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Getting Remote Data to Remote Regions

While Internet connections in more remote regions of the world have improved over the years, connectivity challenges still inhibit delivery of scientific data to people who need it. This past month the situation has gotten a little better, thanks to some international collaborations involving satellite data.
Often remote places are in developing countries that lack funding for the state-of-the-art connectivity necessary for scientific information. Back in 2003, in a BAMS essay, “The ‘Information Divide’ in the Climate Sciences,” Andrew Gettelman addressed the struggles of scientists in developing countries to keep up with the rest of the world in increasingly technology driven times. In visits to a number of countries around the world, Gettelman found slow or nonexistent internet access, outdated operating systems, and other hurdles limited the ability of these scientists to keep up with the literature and access data, among other problems.

The information divide is not unique to the atmospheric and related sciences. However, because of the unique role that timely information plays in forecasting, and the need for data for climate studies, the divide may be especially critical in these disciplines.  Our science is global, affects people globally, and requires global information.

Five years later Michel Verstraete of the European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Environment and Sustainability (JRC-IES) still found limited internet access when participating in a field campaign in 2008 to study the environment around Kruger National Park in South Africa. JRC-IES and South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) joined forces to address the problem of accessing large satellite data files crucial in research related to sustainable development and other environmental studies. NASA became involved the following year, when the problem of electronic access became obvious during a workshop in South Africa on use of Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) data.
The solution: NASA recently shipped 30 TerraBytes of MISR data directly to a distribution center in Africa. CSIR will manage the center and offer free access to researchers in the region. Verstraete, along with members of the other agencies, plans to upgrade connectivity and encourage participants to share data.  Verstraete says he hopes this collaboration will strengthen academic and research institutions in southern Africa.
Adds Bob Scholes, CSIR research group leader for ecosystem processes and dynamics at NASA,

The data transfer can be seen as a birthday present from NASA to the newly formed South African Space Agency. It will kick start a new generation of high-quality land surface products, with applications in climate chance and avoiding desertification.

Last month NASA also joined up with the U.S. Agency for International Development a new node for accessing satellite and other environmental information through the web-based SERVIR system. This time the local collaboration is with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. ICIMOD analyzes geophysical monitoring and predictive information and also can disseminate the information through its relationships with the region’s decision makers. Remote sensing is critical in monitoring sparsely populated, difficult-to-access mountainous areas of the Hindu-Kush-Himalaya region—which includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Myanmar, and Pakistan. SERVIR addresses issues of land cover change, air quality, glacial melt, and adaptation to climate change and other crucial issues in the mountainous region.
As Gettelman concluded in his article:

Perhaps the most important recommendation is that, as we restructure the model of scientific communication in the information age, we ensure that it benefits the maximum number of people. The greatest gains in terms of lives saved and mitigation of the impacts of weather extremes and changes in the climate can most likely come from not just improving the state of knowledge but improving the access to existing knowledge and information by scientists, forecasters, and policy makers around the world.

Up, Up, and Away!

When seven-year-old Max Geissbühler wanted to make a homemade spacecraft, his father, Luke, was skeptical that it could be done. But with further investigation (and further lobbying from Max), they realized that a simple weather balloon combined with some modern technology would allow them to not only create a workable “spacecraft,” but make a video of its flight, as well, tracking its movement as it ascended 19 miles into the upper stratosphere.
The father-and-son team created a small capsule out of a fast-food container that they sprayed with insulation. They put a camera and an iPhone into the container and protected them from cold temperatures they would encounter with chemical hand-warming packets. Then they filled the balloon with helium, attached it to the capsule, and launched it from the town of Newburgh, New York. Its rapid ascent at 25 feet per second brought it through 100-mph winds to a maximum height of about 100,000 feet before the balloon burst, approximately 70 minutes after it was launched. A parachute attached to the capsule brought it back to ground only about 30 miles from its launch site; they found it thanks to a GPS application on the iPhone. Both the phone and camera were intact, and the camera recorded all but the last couple minutes of the flight.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

The remarkable video that resulted has been a hit at video-sharing sites like Vimeo, where it has been viewed more than 3.7 million times in just one month. A website about the balloon project and possible future endeavors can be found here.

