Editor: Jim Elliott
Contributor:Stephanie Kenitzer
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NASA’s Associate Administrator for Earth Science Ghassem Asrar testified before the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics on 10 May, saying, “We are now in the Earth Observing System (EOS) era.”
Describing the period as an “exciting time for the nation in earth science,” he pointed out that Landsat-7 already has completed the first update of the global archive of land cover data, returning high-quality images of the impact of Hurricane Floyd on the North Carolina coast, as well as the devastating floods in Mozambique.
The requests for Landsat data, he said, have increased from 5 to 10 scenes a day to about 100 scenes a day during the last year. The Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) is configured to receive, archive, and distribute more than 200 scenes a day, and it is keeping up with the demand, he explained.
“While pursuing our core earth science objectives,” he continued, “NASA is also applying satellite imagery and technology to generate the next great advances in weather, climate, and natural hazard prediction. All while demonstrating the use of data and information resulting from our missions in other practical applications, such as food and fiber production, water resources management, and natural resources inventory.
“As our national economy and population grows, so does our stake in future Earth system changes. As a larger percentage of Americans move to the coasts, and as more resources are invested in coastal cities, more lives and livelihoods are at risk from severe storms. As the productivity of American agriculture grows, more dollars are at risk in choices based on expected seasonal rainfall. In addition, decision-makers are looking for a scientifically objective assessment of the nature and directions of climate change.”
To describe the progress and benefits of earth science research and characterizing NASA’s Earth Science Enterprise (ESE), Asrar cited several examples:
He said scientists now have established that the phase of El Niño has significant effects on weather in the United States and around the world, affecting agricultural productivity and probabilities of flooding and droughts. Being able to forecast El Niño conditions is a major advance. Pointing out how the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite, launched in 1997 in partnership with Japan, has helped to provide improved estimates of global precipitation, he said the next great advance will come from NASA’s Aqua satellite, to be launched in 2001. It will measure the atmosphere’s temperature and humidity with unprecedented accuracy, he explained, providing a key to understanding the global water cycle.
One of the main focuses of ESE is “to characterize the natural and human-induced forcings of the earth system in order to understand the causes and effects of climate change,” said Asrar. Examples of natural forces on climate, he said, are the sun and volcanoes. We know a lot about aerosols and greenhouse gases, he said, but less about the role they play, especially how they interact with clouds, and he wants to increase the knowledge in that area.
“The Antarctic ozone hole is one of the best documented phenomena that has been clearly tied to human impacts on the environment,” he said. While no such hole has developed over the Arctic, he explained, the current March ozone amounts over the Arctic are now similar to those observed over Antarctica around the time that the ozone hole began forming. Several things are being done to improve knowledge in this area, he said, and ESE will continue its research partnership with the U. S. Global Change Research Program and in the broader scientific community.
Three other witnesses representing the commercial remote sensing industry also testified at the hearing. They were James J. Frelk, vice president, Geospatial Information Systems, Veridian Erim International; Dr. Michael F. Goodchild, director, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Jim Pagliasotti, director, Government Relations, Aerospace States Association (ASA).
Frelk testified that over the past 10 years the commercial remote sensing industry has grown into a $3–$5 billion a year operation. To date, he said, Wall Street and private industry have invested more than $1.2 billion investors in new commercial satellite imaging ventures, beginning with Ikonos. Four new commercial satellites—EROS, QuickBird1, and OrbView 3 and 4—are expected to be launched within the next 10 months.
Pagliasotti suggested the committee might consider a State and Local Communities Geospatial Data Initiative, with minimum funding of $50 million over a period of 5–7 years. “What ASA proposes…is to work with NASA to identify and validate ‘best practices’ for using remote sensing technology to populate the framework data layers, whose performance specifications require commercial solutions,” he said.
During questioning, Asrar said in the next decade NASA would launch 26 satellites that will observe “practically every aspect of earth” and that the agency plans to focus on information delivery.
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According to an article in the 26 May 2000 Washington Post, former Commerce Department inspector General Francis D. DeGeorge pleaded guilty to a criminal conflict-of-interest charge. The charge stems from job discussions DeGeorge had with a government contractor providing services to the National Weather Service.
Prosecutors said DeGeorge was exploring job prospects at Litton PRC Inc., which had a contract to update the National Weather Service’s automated weather forecast system, while overseeing Litton PRC’s work with the agency. DeGeorge pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge that could carry up to a year in prison and a maximum of $100 000 fine, according to the Post.
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NOAA’s National Weather Service has awarded a 5-year, $32.4 million contract to Science Applications International Corp (SAIC) to provide technical services to its National Data Buoy Center at Stennis Space Center, Mississippi.
SAIC, with headquarters in San Diego, will provide comprehensive technical services in the areas of engineering, operations, data quality, information technology, property, transportation, quality assurance, safety, and environmental compliance, among other technical support, officials said.
The buoy center is responsible for developing, operating, and maintaining a network of 68-moored buoy and 56 Coastal-Marine Automated Network (C-MAN) stations in the deep ocean and coastal zone.
These stations measure barometric pressure, wind speed, direction and gusts, air and sea surface temperatures and wave heights.
