing a particularly zig-zaggy weak phase of the Arctic Oscillation, with correspondingly large southern excursions of Arctic air. (With the zig-zags go some large northern excursions of warm air, too, with the result that Alaska and Washington, for example, were experiencing record highs during the period when the East Coast was experiencing its cold spell.)

Q. “Global warming” or “global weirding”? 

While some locations experienced bitter cold and blizzards, other locations experienced unusually warm and mild conditions. Consider that even as people living in Washington, D.C., experienced “snowmaggeddon,” residents in Vancouver, Canada, experienced their warmest January ever recorded.

Ironically, organizers of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games had to use trucks and helicopters to bring in snow to prepare the slopes in time for skiing and snowboarding competitions. The contrast in weather between these two locations illustrates why we don’t draw long-term, large-scale conclusions about climate from short-lived, local weather patterns.

Q. What is the difference between “climate” and “weather” and why is it important?

Weather and climate are related but they are not the same things. Each describes environmental conditions, but on different scales of time and space. Meteorologists describe the state of the atmosphere at a particular time and place — weather — by measuring its temperature, air pressure, moisture, wind speed and direction, etc. But because the atmosphere behaves like a fluid, these conditions are prone to rapid change. Thus, weather at any one location is inherently difficult to predict more than, say, a week in advance.

Climatologists, on the other hand, don’t try to predict weather at one location on such a short timescale. Rather, they look at the bigger picture. Climatologists consider the much larger context in which weather operates and describe the expected frequency and duration of environmental conditions.

The stock market is a good analogy. Wall Street stock traders deal with the complexities of the stock market’s daily ups and downs. Mutual fund managers, however, don’t worry about the market’s daily volatility. They look at long-term trends and manage investors’ money based upon a long-term perspective and their bigger picture understanding of the underlying market forces that drive the stock market.

Likewise, climatologists aren’t as concerned with what the weather was like last week, as they are in determining the likely range and average of winter weather patterns over the last seasons, decades, centuries, or even longer. More importantly, climatologists want to know why those were the long-term prevailing conditions. Specifically, they want to observe and measure the large-scale, slower-moving environmental forces that drive the state of the atmosphere. So they observe and measure those variables that comprise the climate system in which short-term and smaller-scale weather patterns and climate oscillations operate.

To understand climate and detect climate change we need to collect data for a long time — the longer the data record the better — to determine whether and how global climate is changing. The analogy also shows why predicting any single weather event is inherently difficult and why we don’t base our assessments of climate on any single weather event.

Highly efficient vehicles with no polluting emissions

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/441847main_globalhawk-full.jpg">

The Global Hawk can fly autonomously to altitudes above 60,000 feet -- roughly twice as high as a commercial airliner -- and as far as 11,000 nautical miles. Operators pre-program a flight path, and then the plane flies itself for as long as 30 hours. Credit: NASA/Dryden/Carla Thomas


http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/441844main_flightmap.jpg">

On its April 7 flight, the Global Hawk flew approximately 4,500 nautical miles along a flight path that took it to 150.3 degrees West longitude and 54.6 degrees North latitude, just south of Alaska's Kodiak Island. The flight lasted 14.1 hours and flew up to 60,900 feet in altitude. Credit: NASA/Dryden

 

NASA pilots and flight engineers, together with colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have successfully completed the first science flight of the Global Hawk unpiloted aircraft system over the Pacific Ocean. The flight was the first of five scheduled for this month's Global Hawk Pacific (GloPac) mission to study atmospheric science over the Pacific and Arctic oceans.

The Global Hawk is a robotic plane that can fly autonomously to altitudes above 60,000 feet (18.3 kilometers) -- roughly twice as high as a commercial airliner -- and as far as 11,000 nautical miles (20,000 kilometers) -- half the circumference of Earth. Operators pre-program a flight path, and then the plane flies itself for as long as 30 hours, staying in contact through satellite and line-of-site communications to the ground control station at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California's Mojave Desert.

"The Global Hawk is a revolutionary aircraft for science because of its enormous range and endurance," said Paul Newman, co-mission scientist for GloPac and an atmospheric scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "No other science platform provides this much range and time to sample rapidly evolving atmospheric phenomena. This mission is our first opportunity to demonstrate the unique capabilities of this plane, while gathering atmospheric data in a region that is poorly sampled."

GloPac researchers will directly measure and sample greenhouse gases, ozone-depleting substances, aerosols, and constituents of air quality in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.

In yesterday's flight, the plane flew approximately 4,500 nautical miles (8,300 kilometers) along a flight path that took it from Dryden to 150.3 degrees West longitude and 54.6 degrees North latitude, just south of Alaska's Kodiak Island. The flight lasted 14.1 hours and flew up to 60,900 feet (18.6 kilometers) in altitude.

Reaching Higher into the Atmosphere and Staying There

"The Global Hawk is a fantastic platform because it gives us expanded access to the atmosphere beyond what we have with piloted aircraft," said David Fahey, co-mission scientist and a research physicist at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. "We can go to regions we couldn't reach or go to previously explored regions and study them for extended periods that are impossible with conventional planes."

The plane carries 11 instruments to sample the chemical composition of Earth�s two lowest atmospheric layers, to profile the dynamics and meteorology of both, and to observe the distribution of clouds and aerosol particles. Project scientists expect to take observations from the equator to the Arctic Circle, and west of Hawaii.

(Select Pic for more information)
http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/Glopac/"> The Global Hawk carries 11 instruments to sample the chemical composition of Earth�s two lowest atmospheric layers, to profile the dynamics and meteorology of both, and to observe the distribution of clouds and aerosol particles. View this interactive feature to learn more about each of the aircraft's instruments. Credit: NASA/Scott Hanger

The timing of GloPac flights should allow scientists to observe the breakup of the polar vortex, a large-scale cyclone that dominates winter weather patterns around the Arctic and is particularly important for understanding ozone depletion in the Northern Hemisphere. Researchers appear to have gathered some measurements from the polar vortex during yesterday's flight.