Framing the Framers: Updating Science Communication

Some of you may remember a lively panel on the Science of Communication at the 2008 AMS Annual Meeting. It featured a presentation by author Chris Mooney (audiovisual version here) from the trenches of the now full-blown communications quagmire of climate change politics.
Since communication is the overarching theme of the upcoming Annual Meeting in Seattle, it is interesting that a number of climate scientists are trying to shed central tenets of that session, which seemed so cutting-edge two years ago. As a result, judging from some of the scheduled papers, the shape of discussion on communications philosophy in Seattle is going to be quite different than it was three years earlier.
Recall that one of Mooney’s main take-home messages was based on the research of his friend, American University communications professor Matthew Nisbet, on “frames” in communication.
Basically the idea is that information succeeds in becoming memorable, perhaps changing an audience’s thinking, if it is conveyed within an effective “frame.’ Framing can be a story, a useful reference, symbol, or metaphor, a style of delivery (folksy, serious, humorous, self-deprecating, authoritative). Is the science a story of underdogs prevailing? Of frontiers opening? Of prosperity ensuing? Is it scary? Exciting? Weird? Does the science resonate with preexisting perceptions and priorities? Success all depends on knowing your audience and the moment.
In a recent interview, Nisbet says bluntly that the typical frames employed to argue for action on climate mitigation have been ineffective or counterproductive, losing out to competing frames.

If refining frames sounds like it’s more about politics than science to you, then you’re not alone. A number of scientists seem to be growing wary of this focus on framing. The Symposium on Policy and Socio-Economic Research at the upcoming AMS Annual Meeting in Seattle will delve into these frustrations with framing. Speaking directly to the problem of fear-mongering that Nisbet mentions in the interview linked above, Renee Lertzman of Portland State University (4:45 p.m., Tuesday) will discuss how the psychology of anxiety “can evoke complicated, often contradictory emotional and cognitive responses that may hinder or support efforts for effective communications” about the uncertain future. That goes for climate prediction as well as weather forecasting.
The response to poor framing of climate change science has lately turned away from “better” framing. Some climate researchers

Read more

Follow the Water

As the world’s population grows, so does water usage. As a result, the rate we pump water out of the ground to satisfy our thirst and, more frequently, the thirst of the plants we grow, has been exceeding the rate that precipitation can replenish that water. From the news page of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre about a study in Geophysical Research Letters:

The results show that the areas of greatest groundwater depletion are in India, Pakistan, the United States and China. Therefore, these are areas where food production and water use are unsustainable and eventually serious problems are expected. The hydrologists estimate that from 1960 to 2000 global groundwater abstraction has increased from 312 to 734 km3 per year and groundwater depletion from 126 to 283 km3 per year.

The gravity of the water situation: relative ground resource depletion rates. Note the prominent depletion in the central United States: Steven Mauget of the US Department of Agriculture will discuss a new software tool for agricultural water management in the Ogallala region (Wednesday, 26 January) at the upcoming AMS Annual Meeting.

Not only does the depletion threaten food supplies in the long run, but it also adds to global level rise. The GRL article quantified this effect, showing that a quarter of the sea level rise since 2000 is due to aquifer depletion. Water that would have stayed underground 50 years ago is now used by people and their plants, then evaporated; eventually most of it finds its way back to the oceans.
As Roger Pielke points out in a recent post, there is much to be learned about the effect of this water on climate. Not all water under the surface of  the Earth is a renewable resource. While some aquifers indeed are readily replenished by recent precipitation, others have been (or were) locked away from ground sources for many years, due to geology. These isolated reserves, called “fossil water,” were formed long before humanity and have yet to be adequately inventoried. Some of them, like the Ogallala aquifer, have been tapped for agriculture. Thus fossil water is being returned to the water cycle (hence, climate) after a long absence.
All of this fuss over emptying ground water is a good introduction to the “image of the day” from NASA’s Earth Observatory. Not surprisingly, heavy liquid shifting to and from land has a significant local effect on the gravitational pull of the planet. (Fluctuations of the water table are also hypothesized by some geologists to trigger mid-continental plate earthquakes, but that’s an obscure intersection of geology and meteorology, reviewed in this month’s Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, to explore in your spare time.) The gravitational effect of water is the basis of water distribution observations from the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission:

the satellites measured how Earth’s gravity field changed as water piled up or was depleted from different regions at different times of year.

