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GOVERNMENT NEWS
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ENVIRONMENT AND GLOBAL CHANGE
GENERAL NEWS
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A preliminary AAAS analysis of FY97 appropriations shows total federal R&D funding of $74.0 billion, which is $2.9 billion or 4.1% more than FY96. Every major R&D funding agency except NASA and the Department of Interior (DOI) received increases, including a $1.8 billion or 4.9% increase for R&D at DOD and a $785 million or 6.9% increase for R&D at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to AAAS.
Federal support for basic research is $14.8 billion in FY97, 2.7% or $395 million above FY96 and 0.9% above the president's request. NIH continues to provide the majority of federal support for basic research, with $6.9 billion (up 6.4%), followed by NSF ($2.1 billion, up 2.5%) and DOE ($2.0 billion, up 2.3%). NDOD's basic research declines by 5% to $1.1 billion.
Total defense R&D comes to $40.5 billion in FY97, $2 billion or 5.2% more than FY96 and a similar amount above the request. DOD's R&D totals $37.6 billion (up $1.8 billion or 4.9%) due to large increases for the air force and the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. Defense-related R&D at the Department of Energy jumps 10% to $2.9 billion.
Nondefense R&D for FY97 totals $33.5 billion, an $879 million or 2.7% increase over FY96, according to AAAS. The bulk of the increase goes to NIH, which continues to enjoy strong, bipartisan support. Its 6.9% increase for FY97 follows a 6.3% increase last year, AAAS reported.
NSF's R&D inches up 1.0% to $2.4 billion, with cuts in NSF's support for R&D facilities offsetting gains in its support for basic research.
Two agencies in which R&D programs were cut by Congress last year recovered lost ground this year: EPA's R&D increases 12.3% to $593 million, and the Department of Commerce's R&D totals $1.0 billion, a 7.7% jump. Commerce's R&D is $124 million higher than projected because appropriators backed off from the budget resolution's plan to eliminate the Advanced Technology Program, according to AAAS.
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NOAA Administrator Dr. D. James Baker said he considered that NOAA had done "very well in view of the overall budget picture" with its FY97 budget, but predicted tougher times ahead.
In a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington on 15 November, Dr. Baker reviewed NOAA's FY97 budget and discussed a variety of topics, ranging from the management of the Department of Commerce to efforts to increase cooperative projects internationally and with other agencies of government.
He heaped particular praise on the late Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, who died in a plane crash while on a trade mission to Europe, for much of the progress and achievement NOAA had realized over the past 4 years and pointed out that while Mickey Kantor had done an excellent job in succeeding Brown, other top-level management changes lie ahead because Kantor has announced he plans to leave government.
The reelection of President Bill Clinton, he said, is "useful" to the agency because Clinton is already aware of the issues facing the agency, thus eliminating the process of bringing a new administration "up to speed." Clinton, he said, comes in already educated to the issues and "ready to move ahead."
As for the 105th Congress, he predicted it will be a "reflection of the 104th Congress, but different." He believes coalition groups, in which both sides of issues are represented, will play a more important role in the new Congress.
As a rule, he said, Congress has been very supportive. While some cuts in the budget were asked for by the House, in most cases, they were restored by the Senate, he explained.
Baker said that modernization of NWS will remain the "highest priority" with the agency, explaining that he thinks weather forecasting is one of greatest scientific achievements ever. He cited how short-term warning forecasts had assisted the public in the blizzards in the northeast and said that, with AWIPS, forecasters were able to predict the amount of snow to expect during the recent snowstorm in the Midwest. While the number of hurricanes was below the year before, he said, NWS has achieved great improvement in tracking the storms.
As with other government agencies, NOAA realized considerable downsizing, dropping from about 14,500 FTEs in 1993 to approximately 13,000 in the coming year. "That's fewer than in the Kennedy administration," he said. Overall reduction from 1993 to 1999 will be about 16.6%, he explained.
The FY97 budget saw cuts in research and satellites, but increases in NMFS, NOS, and GLOBE.
In long-term climate change, he said, this past year has seen a downward trend in CFCs, and last year also marked the first full year of greater research into El Niño.
Using charts, Dr. Baker said that the NOAA budget distribution in FY96 showed that 32.1% went to NWS, 24.9% to NESDIS, 14.8% to NMFS, 12.0% to OAR, 9.2% to NOS, and 7.0% to PS. In FY97, the breakdown is 32.9% for NWS, 23.1% for NESDIS, 16.7% for NMFS, 13.1% for OAR, 10.5% for NOS, and 3.7% for PS.
For proposed spending by category, Baker said mandatory spending in FY97 would amount to 54.8% of the budget, national defense and international affairs discretionary would be 16.7%, domestic discretionary spending 13.9%, and interest on the national debt 14.6%. In 1980, he said, mandatory spending represented 47.0% of the budget, national defense and international affairs discretionary 23.3%, domestic discretionary 21.9%, and interest on the national debt 7.8%.
Projecting those figures to FY2002, Baker said the breakdown is expected to be 58.8% mandatory spending, 15.9% national defense/international affairs, 13.6% domestic discretionary, and 11.6% interest on the debt.