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Four U.S. companies have won the 2000 George M. Low Award, NASA’s highest honor for quality and technical performance.
Advanced Technologies Inc., Newport News, Virginia, received the award for small-business product, and Jackson & Tull, Aerospace Engineering Division, Seabrook, Maryland, received the award for small-business service. Computer Sciences Corp., NASA Programs Division, Lanham-Seabrook, Maryland, was this year’s winner in the large-business category, and the Boeing Company, Delta II Launch Division, Huntington Beach, California, took the award for large-business product.
The awards were given at the 15th Annual NASA Continual Improvement and Reinvention Conference on Quality Management in Alexandria, Virginia, in April.
Goldin also presented the 1999 QASAR (Quality and Safety Achievement Recognition) Award to four individuals for their significant improvements to products or services for NASA. They were David B. King, chief, Safety, Health and Medical Service Office, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California; Greg S. Breznik, Electrical Systems Division, Kennedy Space Center, Florida; Steven Cronk, chief, Air Force Flight Research Center, Edwards Air Force Base, California (non-NASA category); and Christopher S. Strong, AverStar, Inc., Burlington, Massachusetts (contractor employee).
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The 4-month period of January–April this year was the warmest January–April period on record in the United States in 106 years of record keeping, according to statistics calculated by scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.
The preliminary data indicate that nearly 70% of the country was much warmer than normal, while less than 1% of the country was much cooler than normal. The average temperature of 44.3°F was .3°F over the second warmest January–April, which occurred in 1990. Nevada had its second warmest April; Arizona its third warmest; New Mexico and Utah their sixth warmest.
Based on preliminary precipitation data, January–April 2000 ranked near the long-term mean. About 8% of the country was much wetter than normal, while about 3% of the country was much drier than normal. It was the driest April on record for Missouri. Conversely, it was the sixth wettest April on record for Vermont and the seventh wettest April for New York.
Global land and ocean temperatures continued to average well above the 1880–1999 long-term mean in April. The average temperature anomaly for both land and ocean surfaces was 0.51°C, slightly cooler than the record warm temperatures recorded during the 1998 El Niño episode. Sea surface temperatures averaged 0.35°C above the long-term mean, the sixth warmest April since 1880. The much warmer than average global temperatures were largely due to a continuation of the extremely warm conditions observed over Northern Hemisphere land surfaces.
The global land temperature anomaly was 1.01°C in April, second only to the 1.27°C anomaly recorded in 1998. The warm Northern Hemisphere temperatures reported through surface-based observations are consistent with satellite observations of lower tropospheric temperatures (from the surface to 8 km above the earth's surface).
Scientists from the Global Hydrology and Climate Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville report that although April global temperatures for the lower troposphere were near-normal (-0.01°C below the 1979–98 average), temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were much warmer than the 20-year average. The Northern Hemisphere temperature was +0.19°C above average, while temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere were -0.21°C cooler than the April average. Temperatures were particularly warm in the Northern Extratropics (north of 20° north latitude), where the average April temperature was +0.52°C above average, the third warmest April on record.
The statistics for the United States and the globe are online at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ol/climate/research/2000/apr/apr00.html
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According to the latest forecast released on 17 May by NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) there is both good and bad news for drought-stricken areas of the United States.
The good news is La Niña, the climate phenomenon responsible for bringing drought conditions to some parts of the nation for the past two years, is expected to continue diminishing for the next several months. The bad news is above-normal temperatures, which speed up the evaporation of precipitation and soil moisture, are forecast to affect drought-weary states for the rest of the spring into summer.
In its first-ever drought forecast released in March, the NWS predicted the hardest hit areas would be southern Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, and Georgia in the south, and Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana in the central United States.
With its latest forecast, meteorologists still expect severe to extreme drought conditions to persist in Florida, Georgia, central west Texas, north Arkansas, southern Louisiana, southern Mississippi, southern and eastern Alabama, and western South Carolina.
Severe drought conditions will also persist in Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Indiana and Illinois. The summer forecast favors below normal precipitation and warmer than normal temperatures - a combination that will lead to a worsening drought.
The drought on the leeward areas of Hawaii will also persist. In New Mexico, where 250 000 acres have been scorched from 1 January to 10 May, only predicted monsoon rains in July might bring relief to the parched landscape.
In drought-impacted states, even when substantial rains appear, hot weather dashes any benefits. For example, in early May when areas near St. Louis were drenched by 8–14 inches of rain, high temperatures evaporated much of the precipitation not lost by runoff, and any chance of relief for Missouri, which is still 11 inches below normal precipitation.
For states such as Louisiana, which has been its driest on record since May 1998, and Georgia, the second driest on record, last week's surging temperatures worsened drought conditions. The forecast calls for more of the same.
The latest drought forecast, the National Drought Commission report, and information on drought forecasting, is available online at http://www.drought.noaa.gov.
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NOAA and FEMA officials predict that the United States can look forward to a harsh hurricane season this year, with an above average number of tropical storms and at least three severe hurricanes. An above-average hurricane season typically brings 11 or more tropical storms, of which seven or more become hurricanes, with three or more classified as major. (A major hurricane packs maximum sustained winds surpassing 110 mph and is classified at Category 3 or above on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.)
