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President Clinton's FY98 budget is scheduled to be released between 3 February and 7 February and will likely propose a balanced budget by 2002. The budget will probably include funds designed to help legal immigrants and others adversely affected by the last year's changes in welfare. It will also include $130 billion in tax cuts, though not a capital gains tax cut.
The president originally planned to release the budget on 3 February, but decided to delay its delivery to Congress until after his State of the Union address, tentatively set for 5 February
Republicans are likely to object to the welfare proposal and the absence of a capital gains cut. But the most likely stumbling block for a budget agreement is the future of Medicare. If changes are not made, the Medicare trust fund is estimated to be bankrupt by 2001. Due to Clinton's campaign rhetoric on Republican-proposed cuts to the program's growth, however, Republicans are unlikely to be cooperative.
In addition to the regular budgetary process, the administration is expected to request $2 billion in supplemental appropriations to fund the troops in Bosnia and other overseas military expeditions. That request is likely to include rescissions of FY1997 funds.
The rest of the legislative schedule is less clear, but some likely areas of legislation include Higher Education Act reauthorization, the FDA drug approval process, Intermodal Surface Transportation and Efficiency Act reauthorization, Superfund reauthorization, and clean water, clean air, and nuclear waste storage. Given the above list, science reauthorizations appear unlikely.
Vice President Al Gore announced the release of the first volume of a joint U.S.-Russian CD-ROM atlas containing decades of formerly restricted information collected by the United States and the former U.S.S.R. about the Arctic Ocean. Through an extraordinary U.S.-Russian agreement reached by Vice President Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, the data have "come in from the cold" and are to be officially released for scientific research. The announcement was made at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC. The CD-Rom contains over 1.2 million individual observations from the period of 1948-1993 and is a virtual time machine record of the past 50 years. This CD-ROM covers the winter period in the Arctic Ocean. Further CD-ROMS on the summer period, sea ice, and meteorological data are under development. The Naval Oceanographic Office contributed buoy data and technical expertise to the project.
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Using computer models of California weather, three scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder have successfully replicated the process that causes a narrow tongue of low clouds and fog to surge northward along the state's coast after clearing has occurred. Their findings will help improve the models used in actual forecasting and could lead to better warnings for transportation, defense, and recreation in the coastal zone.
NCAR scientists Joseph Klemp, William Skamarock, and Richard Rotunno presented first results of the modeling on 19 December at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco. Their paper, "Evolution of Trapped Atmospheric Disturbances along a Coastal Barrier," was part of a session on measurement and modeling of the coastal marine atmosphere. The NCAR modeling was conducted with support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under the navy's Accelerated Research Initiative.
While fog can occur under a variety of circumstances, the northward surge phenomenon—especially common in the summertime—has vexed California forecasters for years. The process begins when high pressure noses eastward from the Pacific into Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. This typically produces light east or southeast winds on the California coast. As they descend from the Coast Range, the breezes bring dry, sunny conditions to the shoreline, while they push the marine layer (the cool, moist air that extends a few hundred meters above the Pacific) just offshore.
Forecasters can predict the large-scale pressure changes that cause the winds to blow offshore, but they cannot yet reliably tell when the marine layer might return and surge northward to bring overcast or fog. The surges can be less than 100 km wide. The computer models used by present-day forecasters trace the atmosphere at points separated by 30 to 90 km, a resolution too coarse to fully outline the surges.
Klemp and colleagues used a finer-scale research model in their attempt to depict the surges. Their simulations reveal that when the clearing fog boundary is displaced a few tens of kilometers offshore, a weak area of low pressure—too small to be detected by coastal weather stations—may form just offshore. As the low circulates air counterclockwise, it wraps moist marine air around its south side and toward the coast. When the marine air reaches the higher terrain along the shoreline, it is forced upward. Clouds and fog may form, along with a small high pressure center that pushes the air northward. The result is a narrow tongue of cloud pinched between the coastline and the offshore clear zone. The surge can traverse hundreds of kilometers of coastline over a day or two.