Baker said he believes that the president and the Congress have convinced the public of the need to balance the budget. As the years move ahead, he explained, domestic discretionary spending "gets squeezed," which is going to make the future more difficult. He pointed out that the agency is being asked to accept more responsibility, but faces the problem of increased costs and fewer personnel. As a result, he said, "we're going to have to make some hard decisions."
The agency hopes to reduce spending by entering into more cooperative projects, both nationally and internationally, he explained. One of those efforts is the convergence program now underway, whereby NOAA, NASA, and DOD are working toward converging NOAA's weather satellite systems with DOD's DMSP satellites.
Asked about what new steps might be expected in NWS with completion of the modernization program, NWS chief Joe Friday responded that no other major system introduction is expected, but with the growth of computational capabilities for short- and long-range forecasting, replacements and upgrades could be expected.
Baker explained that NOAA is probably the most active agency outside of the State Department and DOD in international affairs and said that he hopes to strengthen this effort in the future and give it a high priority, particularly in the area of databases.
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While the overall FY97 budgets for federal agencies have been determined, allocations within the agencies remain undetermined in most cases, leaving final measurement of the full impact of the FY97 budget still a matter for speculation.
Attempts to obtain final breakdowns at a number of agencies were met with the same answer: "It's too early to tell."
Agency spokespeople indicated that in most cases final allocations of the budget will not be made until after Thanksgiving.
Preliminary estimates for atmospheric research at NSF were made available from Dick Greenfield, director of geosciences at NSF, who predicted that atmospheric research will be allocated $150.3 million. Overall, the NSF budget for FY97 is $3.2 billion, about $50 million or 2% better than FY96.
In an interview, Greenfield pointed out that the $50 million increase was "mandated" for particular areas over which the agency has no authority to change.
Other estimated allocations for FY97 within the atmospheric research area were $18.2 million for Climate Modeling and Prediction, up from $17.5 million in FY96; $12 million for Global Tropospheric Chemistry, up from $11.5 million in FY96; $5.5 million for Solar, up from $5.2 million the year before; $0.7 million for Earth System History, the same as FY96; $1.1 million for Geodata, up from $1 million in FY96; and $2.6 million for Instrumentation and Modeling, up from $2.5 million in FY96.
The U.S. Weather Research Program estimate is $15.2 million, up from $14.4 the year before; the National Space Weather Program estimate is $11.2 million, up from $10.7 million in FY96. The base program estimate is for $84.9 million, up from $77.7 million the year before.
The $150.3 ATM estimate is $9 million more than the FY96 budget of $141.3 million.
Greenfield predicted that budgets over the next few years will not grow as much as anticipated. In budget planning for the future, he said he had advised his long-range planners to assume an estimated 5% annual growth. He now sees that growth amounting only to 1% or 2% a year. "I think we will now fall steadily behind," he said.
He explained that he hopes to maintain a high priority with the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), particularly in the areas of the National Space Weather Program (NSWP) and the U.S. Weather Research Program (USWRP). Both of those programs come under the Natural Hazard Reduction Program, with USWRP concentrating on improving weather predictions from 0 to 48 hours, with a focus on extreme events like tornadoes, hurricanes, and heavy precipitation, and with NSWP looking at the upper atmosphere to improve predictability for such occurrences as solar storms that cause communications problems and blackouts on earth.
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contributed by Robert M. White
The science and technology community is facing an information threat. Attention has properly been focused on the remarkable advances in the practice of scientific and engineering research enabled by the communication and information revolution, but less so on some of the adverse ancillary consequences. At stake is the present concept and practice of the free and open exchange and use of scientific data, the lifeblood of scientific and technological advance. The information threat, little attended to by scientists and engineers, is embodied in the fierce debate about legal property rights in data.
This debate is proceeding both at the national and international levels. The European Union has recently adopted a Directive on the Legal Protection of Data Bases (September 1996). A diplomatic conference on copyrights and other rights questions will be discussing a global treaty on intellectual property in respect of databases at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in December 1996. In the United States, the U.S. Congress is considering a bill, H.R. 3531, the Database Investment and Intellectual Property Antipiracy Act of 1996, to protect private investments in databases, datasets, and other forms of collected data. In the process of seeking legitimate protection of private sector investment in databases, if some of the provisions now being advanced are enacted, long standing scientific practices with respect to access to data will be under attack.
In the explanatory notes accompanying the proposed WIPO treaty proposals, it is the intent to "protect all data bases that represent a substantial investment." This concept is at variance with the present legal view that many data collections are noncopyrightable. Legal theory has held until now that there had to be a creative and intellectual dimension to copyrightable material. Under the new theory in the proposed House bill and WIPO treaty, compilations of data, even if they reflect only a modest investment of money to produce, are eligible for full legal protection from copy or reuse. This new form of database protection is independent of regular copyright and supersedes it. Further, it includes none of the concepts of "fair use," which are an integral part of U.S. copyright law, that balance the rights of the producers of the content with the rights of the users. Many kinds of databases previously in the public domain would be protected under this new scheme and, therefore, be eligible for restriction by the database producers, potentially limiting access to data that are essential for scientific research.
It is understandable that the commercial world is driven to seek protection of their investments in data collection and compilation. These data are assembled, in many cases, at great expense, but in the digital age, control of the distribution of these data is slipping beyond the owners' control. In the drive to protect their legitimate interests, the implications for science and technological research have not been considered. Most scientists and engineers and their research institutions have failed to interest themselves in the implications of the present legal debates for research.