In a press conference on 10 May, NOAA Administrator D. James Baker and FEMA Director James Lee Witt both warned that citizens in the Caribbean and along the East Coast of the United States should be prepared and urged them to take precautions that can save lives and reduce property damage.
“The greatest influences in this forecast continue to be the ongoing La Niña and a lesser-known climate phenomenon of warmer than normal Atlantic Ocean temperatures that affect hurricane activity over very long timescales,” said Baker. “During last year’s hurricane season, La Niña was bold and clearly defined and gave forecasters more certainty. This year, La Niña’s end is in sight.” (NASA announced that its satellite data show that “the La Niña has disappeared entirely in the eastern Pacific Ocean and is rapidly disappearing over the rest of the Pacific).
However, even as La Niña fades in August (as the current forecast suggests), La Niña’s remnants and other influences still will likely bring more storms than usual, Baker said. These influences already have established a global-scale atmospheric circulation pattern ripe for hurricane activity by contributing to lower wind shear, a more favorable midlevel jet stream from Africa, lower surface-air pressure, and warmer ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic, he explained.
Witt said that recent polls conducted for FEMA show that many Americans “underestimate the very real dangers posed by hurricanes. The new data indicate that while people believe that there is a real threat posed by hurricanes, many Americans, especially in the South and mid-Atlantic regions, have not taken the basic steps necessary to prevent a disaster from hitting home. We cannot prevent the weather, but we can prevent the damage.”
The polls showed that a large number of those questioned “failed to know the key factors they could take for protecting themselves. Only one in three could cite a single action they could take except buy plywood,” he said. He said most homeowners could hurricane proof their homes with expenditures of between $2000 and $3000.
During the press conference, Baker announced the appointment of Max Mayfield, a veteran National Weather Service hurricane meteorologist, as director of the NWS National Hurricane Center in Miami (see related story). He has been acting director since last December when the former director Jerry Jarrell retired.
Last year, there were 12 named storms, with five (Hurricanes Bret, Floyd, and Irene and Tropical Storms Dennis and Harvey), striking the U.S. mainland and claiming 60 lives. Since 1995, there have been 41 hurricanes, 20 of which were major.
The Atlantic hurricane season opens 1 June and ends 30 November. Another outlook will be issued in August, officials said.
Under questioning, Baker said he sees no clear relationship between global warning and the recent increased incidence of tropical storms.
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NOAA’s P-3 Orion “Hurricane Hunter” aircraft was damaged on 2 May during severe weather that hit southern and southeastern Texas.
The aircraft, participating in a hurricane awareness tour of the Gulf states with representatives from the National Hurricane Center, was parked at Scholes Field, Galveston International Airport, when a microburst, or sudden surge in wind, struck the airport, destroying five light aircraft that were parked near the P-3. Debris from those aircraft hit the P-3, damaging the radar dome on the tail and the left elevator. In addition, strong winds damaged the plane’s rudder and vertical stabilizer.
Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, other center officials, and the crew of the P-3 flew commercial airlines to continue the hurricane awareness briefings at Gulfport, Mississippi, and Tallahassee and Fort Myers, Florida.
The P-3 will remain in Galveston until a team of Navy P-3 experts from the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, is able to assess and repair the damage.
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FEMA is launching a first-of-its-kind public service campaign to educate residents along the Eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast about hurricane safety and damage prevention.
Known as the National Hurricane Survival Initiative, the campaign is designed to provide residents with information they need to better protect their homes and families through a half-hour television special—the National Hurricane Survival Test. The program was scheduled to begin airing in late May and continue through the summer on more than 30 stations along the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast.
The half-hour show challenges viewers to test their knowledge of the storms and provides the information they need to keep themselves, their families, and homes safe from a hurricane’s destructive power.
The campaign is in line with FEMA’s initiative, Project Impact: Building Disaster Resistant Communities. Created in 1997 with seven pilot communities, it has grown to nearly 200 communities and more than 1000 business partners.
The campaign, coming on the heels of a FEMA-sponsored poll revealing that many citizens underestimate the risks involved with hurricanes, is being sponsored by FEMA, the Salvation Army, the National Emergency Management Association, and Caradco Wood Windows (a manufacturer offering impact-resistant glass in its windows and patio doors).
The poll, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Bertrand Associates in April and May, queried more than 1200 residents of coastal states from Massachusetts south along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts to Texas. The poll was conducted to gauge residents’ knowledge of storm safety and damage prevention.
The poll showed:
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Airborne black soot has the capacity to raise regional temperatures far more than carbon dioxide and is a major contributor to global climate change, according to researchers at NASA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in a paper published in the 12 May issue of the journal Science.
According to the research team, the intense sunlight of the Tropics heats the soot present in polluted air. The heating burns off the flat tops of shallow cumulus clouds for hundreds of miles downwind of pollution sources. With less cloud cover reflecting sunlight back to space, there is increased solar energy that reaches the earth’s surface and the lower atmosphere, and this can significantly heat the atmosphere and oceans, according to the findings.
