Atlanta 2010

Charting the Course of Arctic Warmth…and Oceanography

While many parts of the country have recently been experiencing conditions that residents might call “Arctic,” the Arctic region itself has been warming since at least the early 1990s, reaching warmth unprecedented in the last century. The consequences for global climate are potentially critical―particularly if fresh water from melting ice and increased atmospheric precipitation in the Arctic slow the overturning circulation of the North Atlantic. With Arctic sea ice melting dramatically in recent years, scientists  are trying to understand the influence of the warmer water that flows into the Arctic from the North Atlantic.
At the National Oceanography Centre (NOCS) in Southampton, United Kingdom, scientists using high-resolution computer models found that from 1989 to 2009, about 50% of the salty North Atlantic water entering the Arctic Ocean came through Fram Strait, a deep channel between Greenland and the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen that connects the Nordic Seas to the Arctic Ocean. The Barents Sea contributes about as much Atlantic water to the Arctic, but the Fram Strait water carried most of the heat that has been a primary cause of Arctic ice melting.
An example of the modeling in this study, published in the January 2010 issue of Journal of Marine Systems, can be seen in the image below, which shows a computer simulation of ocean temperatures at a depth of 100 meters and sea ice thickness in September 2006. The pathways of warm saline water toward the Arctic have previously been poorly understood, but here the 8-km resolution defines three distinct pathways for this water to move under the more pure Arctic water, thus pumping heat northward between 50 and 170 meters below the surface.
“Computers are now powerful enough to run multidecadal global simulations at high resolution,” said NOCS scientist Yevgeny Aksenov. “This helps to understand how the ocean is changing and to plan observational programs so as to make measurements at sea more efficient.”
Ocean-climate interactions are a primary focus of the ocean science research priorities recommended by the U.S. National Science and Technology Council’s Joint Subcommittee on Ocean Science and Technology (JSOST) in their 2007 report, “Charting the Course for Ocean Science in the United States for the Next Decade: An Ocean Research Priorities Plan and Implementation Strategy.” As our understanding continues to evolve regarding the ocean and its influence on the Earth system, the priorities outlined in this report have also evolved. A town hall meeting on “Refreshing Our Ocean Research Priorities” (Monday, 12:15–1:15 p.m., B212) at the upcoming AMS Annual Meeting will explore some of these developments and give participants a forum to discuss topics of interest with the chairs of JSOST.

arctic_sea_update

Have Your Cake and Communicate Better, Too

UPDATE, 1/16/10: Due to a last-minute change, David Schultz will not be able to attend the Annual Meeting and participate in the events discussed in this post. The AMS book launch party will be held as scheduled on Monday.
In the modern world of text messages, Tweets, and, yes, blogs, it’s easy for the craft of writing to be overlooked for the sake of immediacy, shock value, or just plain laziness. Indeed, time for eloquence increasingly seems like a luxury as technology makes communication more convenient and commonplace.
Thankfully, there are still defenders of the art; one of them, the University of Helsinki’s David Schultz, chief editor of Monthly Weather Review, has recently written a book

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Exposing Air Travel Radiation Concerns

The Space Weather Symposium at the AMS Annual Meeting once again will discuss the radiation exposure that airplane passengers get from outer space. This year the presentations in this area of space weather cover future suborbital flights as well (Tuesday, 1:30 p.m., B315).
A typical flight exposes airline passengers to minimal levels of extraterrestrial radiation; such occasional exposures are not considered harmful. The radiation concern is usually reserved for high-flying pilots who spend a lot of time in the air, especially on long polar routes, or for flights during a solar storm.
But one source of gamma rays and typical x-rays might indeed be quite problematic, though very rare, for ordinary air travelers. The radiation is not from outer space, but instead from Earth.
A research group led by Joe Dwyer, professor of physics and space sciences at Florida Institute of Technology, shows that terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs) produced by thunderclouds could expose nearby airplanes to a radiation dose of 10 rem. That’s about 400 chest X-rays, three CAT scans, or 7,500 hours of normal flight time, what the researchers describe as

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On Mars, the Dust Devil's in the Details

Discoveries about the atmospheres of other planets have been closely linked to insights about our own. When a young Carl Sagan confirmed the effect of high CO2 concentrations—a runaway greenhouse effect—on Venus in 1960, for instance, he helped intensify interest in potential anthropogenic warming on Earth.
Conversely, climate models, and now mesoscale weather models such as the WRF, developed for Earthly forecasting, are applied to modeling conditions elsewhere.  At the AMS’s first Symposium on Planetary Atmospheres in Atlanta, Scot Rafkin of the Southwest Research Institute will present, “Application of Mesoscale Atmospheric Models to Mars Missions” (Thursday, 11 a.m., B211). He’ll discuss how terrestrial weather models helped engineers anticipate landing conditions on the Red Planet as well as

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When Wars Are Hot, Crops Are Not

As if it weren’t enough to keep track of arms trafficking, political mischief, and ethnic tensions around the world, now international aid agencies and national security watchdogs are told they have to watch temperatures, too. An article last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences links warm years in West Africa with major civil conflicts (defined to include battle deaths of at least 1,000).
The authors, led by Marshall Burke, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley,  show that temperature has a stronger relationship to internal strife than typical indicators like per capita income or type of political regime. They predict more conflict in the region as the world warms.
Other studies, noting the centrality of rain-fed agriculture in West Africa, have identified precipitation as a regional security indicator. However, the new study shows that temperature may be an even better