The questions raised are profound. What are scientific data? Do they include, in addition to data gathered by scientists and engineers, data gathered by nonscientific groups but used for scientific purposes? What about economic and social science data? What level of investment in added value to government gathered data makes it proprietary? Some of the definitions of databases are very broad and would include collections of materials such as texts, sounds, images, numbers, facts, or data representing any other matter or substance. What happens to the transborder flow of data when countries have different legal or other regimes governing the storage and distribution of data?
Traditionally, science has held a special position in the rules governing intellectual property. That special position is in danger of being eroded. There has been a doctrine of fair use, even for copyrightable material, that enabled such material to be used for teaching purposes and scientific research. The ability to invoke fair use concepts by the educational and scientific communities may be seriously limited. What is desirable scientifically is the ease of distribution electronically and the widespread use of data. This is an anathema to commercial interests that seek to prevent widespread use for which they are not adequately compensated.
What are some of the concerns? One is that government-funded data collection and the associated databases, datasets, and other compilations may be considered proprietary if even a small monetary investment is made in reordering, further processing, or in other ways manipulating the data. Prices for such data might become costly. Modern digital technology does more than make it easy to copy and distribute data. It enables the owner of a database to track all instances of electronic access. Browsing for scientific purposes that have never been in question as evading property rights may become subject to change.
There would likely be profound consequences for the transnational exchanges of scientific data. Many countries are now beginning to embrace a policy of commercializing government-generated data as a means of defraying costs of their collection and distribution. This is true in the case of meteorological data in some European countries. The government of Canada now asks for payment for data it deposits in the U.S. National Climate Data Center in Asheville, NC, and insists on restrictions on the further distribution of such data.
There appears to be little time for public hearings or for national science groups to organize and lodge objections. The scientific implications of the issue have surfaced so recently that it would be helpful if the process of codifying and legislating data exchange could be slowed. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, has written to the Department of Commerce in September making this point.
Recent actions indicate that the issue is finally being addressed. The presidents of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and the Institutes of Medicine have sent a letter to Secretary Michael Kantor of the Commerce Department expressing deep concern. The letter is based on a soon-to-be-published study by the National Research Council on the transborder flow of data that is surveying this question. Other organizations including universities, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and other professional societies are beginning to address the problem. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in conjunction with the National Science Foundation, the State Department, the Commerce Department, and other departments, is beginning to need to focus on the issue to represent the interests of the science and education communities. International groups such as the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) need to become active. If the science community does not attend to its own needs, nobody else will.
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Some of the most important sampling to date of biospheric and atmospheric chemistry in the tropical rainforest will culminate in November and December, when a team of scientists from the United States, France, Italy, the Central African Republic (CAR), and the Congo complete a rare study of the African atmosphere. Ground-based and tower-mounted instruments and a research aircraft will support studies of biomass burning, rainforest–savanna boundaries, and the influence of tropical vegetation on global air chemistry.
This fall's field work, which begins on 10 November, is the climax of a multiyear project called EXPRESSO, the Experiment for Regional Sources and Sinks of Oxidants. Leaders of the project are the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO; Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France; the University of Brazzaville in the Congo; and L'Institut Francais de Recherche Scientifique pour le Developpement en Cooperation.
With its vast expanse of land near the equator, Africa exerts a powerful influence on tropical and global air chemistry. Huge stretches of African savanna and rainforest are burned each fall and winter for agricultural and territorial purposes. The fires produce large amounts of hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen, which interact with sunlight to produce ozone and other smoglike products—often at levels approaching those of a high-pollution day in a major city. Satellite pictures show that the plumes of ozone stretch, at times, as far as South America.
NCAR scientists have made several trips to Africa in the past 3 years to take preliminary air samples, install instruments, and make arrangements for this fall's field campaign. These visits spanned the entire transition zone from savanna to rainforest, which runs from the northeast CAR (around 8°N) to the northern Congo (around 2°N).
This fall's campaign is focused at two sites: one in rainforest near the Congo's Nouabale-Ndoki National Park and the other in the rainforest–savanna transition zone near Bangui, the CAR capital. EXPRESSO is collecting chemical data at these sites—along with meteorological data throughout the study area—to explore how the vegetation and fires interact with the atmosphere.
"There's never been a program in this region that has combined all the elements of photochemistry, biochemistry, and meteorology," says NCAR's Pat Zimmerman.
The experiment's logistics are challenging. Early this year, scientist Lee Klinger and colleagues met a truck and trailer that were shipped across the Atlantic, drove them across Cameroon, and then accompanied them on a barge up the Sangha River to the Ndoki site, located near one of Africa's most remote and best-preserved rainforests.
To sample the African atmosphere, EXPRESSO is using enclosures that measure atmospheric exchange from leaves and soil, a 60-m tower studded with meteorological instruments and air samplers, a balloon tethered for brief periods at heights of up to a kilometer, and France's Arat research aircraft, flying out of Bangui.
While relying on many standard sensors, EXPRESSO will serve as the debut for some specialized equipment, including a new isoprene flux sampler (built by NCAR's Alan Hills) that is "the world's best," according to Klinger. Isoprene, a fast-reacting chemical emitted by trees, plays an important role in the atmosphere's overall chemical balance. "Measuring isoprene is a key to this experiment," says Klinger.