“Aerosol can increase or decrease cloudiness, depending on the weather and the particular ingredients of the pollution,” said Andy Ackerman, lead author of the paper and scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, California. “This newly discovered mechanism amounts to a heating effect over the Indian Ocean that is three to five times as strong as the global effect of increases in carbon dioxide since preindustrial times.”
The research team used measurements of the dark haze covering vast areas of the Indian Ocean during the dry monsoon in February–March 1998 and 1999 as input to a sophisticated computer model of tropical clouds. To their surprise, they found the cloud-burning effect of soot in the haze to be much stronger than the globally averaged greenhouse effect due to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the 1800s.
Only the soot component of pollution causes this newly discovered, cloud-burning effect. Prior research on aerosol-cloud-climate effects focused largely on other ingredients of aerosol pollution. These components were found to increase cloudiness and oppose greenhouse warming. This occurred because increased amounts of water-soluble aerosols produce more numerous and smaller cloud droplets, which reflect sunlight more efficiently and are less likely to result in rain.
“While this is an important finding, we should recognize that it is a theoretical-model calculation which must be tested against actual measurements,” said V. Ramanathan, coauthor of the paper and director of the Center for Clouds, Chemistry and Climate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “Much additional work remains to be completed.”
In addition to Ackerman and Ramanathan, the authors include O. Brian Toon, University of Colorado; D.E. Stevens, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; A. J. Heymsfield, National Center for Atmospheric Research, and E.J. Welton, Science Systems and Applications.
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Between 22 May and 15 July, scientists are scanning the skies for lightning and supercell storms from a host of high-tech platforms in the High Plains near Goodland, Kansas. Their tools include storm-chasing vehicles, radars, and an armored research aircraft. The Severe Thunderstorm Electrification and Precipitation Study (STEPS-2000) is the largest effort to date to study lightning and low-precipitation storms.
The effort is a joint initiative by The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the National Weather Service (NWS), the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), Colorado State University (CSU), the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMIMT), and the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSMT). NCAR researchers Morris Weisman and Jay Miller and CSU's Steve Rutledge are directing field operations.
STEPS-2000 is based at the NWS office in Goodland, Kansas, and at an operations center near Burlington, Colorado. The study area—along the semipermanent dry line that marks the west edge of Tornado Alley—has one of the nation's highest frequencies of positive cloud-to-ground lightning, a primary research focus during STEPS-2000.
STEPS-2000 will be the largest research effort to date focused on lightning, and tornado forecasters may benefit from the effort. Low-precipitation storms produce more than their share of positive cloud-to-ground strikes. Recent studies at NSSL have found several cases in which a storm's predominant cloud-to-ground strikes suddenly shifted from positive to negative within minutes of tornado formation. A shift may be a good indicator of when a violent tornado might appear in some storms. If scientists can follow a storm as it produces a tornado, the link between a storm's electrical behavior and microphysics should become clearer, and that knowledge could translate in the future into better tornado forecasting.
A combination of radar systems will be used to determine the internal flow and precipitation structure of target storms. Two special research radars brought in just for STEPS-2000 will join an NWS Doppler radar based at Goodland. Chase vehicles will collect hail and observe meteorological conditions and precipitation directly beneath storms. The T-28, an armored aircraft that can survive golf-ball size hailstones, will probe storms at altitudes up to 20 000 feet, and two weather-balloon vans will launch weather balloons carrying disposable devices that will radio data to the operations center about environmental conditions on either side of the dry line.
A lightning mapping system will detect up to 10 000 energy pulses per second to plot the three-dimensional distribution of lightning. In addition special instruments will measure electric fields inside the storms. Scientists will use the National Lightning Detection Network to track the location and polarity of cloud-to-ground strikes and the CSU flat plate antenna network to quantify intracloud discharges.
STEPS organizers plan to update lightning data on a real-time weather Web site every minute to help researchers track the storms on radar and in the aircraft. They will also use the site to post STEPS weather-balloon data, which, along with satellite images and other observations from the national operational systems, will be used to "nowcast" weather conditions in the study area.
Additional information on STEPS-2000 is available on the Internet at http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/pdas/steps-science.html .
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DOE’s Los Alamos Blue Mountain supercomputer recently set a world record, running 17.8 years of equivalent single-processor computing in 72 hours.
The Blue Mountain system, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers with a peak speed of three trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS), simulates nuclear physics for DOE’s Stockpile Stewardship Program to ensure the continued safety, reliability, and performance of the nation’s nuclear stockpile without underground testing.
The engineering calculations analyzed thousands of variables to simulate how well a nuclear weapon and its key components would survive upon impact with the ground. During the three-day period, more than 15 000 engineering simulations that required 10 hours each were executed across 31 of Blue Mountain’s 48 SGIT OriginT 2000 servers, or 65% of the entire machine. Each of the servers contains 128 processors.
The Blue Mountain record-breaking run is a “great achievement,” said Paul Messina, who heads DOE’s Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. “This is significant progress in the Energy Department’s efforts to capitalize on its scientific resources to assess and certify the nation’s stockpile without underground nuclear testing.”