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Walking through Problems of Urban Air Quality

Doctors tell us to get more exercise—walking is as good for the body as for the environment. But is it healthy to take a walk in neighborhoods where walking is actually practical? If Vancouver, British Columbia, is representative of most urban areas, then the answer is “no.”
A recent study in Environmental Health Perspectives found that areas that rate highly for both walkability and air quality house only about 2% of the city’s population (they tend to be high-income regions a few miles from downtown).
The nitric oxide and the resulting ozone from auto emissions tend to concentrate in different parts of the city: nitric acid is more pervasive downtown, because ozone takes longer to form and has often drifted from its city sources before reaching its greatest concentrations in the suburbs.
The authors suggest that living in high-rises have an unintended health benefit: they are usually in a walkable environment and also allow most residents to spend much of their time farther away from street-level emissions.
These roadway air quality problems can be quite serious. A new study of the Los Angeles area connects asthma in children with proximity to heavy-traffic areas, with 9% of all childhood asthma cases in Long Beach and 6% in Riverside attributable to living within 75 meters of a major road.
“The impact of roadway proximity on the overall burden of asthma-related illness is remarkable,” said principal investigator Rob McConnell of the University of Southern California. “Air pollution is a more important contributor to the burden of childhood asthma than is generally recognized, especially to more severe episodes requiring visits to a clinic or emergency room.”
The study in the American Journal of Public Health also highlighted the impact of shipping in the region—the Los Angeles-Long Beach port is the largest in the United States—by estimating that 21% of asthma-related bronchitis episodes in Long Beach (about 1,400 cases total) and 8% in Riverside (3,400 cases) were caused by nitrogen dioxide emitted by ships.
If the air is the problem, then meteorology may offer some of the solutions. In a poster to be presented Monday (2:30 pm; Environment and Health Symposium) at the AMS Annual Meeting, David Quesada will report on correlations between weather—including humidity, rain, and winds—and asthma in Miami, Florida, where residents suffer above-average asthma incidence.
With pollen and particulate data in hand, the project may identify ways to help residents live well in an urban environment—without necessarily building more high-rises.

Making a MoPED with Big Rigs

Speaking of the future of weather information along transportation corridors, one of the presenters in the Weather and Transportation sessions Monday (1:30 p.m.) is Brian Bell of Global Science & Technology, an exhibitor at the upcoming Annual Meeting. His topic is a project that will show NOAA how well the commercial trucking fleet can serve as an automated system to gather and report weather information on the road, just as airliners do in the air.
Last year at the AMS meeting GS&T demonstrated a novel mobile weather station with an inflatable satellite dish for easy deployment. But this fall the West Virginia company won the  9-month contract from NOAA to build the Mobile Platform Environmental Data observation network (MoPED). To learn more about the project before the Annual Meeting, see this article from the Times West Virginian.

Are Smarter, Safer Roads Good for Us?

It’s not often you hear that congested traffic arteries are good for you. But this is what you find in a thought-provoking recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal on managing traffic problems in an environmentally sustainable way:

Congestion isn’t an environmental problem; it’s a driving problem. If reducing it merely makes life easier for those who drive, then the improved traffic flow can actually increase the environmental damage done by cars, by raising overall traffic volume, encouraging sprawl and long car commutes. A popular effort to curb rush-hour congestion, freeway entrance ramp meters, is commonly seen as good for the environment. But they significantly decrease peak-period travel times—by 10% in Atlanta and 22% in Houston, according to studies in those cities—and lead to increases in overall vehicle volume. In Minnesota, ramp metering increased overall traffic volume by 9% and peak volume by 14%. The increase in traffic volume was accompanied by a corresponding increase in fuel consumption of 5.5 million gallons.

The author, David Owen, goes on to recommend solutions—part pricing and part planned scarcity—to maintain congestion while raising funds and demand for more sustainable urban transportation systems.
This counter-intuitive argument sets a good context for the Interactive Information and Processing Systems conference at the AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta. Much of Monday’s agenda for IIPS (and other conferences) focuses on the coming age of intelligent transportation—intelligent cars, roadways, and drivers based in part on ingenious means of collecting and using high resolution weather data. You’ll want to get a glimpse of this safer and more efficient future in Paul Pisano’s report on the “Clarus Regional Demonstration” project and other talks Monday starting at 11 a.m.
Because the presentations in Atlanta focus on engineering systems for more roadway efficiency, it would be disconcerting to think of them as contributing to the environmental morass rather than helping to solve it. But that would be an oversimplification of Owen’s essay as well as market-based solution in general. Don’t economists generally tell us that uninhibited flow of information helps balance markets? Better weather information may be the essence of economical solutions to the environmental dilemmas of roadway planning and use.
The talk that addresses congestion from a weather perspective most directly will be Monday afternoon. Ralph Patterson of Utah’s Department of Transportation will discuss results from a study of vehicle speed, spacing, and other factors in winter traffic last year. He also adds in psychological dimensions, looking at the way drivers respond to various forms of weather information. The fast growing state is looking for ways to decrease the $250 million annual costs of traffic congestion. This session should give us a glimpse at the myriad ways meteorologists can help improve an international urban quandary.