On hand for the field work will be five NCAR scientists and technicians, along with four scientists from the University of Brazzaville and collaborators from Paul Sabatier University, the California Institute of Technology, Germany's Max-Planck Institute, and the New York–based Wildlife Conservation Society. Once the intensive field work is done, some of the instruments for monitoring weather and air chemistry will be maintained by the European and African collaborators for longer-term EXPRESSO research.
EXPRESSO may shed light on a global problem in biosphere–atmosphere chemistry. Plants take up vast amounts of carbon, particularly in the lush Tropics, but plants and soils also release carbon, and the overall cycling in the Tropics may be affected by the perennial fires. "One big question we're asking," says NCAR/EXPRESSO field project leader Alex Guenther, "is whether the Tropics serve as a net source or a net sink for carbon. Right now, we don't really know. One study won't answer the question, of course, but it will provide a starting point. Tropical forest landscapes are an important component of the global carbon cycle, so any imbalance there can have global consequences."
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A category 4 hurricane slowly makes its way up the East Coast of the United States, pounding Atlantic beaches for days with heavy surf and higher than normal tides. As the hurricane makes landfall, a 10-foot storm surge crosses the beach. Days later, the tide returns to normal and officials begin to assess the damage from the storm.
Powerful storms such as hurricanes can dramatically change the face of the coastline, eroding sand beaches in one area while increasing beach areas in another. Properly assessing the impacts of such storms is an enormous task. Now NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are combining efforts to provide public officials with the tools they need to accurately assess coastal erosion.
The goal of the joint project between the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, VA, and NOAA's Coastal Service Center (CSC), Charleston, SC, is to produce a highly detailed baseline map of the beaches between Cape Henlopen, DE, and Charleston, an expanse of more than 560 miles, using airborne laser technology.
Federal, state, and local agencies have traditionally relied on photographs and spot surveys to assess the changing coastline. While these methods provide much-needed data, they do not provide a precise enough account of topographical changes due to storms for the agencies to conduct fully effective shoreline development planning or beach replenishment programs, according to NASA Wallops principal investigator Bill Krabill.
"The use of the NASA instrumentation will provide cost effective and highly accurate mapping of beach erosion in particular, which is of great interest and concern to coastal communities," said John Brock, coastal remote sensing program manager with NOAA. "Due to the high human and economic costs associated with flooding and other coastal hazards, this type of information will help to support sustainable beach development and improved coastal management."
The survey is being performed with the NASA Airborne Terrain Mapper (ATM) flown on a NOAA Twin Otter aircraft. The ATM collects 3000 to 5000 spot elevations per second as the aircraft travels over the beach at approximately 150 feet per second. Using the ATM and a Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite receiver, researchers have been able to survey the beach elevations to an accuracy of 4 inches. NASA has surveyed the beaches from the low water line to the landward base of the sand dunes.
"With the gathering of this baseline data, officials will for the first time have the capability to accurately quantify beach damage from a coastal storm," Krabill said. Once the baseline study is completed and the use of this technology verified, the intent is to turn the technology over to the commercial sector to conduct future mapping for those assessing beach topography, according to Krabill, a researcher in the Observational Science Branch at Wallops.
The ATM has previously been used primarily in the measurement of Greenland and ice sheets in the surrounding area. Scientists are mapping these ice sheets to examine response to climatic changes in the Northern Hemisphere.
The East Coast beach mapping field work is being conducted in two stages. During October 1996, a preliminary survey was made over a number of critical sections. A complete survey is planned for the summer of 1997.
The areas surveyed in October include the coast between Cape Henlopen and Wallops Island; Virginia Beach, VA, to Oregon Inlet on the outer banks of North Carolina; Wrightsville, Top Sail, and Myrtle Beaches in North and South Carolina recently hit by Hurricane Fran; and Folley and Isle of Palms Beaches north of Charleston.
NASA is responsible for the operation of the ATM and the initial processing of the data. Mission planning and the follow-on processing of the survey information and its conversion into a format that can be directly used in Geographic Information Systems will be jointly done by NASA Wallops and CSC.
NOAA will take the lead in coordinating with different state and federal agencies responsible for beach monitoring. The coordination with these agencies will include the organization of supporting beach ground surveys and the dissemination of the resulting airborne survey database.
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A site just north of North Webster, IN, has been identified as the preferred location for the new NWS forecast office and Doppler radar (WSR-88D) that will serve northern Indiana and northwest Ohio, according to a NWS announcement.
"Weather service employees working with our contractor completed an extensive investigation of almost 50 possible locations for the new office and Doppler radar," according to NWS Director Elbert W. Friday Jr. "We look forward to proceeding with property acquisition and construction of the radar tower and office."
A 1995 Secretary's Report to Congress had recommended the addition of a WSR-88D and forecast office in 32 areas of concern, one of which would provide the best coverage of severe weather phenomena in the northern Indiana and northwest Ohio region.
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Twelve organizations have recently joined the joint project program under the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program, a new type of partnership in which organizations take on the responsibility of recruiting, training, and mentoring GLOBE participants for a designated area.