The United States suspended underground nuclear testing in 1992 and established the Stockpile Stewardship Program in 1995 to monitor continuously the condition of America’s nuclear weapons stockpile, assess the findings, and perform maintenance and refurbishment as needed.
Lance Hill and Dick Macek, both of the Engineering Analysis Group in the Engineering Sciences and Applications Division of the laboratory, operated by the University of California for DOE, headed the team performing the calculations at Los Alamos.
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Three-time NASCAR Winston Cup Series champion Darrell Waltrip is teaming with federal weather experts to prevent motorists from driving across flooded roadways. The group unveiled a special public service video on 26 May at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte, North Carolina.
According to the National Weather Service (NWS), floods are responsible for more deaths each year than any other weather-related phenomena, and of these fatalities, about half (more than 50 annually) are caused when people try to drive through flooded roadways.
In the 30-second video, Waltrip stresses the dangers of driving across flooded roads. The video was provided to television stations across the country via a satellite feed. Waltrip is encouraging the media to air the spot to spread the safety message.
"If I can help the National Weather Service prevent even one flood-related death, I'd consider this public service effort a great success," Waltrip said. "Water can be deceptive, especially at night, and all it takes is a few inches to cause a crash or carry your car or truck downstream," Waltrip cautions the viewer. "Take it from me, protect your family. Steer clear of flooded areas."
According to NWS, the United States experienced 24 605 flash floods over the last 10 years causing about 100 fatalities each year. "Of these fatalities, 52% were vehicle related," said NWS Deputyr Director John Jones, who noted that the weather service provided warning of these floods with an average lead time of 43 minutes over the last five years.
For information on obtaining a copy of the video contact Greg Hernandez or Gene Louden in NOAA Public Affairs at (202) 482-6090.
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Three massive icebergs have broken off from the Ronne Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, according to the National Ice Center in Suitland, Maryland, a tri-agency activity with representation from the U.S. Navy, NOAA, and the U.S. Coast Guard.
The dimensions and locations of the icebergs are:
A-43A 107x21 statute miles (168x33km) centered at 7510°S 05858°W
A-43B 53x23 statute miles (84x35km) centered at 7657°S 05513°W
A-44 41x20 statute miles (60x32km) centered at 7624°W 05326°W
Iceberg A-43 was detected by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's infrared imagery on 5 May and is believed to have calved from the Ronne Ice Shelf sometime during the afternoon or evening of 4 May. A-44 calved in the afternoon or evening of 6 May, at or near the time that A-43 broke in half, officials said.
Iceberg names are derived from the Antarctic quadrant in which they were originally sighted. The quadrants are divided counterclockwise in the following manner:
A: 0–90°W longitude (Bellinghausen/Weddell Sea).
B: 90°W–180° (Amundsen/Eastern Ross Sea)
C: 180°–90°E (Western Ross Sea/Wilkesland)
D: 90°E–0 (Amery/Eastern Weddell Sea)
When an iceberg is first sighted, the National Ice Center documents its point of origin. The letter of the quadrant, along with a sequential number, is assigned to each iceberg. For example, A-44 is the 44th iceberg the center has found in Quadrant A.
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When the former Soviet Union disbanded in the early 1990s, it also signaled the end to the collection of some weather and climate data from the Arctic. But an international team of scientists, including some from NOAA, are working to close that gap with the establishment of a research camp at the North Pole this month to gather data during a five-year project to learn how that area of the world affects global climate.
"The former Soviet Union used to have manned ice camps from about 1958 to the early 1990s that would float out there on the ice collecting weather data," said James Overland, meteorologist and oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington. "But since the Soviet Union disbanded and the camps were abandoned, there's been a gap in the observations."
"Since about 1989, it looks like the atmospheric circulation has changed and there is less ice," Overland explained. "We need to take measurements to compare with the measurements that the Russians made in the past. What's exciting about this North Pole project is that we'll have instruments in place to take measurements."
Overland said that NOAA and the laboratory's role is to install the meteorological stations that will be used to study climate change as it is affected by the Arctic Oscillation. The Arctic Oscillation, an atmospheric circulation of the Northern Hemisphere, is centered over the North Pole.
Instead of having humans stationed at the North Pole, these weather instruments will sit on ice flows about two to three meters (about six to nine feet) thick.
One of the instruments is a radiometer that will measure long-wave radiation from the clouds and short-wave radiation from the sun. Overland described it as a "mini R2D2," the bullet-shaped robot that appeared in the "Star Wars" films.
“It's a canister about two-feet high, and its top rolls over once an hour. The sensors are then exposed for about a minute to take readings and then return to the canister to prevent the build up of ice crystals that could affect its operation," Overland said.
NOAA scientists are also installing a weather station to measure wind temperature, speed and direction, and an instrument to measure ice thickness. "In the summer the ice and snow melts, and it makes the ice thinner. In the winter, it grows on the bottom and makes it thicker," Overland said. The plan is to put out new instruments every year because they are installed on ice flows, which drift away.”
By the end of May, the laboratory plans to have a Web site where those interested in a weather report from the North Pole can do so from the comfort, and warmth, of their own homes.