Below is GRACE data from 2009-10 mapped by NASA’s Robert Simmons, showing how the water year giveth (blue) and taketh away (red). (There will be more on watching water resources carefully from space in presentations at the AMS Annual Meeting, including NASA’s David Toll on the NASA Water Resources Program on Tuesday 25 January.)

Science for Everyone at the USA Expo

The first USA Science & Engineering Festival kicks off this weekend in Washington DC. Running for two weeks, the festival wraps up with a two-day expo on 23-24 October, with 1,500 booths planned in the downtown area, numerous local festival events, as well as satellite events across the country. From Hawaii to New York, scientists plan to visit local schools, hold special events, and open their doors to the general public.

The WeatherBug mascot will be at the DC Weather Coalition exhibit.

As part of expo, AMS will take part in the massive event on the National Mall, helping out with a double booth space run by the DC Weather Coalition, an educational partnership of government, scientific societies, enterprise, and institutions. The booth features an exhibit called “Become an Amateur Weather Forecaster,” in which visitors can experience firsthand what it takes to be a weather forecaster (Booth Numbers 1010, 1012, Section MA-C).  “Using this approach to examine the wonders and mystery of weather, water, and climate certainly adds intrigue and excitement to the many hands-on exhibits sponsored by DC WeatherFest Coalition partners,” comments Elizabeth Mills, a Coalition representative and associate director of the AMS Education Program.
A WeatherBug weather station is planned to demonstrate the numerous ways to access the daily weather. Meteorologists from local television stations WJLA and TBD, including Joe Witte, and members of the AMS Education Department will be available for questions and to assist with the WeatherBug display and twice-daily Weather Jeopardy games at the booths.
Mills notes that this variety allows visitors to experience related topics from different perspectives.  “Visitors in one area of our exhibits can be interviewed on camera, in another explore a weather station, and in others learn about the latest in weather research,” and in other exhibits, “they can see, first-hand, the instrumentation used in the ocean and understand the way climate is changing, or watch their kids being entertained by the WeatherBug mascot.”
To find exhibits that meet specific interests, the festival site is organized by age range, subject area, keyword, or organization name.  A tracking system for various age groups also makes it easy to find events with a common theme. The exhibits will be open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on the weekend of the festival.

If Your Climate Cup Runneth Over

Processing the endless stream of weather data can be a little like drinking from a fire hose. So designer/artist Mitchell Whitelaw has found a new way to civilize information intake.

measuring cup
"Measuring Cup," by Mitchell Whitelaw, showing at the Object Gallery in Sydney, Australia.

“Measuring Cup” is formed using 150 years of monthly average temperatures for Sydney, Australia. Says Whitelaw,

The structure of the form is pretty straightforward. Each horizontal layer of the form is a single year of data; these layers are stacked chronologically bottom to top – so 1859 is at the base, 2009 at the lip. The profile of each layer is basically a radial line graph of the monthly data for that year. Months are ordered clockwise around a full circle, and the data controls the radius of the form at each month. The result is a sort of squashed ovoid, with a flat spot where winter is (July, here in the South).

Whitelaw decided to smooth the data with a five-year moving average “because the raw year-to-year variations made the form angular and jittery.” The result is not only aesthetically pleasing but functional due to climate change:

The punchline really only works when you hold it in your hand. The cup has a lip – like any good cup, it expands slightly towards the rim. It fits nicely in the hand. But this lip is, of course, the product of the warming trend of recent decades. So there’s a moment of haptic tension there, between ergonomic (human centred) pleasure and the evidence of how our human-centredness is playing out for the planet as a whole.