The new partners include Drexel University; Unified School District of Oakland, CA; Unified School District of Los Angeles, CA; City University of New York; Rocky Mountain NASA Space Grant Consortium, a consortium of 10 universities and museums; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Biosphere 2 Center of Columbia University; Cleveland Public Schools; Tri-State Education Initiative Consortium, involving 230 schools in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee; Pacific Region Educational Laboratory, serving Pacific children and educators in Hawaii, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia; the University of Alaska Southeast; and the University of Idaho and Boise State University.
Other new developments in the GLOBE program include the development of a teacher's guide and new soil and hydrology measurements, the visualizations from which have been enhanced by Goddard Space Flight Center's Scientific Visualization Laboratory in Greenbelt, MD.
GLOBE, initiated by Vice President Al Gore in April 1994, is jointly administered by NOAA, NASA, NSF, and EPA. More than 3000 schools in 43 countries are participating in the GLOBE program, and GLOBE students have reported more than 325,000 science observations in the areas of atmosphere/climate, hydrology/water chemistry, and biology/geology.
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Two NASA instruments have again detected a substantial depletion of ozone levels over Antarctica, commonly referred to as the Antarctic ozone hole.
The average size of the Antarctic ozone hole during 1996 has been almost as large as in the peak year of 1993, although ozone values are higher than the record lows seen in September 1994, according to preliminary analysis of satellite data by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. During the current year, the ozone hole covered a surface area over the South Pole roughly equal in size to the North American continent.
These data were recorded by two of NASA's Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer instruments (TOMS) launched this year, one onboard the NASA Earth Probe satellite and another on the Japanese Advanced Earth-Observing Satellite (ADEOS). Low ozone amounts over the Antarctic continent consistent with these TOMS data also have been validated by ground-based instruments and other satellite-based instruments.
The average size of the ozone hole during this year was 8.3 million square miles, similar to observations in the last 4 years. The largest observed average size of the ozone hole was in 1993, at 8.5 million square miles.
The hole started to form in mid-August of this year and reached a 1-day peak size on 7 September 1996 of about 10 million square miles, then quickly shrunk to values of less than 8.5 million square miles. The previous largest 1-day peak size hole was 9.4 million square miles on 27 September 1992. In comparison, the surface area of North America is 8.1 million square miles, while Antarctica has a surface area of 5.4 million square miles.
Since the mid-1980s, the region covered by low total ozone has begun to grow each year in early August. This region reaches its maximum extent in September, while the lowest ozone values are typically seen in late September and early October. The ozone hole usually disappears by early December. The ozone hole in 1996 opened up slightly earlier than in previous years, but had begun to decrease in surface area below 7.7 million square miles by 16 October 1996.
"This ozone hole is very similar to those seen in recent years," said Dr. Paul Newman, research scientist in the Laboratory for Atmospheres at Goddard. "Although its area climbed briefly over that of the previous peak, that is not as great a concern as the average size, because meteorological conditions can cause large day-to-day fluctuations. This is similar to winter temperatures, where one really cold day is not as important as the average temperature over the whole winter season."
The ozone amounts measured by TOMS/ADEOS and TOMS/Earth Probe dropped to 111 Dobson units on 5 October near the center of the Antarctic continent, with values below 220 Dobson units measured over a wide area. Total ozone values less than 100 Dobson units were measured in both 1993 and 1994, with the record low value of 88 Dobson units measured on 28 September 1994.
Ozone, a molecule made up of three atoms of oxygen, comprises a thin layer of the atmosphere that absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. A Dobson unit is related to the physical thickness of the ozone layer if it were brought to the earth's surface. The global average ozone layer thickness is 300 Dobson units, which equals 1/8 of an inch, approximately the thickness of two stacked pennies. In contrast, the ozone layer thickness in the ozone hole is about 100 Dobson units (1/25 of an inch), approximately the thickness of a single dime.
Scientists at the South Pole from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), working with balloon-borne measurements, have found low total ozone values similar to those seen in 1995. "However, in the central region of the ozone hole, from 7.5 to 12.5 miles altitude, ozone depletion was more severe than in the past," said Dr. Dave Hofmann of the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Lab in Boulder, CO. The NOAA measurements showed that complete destruction of ozone at an altitude of 10 miles was observed over the period from 24 September to 14 October. "Total ozone did not reach record lows because of unusually high ozone above the ozone hole at 15 miles, which compensated for the low values in the ozone hole," Hofmann said.
"These deep and large ozone holes are likely to continue to form annually until the stratospheric chlorine amount drops to its pre–ozone hole values," said Dr. Richard Stolarski, also a research scientist at Goddard. "The slightly earlier ozone hole this year probably resulted from the continued increase of Antarctic stratospheric total chlorine levels."
Since the discovery of the ozone hole in 1985, TOMS has been a key instrument for monitoring ozone levels throughout the Southern Hemisphere. The first TOMS aboard NASA's Nimbus-7 satellite measured Antarctic ozone levels from November 1978 to May 1993, and it helped make ozone a household word through pictures of the Antarctic ozone hole. It was followed by a TOMS sensor on a Russian satellite.