For more information on the North Pole project, visit http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/index.html
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Last month's FCC ruling, requiring television broadcasters to visually display critical emergency messages on television broadcasts for hearing impaired viewers, is a big step that potentially will save more lives when severe weather threatens a community.
In a country impacted by 1000 tornadoes, 10 000 thunderstorms and 2500 floods each year, having more effective ways to issue severe weather warnings will benefit the 28 million Americans who are hearing impaired, said Jack J. Kelly, National Weather Service director.
Under the FCC ruling, hearing-impaired audiences will receive tornado, hurricane, and flash flood warnings sooner than when the new closed-caption requirement goes into effect, which likely could take several years. Another feature of the FCC ruling requires emergency information, not provided through closed captioning, to be aired through a text scroll or crawl on the screen. The FCC said this rule will apply regardless of whether the need to air the emergency information occurs during a regularly scheduled newscast, an unscheduled break during regular programming, or as part of continuing news coverage of an event.
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Combining techniques developed by Leonardo da Vinci and today’s computer applications, an artist and two scientists at USGS have produced what it describes as “one of the most dramatic and beautiful maps of the United States ever published.”
Titled “A Tapestry of Time and Terrain,” the map weaves together in vivid colors and shadings the topographical and geological components of the lower 48 states, as well as the geologic age of those components, officials said.
The union of topographic texture with the patterns defined by units of geologic time creates a visual synthesis that has escaped most prior attempts to combine shaded relief with a second characteristic shown by color, according to USGS. By mutually enhancing the landscape and its underlying structure, the map outlines the geologic story of continental collision and break-up, mountain building, river erosion and deposition, glaciation, volcanism, and other events that have shaped the region over the last 2.6 billion years.
The new shaded-relief image is made up of 12 million tiny squares, each about one-hundredth of an inch, or a fourth of a millimeter, on each side.
The second component of the map, color, represents geologic time, with 52 colors used to depict rocks that range in age from the Precambrian, 2.6 billion years ago, through the Holocene, which includes time from about 10 000 years ago. The orderly sequence of earth materials, from oldest to youngest, is represented by an equally well-ordered sequence of prismatic colors, based on the rainbow. The youngest parts of the nation, such as coastal areas and the great valleys of the West, are depicted by gray and beige, while greens, yellows, and oranges depict the middle-aged areas that were formed in the Cretaceous and Tertiary ages, between 144 and 2 million years ago.
The winding course of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon is marked by a vivid contrast in pattern and color. A narrow ribbon of red cuts through a field of blue as it differentiates the ancient granites and titled metamorphic rocks (2.6 billion years ago) along the river’s banks, from the younger, overlying Paleozoic (560–245 million years ago) sedimentary rocks in the canyon walls and at the rim.
Rising from the Great Plains in eastern Wyoming and western South Dakota, the Black Hills are conspicuous by the red outcrop of Precambrian granite. Other outcrops of this ancient rock are seen in parts of the Rocky Mountains and occasional ridge crests in the basin and range province of Nevada and Arizona.
The most distinctive feature of the far West is California’s Great Central Valley.
Created by Jose Vigil, Richard Pike, and David Howell, the map is available over the counter at the USGS Earth Science Information Centers in Menlo Park, California; Spokane, Washington; Denver, Colorado, and Reston, Virginia, for $7. It can be ordered by calling 1-888-ASK-USGS (275-8747). It can be previewed at http://tapestry.usgs.gov/.
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A series of 25-mile cracks along the edge of the continental shelf 100 miles east of Virginia Beach and the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay have raised concern that they might cause an Atlantic tsunami, the large destructive waves that have terrorized Japan and areas of the Pacific for centuries.
If the cracks are moving, they could be the beginning of underwater landslides that cause tsunamis, according to a report in the May issue of Geology Magazine.
Scientists estimate that a landslide from the cracks could send a 20-foot-high wave hurtling toward the area’s beaches. The Virginia Beach–Norfolk–Newport News area, with 1.5 million people, would be the closest to the origin point of the wave, but flood waters could push up the Chesapeake Bay and Potomac River and inundate waterfronts in Annapolis, Maryland; Washington, D.C.; Alexandria, Virginia, and other low-lying areas, according to the article.
Researchers pointed out that a tsunami—which means “harbor wave” in Japanese—is hard to anticipate or predict. When an earthquake or landslide trigger a fast-moving series of waves spread out across a broad path, they are barely detectable on the surface until the waves reach shallow water.
A tsunami can move at speeds up to 450 miles an hour in the open ocean and rise to 100 feet approaching shore, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Tsunamis are not unprecedented on the North Atlantic coast. A 40-foot wave slammed into Newfoundland, killing 51 people, in 1929.
“If a massive landslide occurred this close to the coast, you would only have about 20-minute warning,” said Jeffrey K. Weissel, of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and a member of the research team. Weissel and other members of the team planned to take a closer look at the potential slide area, using new sonar equipment. If the cracks are recent, he said, monitoring equipment will be installed to see whether they are moving.
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Eleven national NOAA Weather Radio Mark Trail Award winners were honored in Washington on 10 May at a luncheon in the Russell Senate Office Building.