In other words, don’t sip from your own data unless you can show a perceptible warming.

A Slow Start, but Gaining Fast

Tropical Storm Lisa became the 12th named storm in the Atlantic Basin this week in what has suddenly become the active 2010 hurricane season that forecasters months ago had predicted. Nine of those twelve storms formed since August 21, with five of them becoming hurricanes. Before that, only one of the first three named storms (Alex) even reached hurricane strength. By contrast, 2005 (9 out of 28) and 2008 (6 out of 16)  both had numerous storms form before August 20. Why the delay this year? According to a story in Newscientist.com, a mass of hot, dry air over the oceans stunted the formation of tropical storms. Scientists traced this dry air to a massive ridge of high pressure that sat for months over Europe and Asia, causing an intense heatwave in Russia and severe monsoon rains in Pakistan this summer that killed thousands of people. But just as mid-August arrived, when the typical height of Atlantic hurricane activity is imminent, things changed. As the Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters wrote in his blog on August 17:

Vertical instability, which was unusually low since late July, has now returned to near normal levels over the tropical Atlantic, though it remains quite low over the rest of the North Atlantic. Instability is measured as the difference in temperature between the surface and the top of the troposphere (the highest altitude that thunderstorm tops can penetrate to). If the surface is very warm and the top of the troposphere is cold, an unstable atmosphere results, which helps to enhance thunderstorm updrafts and promotes hurricane development. Since SSTs in the Atlantic were at record highs and upper tropospheric temperatures were several degrees cooler than average in July, enhancing instability, something else must have been going on to reduce instability. Dry air can act to reduce instability, and it appears that an unusually dry atmosphere, due to large-scale sinking over the Atlantic, was responsible for the lack of instability.

Not until the heat wave broke near the end of August did the tropical storms really begin to form in earnest, with four storms (Danielle, Earl, Fiona, and Gaston) arising just between August 21 and September 1. And spurred by those record-high SSTs mentioned by Masters, the 2010 season has not only produced 12 named storms and 6 hurricanes, but 5 major hurricanes–four of them Category 4–making that slow start seem like a distant memory. To put this season in historical perspective, there have been yearly averages of 14 named storms, 8 hurricanes, and 4 major hurricanes since the current active Atlantic hurricane period began in 1995. This season is just one major hurricane away from moving into a 7-way tie for 3rd-most major hurricanes in a season, topped only by the 7 major hurricanes in 1961 and 2005 and 8 in 1950 (lists of most active seasons in various categories can be found here).

This photo, taken from the International Space Station, shows the eye of Category-4 Hurricane Igor at 10:56 Atlantic Daylight Time on September 14, 2010, as it advanced over the Atlantic Ocean. (Photo credit: NASA Earth Observatory.)

Danger Lurks where Weather Statistics Lack

In his new book, Hot Time in the Old Town: The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt, Edward P. Kohn tells how New York City’s government generally dithered while casualties mounted. During the heat wave in 1896, an estimated 1,300 people died as 10 straight days of 90-degree-plus heat, high humidity, and no wind baked the crowded working class tenements. Unfortunately, City Hall wasn’t keeping close track of what was happening until too late.
Roosevelt, then president of the city’s Board of Police Commissioners, was an exception. He ordered vendors to supply ice–normally too expensive for ordinary workers–for free.

Roosevelt personally supervised the ice distribution from the police precinct houses, not only “busting” this particular trust, but also having intimate contact with the city’s working poor.  Writing his memoirs years later he would remember the “gasping misery of the little children and of the worn-out mothers.”  Such scenes must have helped shape the man who was about to become the dominant figure of the Progressive era.

Kohn makes a perceptive point that general unawareness compounded the deadliness of the 1896 heat wave and can still exacerbate heat waves today. Even while some of us have begun waking up to the dangers of heat–especially since Chicago in 1995 and the European Summer of 2003– when complete, reliable, and immediate statistics are not available, heat is an underrated, quiet killer, more lethal than most people realize, and usually more lethal than necessary:

Images of forest fires and smoke-choked Moscow filled American televisions, yet the tremendous death toll from the heat wave attracted little attention.  Only in mid-August did the Moscow city government report that the death rate in the city had doubled during the heat wave, resulting in three hundred extra deaths every day.  The Russian heat wave, then, was a historic and catastrophic natural disaster.  But it was underreported and will soon fade from our collective memory.