According to the NCAR scientists, the surge's movement up the coast can be characterized as a Kelvin wave, a particular kind of atmospheric feature in which winds blow in the direction of movement of a pressure disturbance. Research computer models tend to handle Kelvin waves skillfully, so this bodes well for surge prediction efforts.
The NCAR researchers simulated the surge in two and three dimensions with a numerical cloud model run on a Digital Equipment Corporation workstation. The model featured a simplified version of the coast's topography. The scientists' next step is to add sharper resolution to incorporate the bays, inlets, and peninsulas that dot the California coast. The added detail will help the modelers analyze more precisely how the surges develop and move.
"This phenomenon is a tough test for a model," says investigator Rotunno. "Delicate imbalances (in pressure) seem to set it off, and it's too fine-scale to show up in most models. Still, it can produce enough fog to envelop boats and airports."
Researchers at the Naval Oceanographic Institute, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and several other universities and laboratories covered other aspects of coastally trapped disturbances at the AGU meeting. NCAR is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation.
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Researchers are studying possible links between West Coast weather and the sun's 11-year cycle.
Preliminary research suggests that the solar cycle influences rainfall levels in North America, researchers reported at the recent American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. However, there are a number of skeptics.
"I've given quite a few of these talks, and I'd say 10% of the people have open minds," said research hydrologist Charles A. Perry of the U.S. Geological Survey in Lawrence, KS. Every 11 years at "solar maximum," the sun ejects storms of charged particles. Some particles reach earth and can disturb power networks and radio communications. Satellites have found that the sun varies subtly in brightness every 11 years.
Perry believes he's found indirect links between solar irradiance and water levels in the Mississippi River. He theorizes that at solar maximum, the sun emits so much energy that tropical storms become unusually warm. Ocean currents carry the water around the Pacific rim clockwise, and it reaches the West Coast about five years later.
There, he maintains, the warm water emits moist air that moves east, forming rain clouds over the West Coast and the Midwest. It warms the atmosphere, he says, in turn shifting the position of the jet stream, and guides Pacific storms toward North America, bringing even more rain.
If he's right, forecasters could use solar cycles, along with more orthodox meteorological tools, to forecast rainy seasons, allowing for the five-year lag.
Another sun–earth link was reported by Pavlos Christoforou, a doctoral student in atmospheric sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
He believes that the Aleutian low tends to move west at solar maximum and east at solar minimum. When the Aleutian low goes west, the void is filled by a high pressure cell, the Pacific high. The Pacific high blocks storms from entering California, resulting in mild weather or drought.
However, when the Pacific high moves west, replacing the retreating Aleutian low, Pacific rains sneak through and attack California and other western states, he suspects. In other words, the solar maximum might indirectly cause some of California' soggier weather, he says.
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Thunder clouds may not always have a silver lining, but they definitely can sport high-altitude halos of flickering red light.
That phenomenon has been confirmed by researchers at Stanford's Very Low Frequency Research Group, who for the first time have measured the horizontal structure and dynamics of a new kind of stratospheric lightning that scientists have named "elves." The new measurements, obtained with a specially constructed device called the Fly's Eye, confirm the prediction that these flashes take the highly unusual form of luminous rings that spread across the sky at speeds faster than light.
In February 1996, the Stanford scientists predicted that elves would have such a rapidly expanding ringlike structure. They based their prediction on the assumption that the newly discovered phenomenon is produced by powerful electromagnetic pulses generated by large lightning strokes.
The results were reported by Umran Inan, professor of electrical engineering, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December.
"For a long time, we have known that certain events in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, like solar storms, can affect the lower atmosphere, resulting in significant consequences like power blackouts," Inan explained. "Now, we are learning that certain events in the lower atmosphere can affect the upper atmosphere. Because about 1,000 lightning strokes occur each minute around the world, it is not unlikely these effects may have a global impact on the atmosphere."