The winners all received a framed Mark Trail comic strip by its creator, Jack Elrod. NOAA Administrator D. James Baker, who presided over the presentations, paid tribute to Elrod, who, for 40 years, has been using the comic strip to drive home messages of being prepared, playing it safe, and taking appropriate action. His work, Baker explained, epitomizes the essential themes underscored in the Mark Trail Awards—public safety and partnership.
John Sokich, of National Weather Service, served as master of ceremonies for the luncheon, sponsored by the AMS, Midland Consumer Radio Inc., Oregon Scientific Inc., Radio Shack, Topaz3 & Maxon America Inc., and Wireless Marketing Corporation. Richard Hallgren, executive director emeritus of AMS, outlined progress that had been made in the development of the NOAA Radio program, and NWS Director John Kelly Jr. emphasized the importance of the program in saving lives and reducing property damage.
Awards presented at the luncheon in Washington were:
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GOES-11, the nation’s latest weather satellite, has sent back its first image from space. Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on 3 May, the satellite sent back a clear, crisp image from its geostationary vantage point 22 300 miles in space. Launched as GOES-L, it was renamed GOES-11 in orbit on 11 May. GOES-11 will be stored in orbit and will replace either GOES-8 or GOES-10 as needed.
Space Systems/Loral, a subsidiary of Loral Space and Communications, Ltd, built the satellite. It was launched on an Atlas IIA rocket, built by Lockheed Martin.
The first image is available on the Internet at NOAA http://www.osei.noaa.gov and click onto Current Events, or at NASA http://pao.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/earth/goesl/goesl.htm.
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New insights from satellites in space may help health officials predict outbreaks of the deadly water-borne cholera, a bacterial infection of the small intestine that can be fatal to humans.
Scientist have learned how to use satellites to track blooms of tiny floating plant and animal plankton that carry cholera bacteria by using satellite data on ocean temperatures, sea height, and other climate variables, according to a paper coauthored by University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) and NASA researchers that appeared in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The experiments fulfill our hypothesis that cholera is associated with environmental conditions,” said Dr. Rita Colwell, founder and former director of UMBI and now director of the National Science Foundation. She currently is on leave of absence from the University of Maryland and is coauthor of the cholera-tracking project paper.
The authors found that rising sea temperatures and ocean height near the coast of Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal from 1992 to 1995 often preceded sudden growth, or “blooms,” of plankton and outbreaks of cholera. Similar application of risk analysis developed by NASA using satellite data also has been used in the study of diseases such as malaria, Lyme disease, and Rift Valley fever.
“When such a model for Bangladesh is extended to the global scale, it may serve as an early warning system, enabling effective deployment of resources to minimize or prevent cholera epidemics in cholera-endemic regions,” according to Brad Lobitz, principal author of the paper and a contract scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, California.
The scientists correlated years of hospital cholera records from Bangladesh with sea temperature and ocean height data that came from a variety of satellites and surface observations.
Satellites not only can measure water temperature and ocean height, but also can measure colors that indicate plankton and chlorophyll over a large sea area, Lobitz explained. Sea height is important, he said, because tides reach farther inland to affect more people who may drink or bathe in brackish water carrying cholera.
“Bangladesh is very low and flat, and tidal effects are felt almost half way up into the country,” said coauthor Louisa Beck of California State University at Monterey Bay and a resident scientist at Ames.
The effort was a cooperative project between NASA’s Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications and UMBI. The study also was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Other authors include Byron Wood, Ames; Anwar Huq, UMBI; and George Fuchs and A.S.G. Faruque, the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh.
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On 9 May NOAA awarded a $9.6 million contract to AlliedSignal Technical Services Corporation, of Columbia, Maryland. The contract is for engineering services in support of NOAA's environmental satellites.
The primary purpose of the contract is to provide engineering services to the NOAA Office of Satellite Operations in Suitland, Maryland, to support the safe and effective operation of NOAA's environmental satellites.
NOAA's environmental satellite system is composed of two types of satellites: geostationary operational environmental satellites (GOES) for national, regional, short-range warning, and "now-casting;" and polar-orbiting environmental satellites (POES) for global, long-term forecasting. Both kinds of satellites are necessary for providing a complete global weather monitoring system. GOES satellites provide the kind of continuous monitoring necessary for intensive data analysis. They circle the earth in a geosynchronous orbit, which means they orbit the equatorial plane of the earth at a speed matching the earth's rotation. This allows them to hover continuously over one position above the surface, thus monitoring, for example, the path of hurricanes.
Complementing the geostationary satellites are two polar-orbiting satellites. Constantly circling the earth in sun-synchronous orbit, these satellites support large-scale, long-range forecasts, and numerous secondary missions. The polar orbiters monitor the entire earth, tracking atmospheric variables and providing atmospheric data and cloud images. The satellites provide visible and infrared radiometer data for imaging purposes, radiation measurements, and temperature and moisture profiles. The polar orbiters' ultraviolet sensors also measure ozone levels in the atmosphere and are able to detect the "ozone hole" over Antarctica from mid-September to mid-November.
The engineering support contract was awarded for an initial 1-year period of performance with options to extend performance for three additional 1-year periods. AlliedSignal Technical Services Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International, Inc.