TOMS data also provided part of the scientific underpinning for the Montreal Protocol, under which many of the world's nations have agreed to phase out the use of ozone-depleting chemicals. As a result of restrictions in the Montreal Protocol, chlorine levels have already peaked in the lower atmosphere and should peak in the Antarctic stratosphere in about 3 to 5 years.
The size and depth of the ozone hole, and global ozone levels depend on meteorological conditions and on the amount of chlorine present in the atmosphere, and may be affected by the presence of sulfate aerosols produced by volcanic eruptions. Scientists speculate that ozone values over Antarctica were low in 1993 and 1994 because of the enhanced presence of sulfuric acid aerosols in the stratosphere due to the June 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines.
TOMS-Earth Probe, launched in July of this year, is the third in the series of TOMS instruments. Operating from a 312-mile orbit, TOMS-Earth Probe is principally dedicated to collecting ozone and aerosol data in the lower atmosphere. The fourth TOMS instrument was launched in August aboard ADEOS into a 500-mile orbit. ADEOS is an international climate change research mission that includes instruments from the United States, Japan, and France, with investigators from many countries around the world.
Both TOMS-EP and ADEOS are key parts of a global environmental effort that includes NASA's Mission to Planet Earth, a long-term, coordinated research effort to study the earth as a global environmental system.
TOMS ozone data and pictures are available to anyone with a computer connection to the Internet World Wide Web at http://jwocky.gsfc.nasa.gov
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Marine biologists aboard a ship in the Gulf of Mexico are using maps of ocean currents produced with data from the ocean-observing satellite TOPEX/POSEIDON to help them locate and count sperm whales and dolphins.
The TOPEX/POSEIDON altimeter data, combined with information from the European Space Agency's ERS-2 satellite, are being used in near-real time to generate circulation feature maps that will be faxed to scientists aboard the research ship R/V Gyre. These maps provide scientists with timely information about rapidly changing ocean features so that scientists can direct the ship toward those areas to determine whether whales and dolphins are present.
"There is evidence that whales prefer to feed in the edges of cyclonic eddies, and the satellite data gives us a good picture of where those oceanographic features are located," said Dr. George Born, a principal investigator on the TOPEX/POSEIDON project from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The university is generating the ocean maps and sending them directly to the scientists in the gulf. "The data from TOPEX/POSEIDON and ERS-2 greatly enhance our ability to identify and map circulation features as they occur in the Gulf," said Dr. Robert Leben, a coprincipal investigator on the project at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The R/V Gyre left Pascagoula, MS, on 10 October and surveyed the northeastern Gulf of Mexico until 28 October. A previous survey indicated that whales and dolphins were contacted most frequently in the area where warm water eddies break off from the Gulf Loop Current, a strong ocean current that circulates around the Gulf of Mexico.
The TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite was developed to study global ocean circulation, but it is providing unexpected benefits for marine biologists. "We are very excited that these data are being used in new and different ways. Scientists are continuing to find new applications for this project and are proving they can study not only ocean currents, but also the creatures that inhabit the oceans," said Dr. Lee-Lueng Fu, TOPEX/POSEIDON project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.
The TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite uses an altimeter to bounce radar signals off the ocean's surface to get precise measurements of the distance between the satellite and the sea surface. These data are combined with measurements from other instruments that pinpoint the satellite's exact location in space. Every 10 days, scientists are able to produce a complete map of global ocean topography, the barely perceptible hills and valleys found on the sea surface. With detailed knowledge of ocean topography, scientists can then calculate the speed and direction of worldwide ocean currents.
The R/V Gyre expedition is sponsored by Texas A&M University, the Texas Institute of Oceanography, and the National Biological Service.
TOPEX/POSEIDON is a joint mission of NASA and the French Space Agency, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the U.S. portion of the mission for NASA's Office of Mission to Planet Earth, Washington, DC.
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Scientists have begun installing a network of 250 Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers that will continuously measure the constant, yet physically imperceptible, movements of earthquake faults throughout southern California. This information, which in many cases will be gathered and analyzed with the help of local students, should help researchers forecast future earthquake hazards in the greater Los Angeles area.
NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin dedicated a new site in the Southern California Integrated GPS Network (SCIGN) at Rialto High School before a demonstration of the technology to science students from the school. Goldin was accompanied by U.S. Representative George Brown (D-CA), the ranking minority leader of the House Science Committee, and representatives from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey.
"This network is a tremendous example of how technology developed for space benefits life on earth. This interagency project will give us detailed information never before available to track the invisible geologic strains and stresses that lie beneath the California landscape," Goldin said. "Such data should give us fresh insight into the forces that produce earthquakes, and could one day help reduce the loss of life and property from such disasters."
GPS uses data transmitted from a constellation of 24 earth-orbiting satellites that are jointly governed by the Departments of Defense and Transportation. The satellites are arranged so that several of them are "visible" from any point on the surface of the earth at any time. A user on the ground using a GPS receiver can determine the site's precise location by coordinating the signals from the satellites.
"The surface of the earth is constantly moving and southern California is being squeezed in the process. The GPS network will continuously measure movements of the earth's crust with a precision of 1 millimeter per year, which will show us where strain is building up," said Dr. Andrea Donnellan, a member of the SCIGN coordinating committee at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA.