Now we’re galloping onward with fall, circulation patterns have changed and the summer’s heat has been replaced by other concerns. Reading Kohn’s book is a good way to reflect on the value of keeping good weather impacts statistics.

Not Seasick…Science Smitten

What if you are asked to be part of a scientific expedition aboard a non-luxurious research vessel, surrounded by complete strangers, forced to face rough seas – and sea sickness, 16 hours’ work shifts, no weekends or recreational activities, no days off, lots of hours under the sun working with scientific equipment, poor internet connectivity and no interaction whatsoever with the outer world? While many people would say: “no thank you”, I was euphoric when I received an email which first line read: “Congratulations, you have been selected as a participant of the Sixth Aerosols and Oceans Science Expedition”.

So begins Mayra Oyola’s engaging story of work aboard the NOAA research vessel Ronald H. Brown for the AEROSE campaign

Beside The Ronald H. Brown.

under the auspices of Howard University, NOAA, and other institutions. It was apparently a love affair not just with the science and the sea, but with a lidar, too:

[E]very scientist is …assigned at least one particular instrument and is expected to become the one and only expert on that matter.  In a sense, every scientist establishes a sort of “bond” with his/her assigned instrument that is very similar romantic affair. You can grow such a strong love and hate relationship with it. There are days when you two can get along just fine. But other days you have to fight against temptations (like throwing it overboard or smashing it with a sledge hammer). There are days when your appointed instrument gets seduced by Murphy (in other words, goes haywire) and you have to make him/her understand that s/he is in a monogamous relationship with you.  As some partners, these instruments can be gold diggers (they cost hundreds/thousands of dollars) and are high maintenance as well.

And, this enticing view of the ocean:

When people say I must be crazy to have loved so much sailing on this expedition, I just ask them a couple of questions: Have you seen bioluminescence or done some fishing in the middle of the Atlantic basin? Or have you ever had the chance to catch a movie under the stars in the middle of the Sea? Well, I had.  There are some great perks about sailing on the Brown. There is nothing as beautiful as lying on deck at night for the most spectacular stargazing sessions you will experience in this world.  There are unusual things that you will never see in your everyday life: like watching a double rainbow or the most impressive towering cumulonimbus cloud EVER at the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITZC). I also loved watching different marine life forms like the flying fishes, dolphins and squids (oh yeah, we saw squids!). Oh and the sunsets… sunsets that will take your breath away!….But the highest reward is this:  we get to do REAL science to solve REAL problems, such as improving the quality of satellite operations,   understanding the effects of aerosols in hurricane formation and intensification and learning how tropospheric ozone can be linked to global warming, among many other things. There is nothing that can top that!

Check out the full story, and picture gallery, here, and kudos to Oyola for such drawing a compelling portrait of science at sea. We talk about the need to communicate science, and we’ll talk more about it as the Annual Meeting approaches, but she’s set a strong example already.

National Climate Assessment Welcomes Your Comments

The US Global Change Research Program published its “US National Climate Assessment Objectives, Proposed Topics, and Next Steps” (also available here in html) in the 7 September 2010 issue of the Federal Register.
The program requests public comments on this document, which describes the objectives of the National Climate Assessment (NCA) process, provides an outline of the next NCA synthesis report (scheduled for publication in June 2013), and describes the next steps in planning for and implementing the NCA process.
Public comments on this document will be evaluated and, if appropriate, used to inform the NCA structure and process. Updates on the NCA structure and process will be posted on the NCA web site as they are available. Comments will also be provided to the Federal Advisory Committee for the NCA, the “National Climate Assessment Development and Advisory Committee,” when it is constituted this fall. All comments will be collated and posted on the NCA Web site.
Please submit comments here no later than 11:59 PM EST, October 8, 2010.