Scientists also expect to gather data between 45,000 and 65,000 feet, where many greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances are destroyed. They will measure dust, smoke and pollution that cross the Pacific from Asia and Siberia and affect U.S. air quality.

Several instruments will measure aerosols, which play an important but incompletely understood role in Earth's radiation budget. Some aerosols absorb warming sunlight, while others reflect it back to space and cool the planet. High-altitude particles can serve as nuclei for the formation of clouds.

Command and Control

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/441849main_glopaccontrol.jpg"> The Global Hawk Operations Center (GHOC) at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center serves as the cockpit of the Global Hawk. The pilots, who monitor and control the aircraft from the GHOC, have displays of all aircraft parameters and can override the autonomous flight control system to make course corrections and altitude adjustments. Credit: NASA/Dryden/Tony Landis

The flights are designed to address various science objectives:

1. validation and scientific collaboration with NASA earth-monitoring satellite missions, principally the Aura satellite,

2. observations of stratospheric trace gases in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere from the mid-latitudes into the tropics,

3. sampling of polar stratospheric air and the break-up fragments of the air that move into the mid-latitudes,

4. measurements of dust, smoke, and pollution that cross the Pacific from Asia and Siberia,

5. measurements of streamers of moist air from the central tropical Pacific that move onto the West Coast of the United States (atmospheric rivers).

False-color short-wavelength infrared image of Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano from data obtained by NASA's EO-1 Hyperion satellite on March 24, 2010. image credit: NASA/JPL/EO-1 Mission/GSFC/Ashley Davies

A NASA research team is using the latest advances in satellite artificial intelligence to speed up estimates of the heat and volume of lava escaping from an erupting volcano in Iceland.

On March 20, 2010, Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano (pronounced "AYA-feeyapla-yurkul,") awakened for the first time in 120 years, spewing still-active lava fountains and flows. That day, a NASA "sensor web" -- a network of sensors on the ground and aboard NASA's Earth Observing-1 satellite, alerted researchers to this new volcanic "hot spot." The eruption was detected by autonomous "sciencecraft" software aboard the satellite, which is known as EO-1.

Sciencecraft software enables the spacecraft to analyze science data onboard to detect scientific events and respond by sending alerts, producing scientific products and/or re-imaging the event.

The software is typically able to notify researchers on the ground within 90 minutes of detecting events, and then rapidly sets up the satellite to observe them. In the case of the Iceland volcanic event, EO-1 was able to take advantage of recently uploaded "smart" software that allows the spacecraft to react quickly to an event and to rapidly downlink the data for processing by ground personnel in less than 24 hours. That process used to take three weeks for researchers working manually.

The artificial intelligence software directed EO-1's Hyperion and Advanced Land Imager instruments to target the volcano on its next passes over Iceland, which occurred on March 24, 29 and 30. After image data were transmitted to a ground station at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., computers automatically analyzed them and created maps and estimates of heat loss and eruption flow rate.

"Use of autonomous systems in this way represents a new way of doing science, where spacecraft can think for themselves and react to dynamic and often transient events," explained Ashley Davies, lead scientist for NASA's New Millennium Program-Space Technology 6 Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment at JPL.

"This autonomy technology enables spacecraft to rapidly inform the ground of significant events, like the volcanic eruption," said Steve Chien, principal investigator for the Autonomous Sciencecraft at JPL. "This same technology has been used to track fires, flooding and other natural hazards."

"This sensorweb technology enables rapid retasking of the EO-1 spacecraft, making it easier to track breaking phenomena such as the Iceland volcano," added Daniel Mandl, EO-1 spacecraft mission manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Goddard manages the EO-1 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Less than 24 hours after the satellite's first observation, the JPL team confirmed the volcano was emitting more than one billion watts of energy -- enough to power 40,000 passenger cars at the same time -- and discharging more than six tons of lava per second.

The fully automated process accelerated NASA's distribution of images to volcanologists studying the eruption. Rapid calculations of lava volume (known as the effusion rate) and location can help determine the likely direction of lava flows, while giving emergency managers advance warning to plan and deploy resources, and carry out informed evacuations.

Davies believes he and other researchers can use the "onboard autonomy" to achieve a greater and faster return rate of new Earth and planetary science data, while offering potentially life-saving benefits through rapid detection of natural events.

"There is concern that this eruption might precede another larger eruption at the Katla volcano nearby," said Davies. "If it does, we will be poised to provide imaging data of activity as the eruption evolves."

http://peruanista.blogspot.com/2010/04/glacier-in-peru-melts-down-and-break.html - Glacier in Peru Melts Down and Break Off into a Lake Causing Tsunami and Mudslides in Central Andes [PHOTOS & VIDEO]

A glacier broke off in the central Peruvian Andes and fell into a lake causing what scientists said was a 75-foot tsunami, killing three people, causing mudslides and the destruction of a water processing reservoir used to supply the surrounding towns.

The glacier that broke off was part of the http://www.peakbagger.com/peak.aspx?pid=8466 - Huancan snow peak , located in the region of Ancash, close to the town of Carhuaz and south of the Huascaran, the highest snow peak of Peru and one of the highest in the world. They are part of the world famous Cordillera Blanca mountain range.

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_tLOnL2biaWE/S8V4Zkyis9I/AAAAAAAADv0/Acf8j09x1m4/s720/Huancan%20Glacier%20Map.jpg"> Map by Peruanista. Source: andix.com and allthemountains.com