"GPS is the most important new technology to emerge for the study of earthquakes in decades. This information will permit us to improve our estimates of the regional earthquake hazard in southern California and to prioritize earthquake mitigation activities, including emergency preparedness and retrofit strategies," said Dr. Tom Henyey, director of the USGS-NSF Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) in Los Angeles. "Continuous GPS measurements also will allow for more rapid regional damage assessment following large earthquakes."
The earthquake network began in 1990 with only four GPS receivers, as a prototype project funded by NASA. It detected very small motions of the earth's crust in southern California associated with the June 1992 Landers and the January 1994 Northridge earthquakes. "The GPS receivers operating during the Landers earthquake were able to detect for the first time a subtle change in the regional deformation pattern, which is potentially of great importance for studying the physics of earthquakes and hazards mitigation" said Dr. Yehuda Bock, a SCIGN executive board member from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.
Currently, the SCIGN has 40 GPS receivers up and running, with the remaining receivers scheduled to be installed over the next 3 years.
"With data from the 40 receivers, we have determined that southern California has continued to move since the Northridge quake in 1994. This may mean that stress is being relieved in part without earthquakes, which may reduce the overall earthquake hazard," JPL's Donnellan said. "We will try to determine if other faults have been loaded as a result of the earthquake."
"The survey data are particularly important for identifying active buried faults that do not reach the ground surface. Such faults may be common in the Los Angeles metropolitan region," said Dr. David Jackson, science director of SCEC.
The GPS measurements will also be useful to characterize earthquake damage. "The network will help agencies monitor important structures. GPS receivers placed on or near dams, bridges, and buildings would allow off-site detection of probable damage to those structures. We are collaborating with Los Angeles County in a pilot study of continuous GPS monitoring of Pacoima Dam," said Dr. Ken Hudnut, SCIGN executive board member at the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena.
Many of the receivers are being placed at schools so that students can be involved in the experiment. SCEC's "Global Science Classroom" at the University of Southern California has formed a partnership with JPL, and several school districts and educators' groups to develop a science unit for use in schools. The unit, titled "The Elastic Planet," will give students access to the data being gathered by the network.
"This network is a model of interagency cooperation between NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Science Foundation, as well as with local governments and schools," Goldin said. "Students will get hands-on science experience in using real data. It should ignite their enthusiasm for science while providing a genuine public service."
SCIGN is a consortium of institutions with a common interest in using GPS for earthquake research and mitigation. The consortium is coordinated by the SCEC, a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center headquartered at the University of Southern California. The lead institutions in the installation and operation of SCIGN are JPL; the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics; Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego; the United States Geological Survey; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of Southern California.
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Joseph H. Rothenberg, Goddard Space Flight Center director, announced today that Space Systems/Loral of Palo Alto, CA, has been selected to receive the eighth annual Goddard Contractors Excellence Award. The other finalist was Unisys/Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement (SEWP) of Hanover, MD.
Rothenberg said that "Space Systems/Loral demonstrated exceptional performance on Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) contracts. The company applied lessons learned from previous spacecraft manufacturing into future spacecraft. The acceleration of the GOES-L launch by 18 months required rapid replanning and showed their outstanding responsiveness to change."
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A NASA research team has found high concentrations of ozone, comparable to urban pollution levels, in the lower atmosphere over the tropical South Atlantic Ocean. The pollution has been linked to intense, seasonal biomass burning in South America and Africa, providing convincing evidence that human activities are extending their impact further, and in more diverse ways, into regions of traditionally pristine air.
"Most people don't realize that over a hundred thousand square miles of vegetation are burned each year in southern Africa, an area larger than that burned in South America," said Dr. Jack Fishman, mission scientist for the experiment from NASA's Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA.
The new research findings were reported 30 October in a special issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research. The findings are based on data from an experiment called Transport and Chemistry near the equator over the Atlantic (TRACE-A), which was conducted by NASA, the Brazilian Space Agency (INPE), and scientists in South Africa. "The purpose of our mission was to understand how much each continent contributed to the observed pollution pool and to gain an understanding of the unusual chemistry taking place in a part of the world's atmosphere so far removed from the origin of the pollution," Fishman said.
According to Fishman, the pollutants drift over the tropical South Atlantic Ocean, where the wind pattern traps them. Chemical processes, driven by very bright sunlight, then produce a smog similar to what is found in industrialized areas of the world. Eventually, the plumes of ozone and other pollutants produced by those chemical processes extend to the far reaches of the Indian Ocean, and there is some evidence that traces are seen as far away as Australia.
"As a result of TRACE-A, our understanding of the atmospheric chemistry of the entire Southern Hemisphere is greatly improved," Fishman added. "And we now realize that the composition of the atmosphere in what was once thought to be one of the cleanest regions in the world has also been greatly altered by human activity."
Most of the earth's ozone is found in a layer in the stratosphere that begins about 20 miles above the surface. It is produced by the interaction of sunlight with oxygen and other gases that occur naturally in the upper atmosphere. The stratospheric ozone layer provides a shield from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. In the lower atmosphere, however, ozone is a toxic gas that has long been known to exist in harmful amounts over highly populated, heavily industrialized regions. Its occurrence in large amounts in remote parts of the atmosphere has been much rarer, however.