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AMS member Robert H. Kraichnan, president and principal investigator of Robert H. Kraichnan, Inc., in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is among 60 new members and 15 foreign associates from nine countries recently elected to membership in the Academy of Sciences.
The election was held 2 May during the business session of the 137th annual meeting of the Academy in Washington, D.C. Members are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Election to membership in the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer. This election brought the total number of active members to 1843. Foreign associates are nonvoting members, with citizenship outside the United States. There are 320 foreign associates as a result of this election.
Also elected to membership this year was Dr. Rita Colwell, director, National Science Foundation.
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Max Mayfield, a long-time hurricane forecaster, was named the new director of the National Weather Service's (NWS) National Hurricane Center on 15 May. Mayfield will oversee a team of hurricane forecasters, specialists, and technical personnel at the Center's headquarters in Miami.
Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Jack Kelly, director of the NWS, said Mayfield possesses the unique qualities vital to lead the Center. "He knows every link in the critical process of hurricane predictions. He understands the science of hurricanes and the science of communicating the threat of hurricanes, which will help communities in danger of a land-falling storm take necessary safety precautions."
Kelly added, "Max typifies the weather forecasters of our country who work around the clock to keep people safe." Mayfield, who has been the acting director since December 1999, when the former director Jerry Jarrell retired, began his forecasting career with the Air Force in 1970 after graduating from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in mathematics. In 1972, Mayfield joined the National Weather Service as a satellite meteorologist in Miami.
The Oklahoma native earned his master's degree in meteorology at The Florida State University in 1987, and then became a hurricane specialist. Since 1988, Mayfield has written half of the Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific annual hurricane summaries, published in Monthly Weather Review and Weatherwise.
In 1996, Mayfield, a favorite among emergency managers in hurricane-prone regions, was awarded the AMS Francis W. Reichelderfer Award for exemplary performance as coordinator of the center's hurricane preparedness presentations to emergency managers and the general public.
Mayfield said his goal is to help improve the warning lead times and increase the center's understanding of the tracks and intensity of hurricanes.
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Edward J. Heffernan has been named Chief of Staff at NASA Headquarters. NASA Administrator Dan Goldin announced the appointment on 28 April, noting that ”Ed Heffernan brings a wealth of policy and legislative experience to this important role.”
As Chief of Staff, Heffernan will continue in his role as head of the agency’s legislative affairs and also will coordinate all staff activities in the immediate office of the administrator.
Hefffernan joined NASA in April 1994 as a legislative policy specialist for he Space Station Information Center. He also served as Senior Advisor for Intergovernmental Affairs in the Office of Policy and Plans, White House Liaison, and Associate Administrator for Legislative Affairs.
Prior to joining NASA, he had been a consultant in Washington, D.C. and, from 1987 to 1992, he served as legislative assistant to Congressman Richard J. Durbin (D-IL).
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One of the world's most renowned scientists, Professor-Emeritus Edward Norton Lorenz, has won the 45th International Meteorological Organization Prize, known as the IMO Prize, of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The decision was made by the WMO Executive Council at the end of its session held in Geneva from 16–26 May 2000.
Lorenz is an internationally renowned researcher, lecturer, and author on atmospheric circulation, atmospheric predictability, and chaotic dynamical systems. Through several books and more than 60 scientific articles spanning over 40 years, Lorenz has profoundly influenced the way meteorologists everywhere think about the atmosphere, model its behavior, and understand its predictability.
Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, Professor Lorenz started a scientific revolution by opening an entirely new field of scientific inquiry: "the predictability of macroscopic systems—chaotic dynamics", which has profound influences on human affairs far beyond the boundaries of his discipline, the atmospheric sciences.
His book entitled The Essence of Chaos, which defines chaos and illustrates its special properties in a way in which thoughtful, nonspecialists can understand, has influenced the work of scientists, decision makers, and the general public. The results of this work have been instrumental both in describing the characteristics of atmospheric systems and in estimating the predictability of weather and climate. These have been invaluable elements in improving the accuracy of models and subsequent projections of the future state of climate.
The vast experience of Professor Lorenz, includes serving as a Teaching Fellow in mathematics at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus and Head of the Department of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1967, at the Fifth World Meteorological Congress, he presented the IMO lecture entitled "The Nature and Theory of the General Circulation of the Atmosphere," characterized by the congress as a "brilliant lecture" and published as a WMO monograph. His accomplishments have been recognized world-wide through numerous awards and honours, including the Kyoto Prize, the Roger Revelle Medal, the Holger and Anna-Greta Crafoord Prize, and others.
A fellow and honorary member of the AMS, Lorenz has received numerous awards and prizes from scientific organizations around the world. In 1963 he received the AMS's Meisinger Award for his work on better understanding the energetics of the general circulation. He was awarded the AMS Rossby Research Medal in 1969.
The IMO Prize, which consists of a certificate, a gold medal, and a cash award, is conferred every year for outstanding work in the field of meteorology and related geophysical sciences and for contribution to international cooperation in the field of meteorology. The IMO, the predecessor organization of the WMO, was established in Vienna in 1873. When the WMO was established in 1950, it took over the assets of IMO, which are used to support the annual award of this prize.
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