Pilots have reported strange flashes of light above thunderstorms for some time. Not until the late 1980s, however, did scientists begin to take those reports seriously. Once they began studying these lights, researchers found a number of new phenomena, including
These new forms of lightning can be quite bright, according to researchers, but they are subliminally brief, existing for only a few thousandths of a second. Elves are the shortest lived, they said, lasting significantly less than a millisecond. They are so quick that scientists aren't sure they can be seen with the naked eye.
Elves also are too brief to register on most video cameras, according to the researchers. The video cameras use electronic light detectors with a time resolution of 16 milliseconds. They can only detect elves that are unusually bright, the scientists reported.
In 1995, a group of Japanese scientists produced the first direct evidence that elves exist. They used an instrument called a photometer to detect distinctive submillisecond light flashes originating higher in the sky than those from sprites, which last several milliseconds.
Inan and his colleagues built a special device and christened it the Fly's Eye. The instrument has a dozen 18-inch barrels. Each barrel points to a different part of the sky and is connected to electronics that amplify the incoming light to detectable levels. Because the Fly's Eye has a time resolution of 30 microseconds, it can measure the way elves change over their brief lifetime.
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The National Research Council (NRC) has released its report on the accomplishments and legacies of the Tropical Oceans Global Atmosphere (TOGA) program, calling it "a model for how to do earth sciences."
"TOGA opened the way to the future of seasonal-to-interannual climate predictions," according to the report. "The follow-on programs will further develop the means of predicting the climate for the ultimate benefit of mankind."
The TOGA program, which began in January 1985 and ended in December 1994, has made major advances in the understanding of the strongest climate variation on seasonal-to-interannual timescales, El Niño, and the Southern Oscillation, according to the report.
For more than 10 years, NOAA led the U.S. interagency program in the United States. During this period, NOAA—primarily through its Office of Global Programs—provided more than 50% of the funding for the U.S. portion of this multidisciplinary program.
Ultimately, more than 18 countries participated. In the United States, NOAA's role was complimented by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Department of Defense Office of Navy Research.
NOAA's major contributions included
Additional research is still required to develop the skill for predicting short-term climate variations caused by other processes or in other parts of the world, according to the report.
The NRC report calls for further efforts to maintain the observing system, the creation of an institute for developing applications of short-term climate forecasts, and the establishment of a program for continued research on seasonal-to-interannual climate variations, as well as the influences of longer timescales and their predictability.
Since the completion of TOGA, NOAA has
In the future, NOAA plans to
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Two of the nation's busiest and snowiest airports, New York's La Guardia and Chicago's O'Hare, will be test sites this winter for a new data-gathering and display system to aid airlines in making deicing decisions. Beginning in early January, the system will provide snowfall "nowcasts" up to 30 minutes in advance for participating airlines to help reduce takeoff delays, increase safety, and save money on deicing procedures.
Ice buildup on aircraft waiting to depart can be a serious safety hazard. As little as 0.8 millimeters of ice on the upper wing surface increases drag and reduces airplane lift by 25%. With deicing fluids ranging from $2 to $4 a gallon, battling ice buildup can cost airlines tens of thousands of dollars in a single snowy day, in addition to the expense of flight cancellations and delays. The new system's half-hour forecasts could mean big savings for airlines through more effective deicing practices and fewer cancellations.
Funded by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Weather Support to Deicing Decision Making (WSDDM) was developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. The FAA will evaluate WSDDM at both airports through user surveys and cost/benefit analyses. If successful, it will become a standard feature for those airlines willing to pay for its operation at airports regularly besieged by winter weather.
At La Guardia, Delta and USAir will participate from early January through March. United, which helped test a prototype of the system last year at O'Hare with encouraging results, will participate there again this winter, from mid-January through April.
Roy Rasmussen, head of NCAR's deicing program, comments, "Passengers can get anxious about safety and unpredictable delays in bad weather. I hope that providing the most up-to-date snowfall information will result in safer winter flying and greater confidence for the public." According to Rasmussen, four or five major storms at each site this year would be enough to demonstrate the system's usefulness.