More than 300 scientists from 14 nations participated in TRACE-A and its concurrent counterpart, the Southern African Fire–Atmosphere Research Initiative (SAFARI). Their work has shed new light on the impact and extent of human activities on the atmosphere and has provided data that will help to understand the links that may exist between the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and the earth's climate.
NASA's major contribution to TRACE-A was a DC-8 research aircraft carrying special instruments for very sensitive measurements of ozone and the gases that produce it in the atmosphere. The instruments carried by the DC-8 could measure a wide variety of trace gases down to the parts per trillion level (one-millionth of a part per million). During TRACE-A, the DC-8 flew more than 70,000 miles, probing the air over South America, southern Africa, and the vast expanses of the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Onboard the DC-8, a dozen scientists and their support crews from several NASA centers and U.S. universities operated sophisticated instruments, including airborne lasers to measure ozone and smoke particles above and below the aircraft.
TRACE-A also utilized an operational satellite to map the large-scale distribution of ozone and biomass burning patterns. In addition, a series of ozone sensors launched aboard weather balloons and enhanced weather measurements provided information about the transport of the various trace gases and the physical processes responsible for their observed distributions in the atmosphere. Computer models were also used to integrate the results and to help interpret them. The experiment is part of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth, a long-term, coordinated research effort to study the earth as a global environmental system.
Additional information and figures for TRACE-A and NASA's Global Tropospheric Experiment are accessible through the Internet at http://asd-www.larc.nasa.gov/lidar/lidar.html
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A summary of about 300 research projects by 500 researchers, "Summaries of Research in FY 1995," has been produced by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN. The report, to be published by DOE, includes summaries of global change research in atmospheric radiation measurement, unmanned aerial vehicles, atmospheric science, climate modeling, education information and integration, integrated assessment, the National Institute for Global Environmental Change, the Ocean Margins Program, ocean research, the Program on Ecosystem Research, quantitative links and terrestrial carbon processes, and environmental remediation, including subsurface science, microbial genome, and environmental radon.
The report was compiled and edited by Frederick M. O'Hara Jr.
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Refined calculations and new evidence support a revolutionary suggestion that global-scale geologic events produced the bulk of the earth's oxygen supply, a NASA scientist reported.
Scientists have long believed that oxygen collected in the earth's early atmosphere as a by-product of plant life from a process called photosynthesis, in which plants take carbon dioxide and water to produce organic matter and oxygen. Dr. David DesMarais, of NASA's Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA, first suggested in 1992 a relationship between oxygen and the collision of continents, the resultant colossal mountain ranges and increased erosion burying huge amounts of organic matter in ocean beds.
"Although photosynthesis did provide an oxygen source strong enough to sustain the amount of existing oxygen, the creation and assembly of large modern-sized continents was responsible for early dramatic increases in oxygen," DesMarais said.
DesMarais reported new evidence supporting his findings at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver.
DesMarais's research correlates oxygen "surges" in the atmosphere 2.2 to 2.0 billion years ago with changes in the amount of carbon stored in the earth's crust at that time. During that time, several of the earth's "microcontinents" crashed together, forming new, stable, modern-sized continents. As the continental fragments collided, towering mountain ranges formed. Their steep slopes produced rapid erosion and sedimentation, key to DesMarais's theory.
Organic matter is normally consumed by bacteria and animals, a process that utilizes oxygen (respiration), producing energy, carbon dioxide, and water as by-products. According to DesMarais, when huge amounts of organic matter were buried during cataclysmic collisions, oxygen was freed to accumulate in the earth's early atmosphere.
"The cycle of photosynthesis (which produces oxygen) and respiration (where oxygen is consumed) is an almost break-even process," DesMarais said. Only when large amounts of organic material are buried in ocean sediments during tectonic upheavals can the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere increase substantially, he added.
An independent recent study concludes that approximately three large continental masses were assembled between 2.5 and 1.9 billion years ago by the collision of smaller land masses. Two of these were assembled between 2.2 and 1.9 billion years ago. These collisions formed Himalayan-class mountains with high rates of sedimentation in the ocean, burying organic matter.
According to DesMarais, the formation of stable, large continents also protects and stores larger amounts of organic carbon for hundreds of millions of years, further allowing the atmosphere to accumulate large amounts of free oxygen.
Furthermore, new calculations by DesMarais reveal that the increases in atmospheric oxygen and sulfate (oxidized sulfur) in seawater between 2.2 and 2.0 billion years ago were too large to be explained soley by the slow decline in volcanic activity over the earth's history. The decline in volcanism had been previously offered as an alternative to DesMarais's continental evolution hypothesis.
DesMarais's research is supported by the space science division at the Ames Research Center and the Exobiology Program in NASA's Office of Space Science, Headquarters, Washington, DC.
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Acting NOAA Chief Scientist Al Beeton received the Great Lakes Commission Outstanding Service Award at the commission's annual meeting in Erie, PA, on 17 October. The award is presented to an individual who has "demonstrated an outstanding spirit of cooperation and interagency support for the Great Lakes."
NASA's top three directors at Kennedy Space Center will leave the agency early next year. Having announced their intention to retire, heading out the door will be Center Director Jay Honeycutt, Deputy Director Gene Thomas, and Associate Director Alan Parrish. The planned resignations come as NASA gears up for the first of 27 shuttle flights to build a $40 billion international space station between 1997 and 2002.
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