During the demonstration, surface weather stations, snow-weighing gauges, and Doppler radars will measure snowfall accumulation, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and the water content of snow. The data will be processed instantly and displayed graphically on video monitors at the Delta control tower and the Marine Air Terminal at La Guardia, the New York Traffic Control (TRACON) office in Westbury, USAir's operations center in Pittsburgh, and the Delta operations center in Atlanta. At O'Hare, monitors will be installed at United's station control, tower, and flight operations center.
The monitors will show bands of snow detected by the National Weather Service's NEXRAD radar network as they move toward or away from the airports. Data from snow-weighing gauges strategically placed in and near the airports will be displayed as a simple graph showing the water content of snow at various locations—a key factor in deicing decisions. The resulting nowcasts (0-30 minutes) based on these and other meteorological data are expected to aid airport officials, including ground personnel deicing the planes, airline station control managers coordinating flights, airport managers in charge of plowing the runways, and air traffic controllers deciding how long to hold planes at gates.
The new technology is a direct result of scientific research. Rasmussen found that the potential of snow to form ice on an airplane's wings and fuselage corresponds to the amount of water in the snow rather than to visibility, which has traditionally determined deicing and takeoff decisions. In studying a number of takeoff crashes due to icing, he noticed that visibility at the time of the accidents varied widely. He determined that large, dry snowflakes hampering visibility were less of a threat than small, heavy flakes holding more water. The snow-weighing gauges used in this winter's test at O'Hare and La Guardia will measure the actual liquid content of the snow. "Pilots have already become more aware that visibility can be misleading when it comes to aircraft icing," says Rasmussen. "Now we can give them quantitative measurements indicating the real potential of snow to form ice on aircraft."
NCAR has placed two snow-weighing gauges at La Guardia, two at John F. Kennedy Airport, and one at Newark Airport nearby in New Jersey. In the Chicago area, gauges will be placed at O'Hare, at Midway Airport, in the city of Wilmette, and at the College of Du Page, southwest of O'Hare. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages NCAR under sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. This research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation through an interagency agreement in response to requirements and funding by the Federal Aviation Administration's Aviation Weather Development Program.
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Experts from around the world have agreed on a standard for locating information, whether held in libraries, data centers, or published on the Internet. This lays the foundation for a virtual library of environmental data and information that will be easily accessible on global networks.
An information locator service is useful wherever people communicate, but there is a special urgency to the worldwide sharing of environmental information," said U.S. Vice President Al Gore. "Every year, governments and others spend billions of dollars collecting and processing environmental data and related technical information.
"We now hold around the world an incredible wealth of information about the earth and its inhabitants," the vice president said. "That information could have a profound impact on our ability to protect our environment, manage natural resources, prevent and respond to disasters, and ensure sustainable development. Unfortunately, many potential users either do not know that it exists or do not know how to access it. This initiative will make use of base standards that are so essential for people to find the environmental data and information they need."
The experts are representatives to the Global Information Society Initiative, which was convened at the suggestion of Vice President Gore and organized by the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Commission). The leaders of the Environment and Natural Resources Management project, which includes several other nations and organizations, are Larry Enomoto of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Eliot Christian of the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
"The service standard is designed to make information easy to find," said Christian. "It is a natural complement to the World Wide Web that is such a wonderful tool for presentation. When we look for a particular piece of information, we often need to search many separate sources. We may not be satisfied with just scanning World Wide Web pages, just accepting the suggestions of one publisher, nor just being limited to information published in English.
"Libraries centuries ago confronted the same problem. They held an amazing diversity of content, but had to work out common agreements on how to catalog it," Christian said. "Today, librarians and citizens everywhere rely on the common formats used in library catalogs. The information locator service builds on these standards as applied to electronic networks, and is positioned to evolve along with rapid advances in information discovery and natural language processing."
The standard adopted for this service is ISO 10163, known in the United States as ANSI Z39.50. This standard specifies how electronic network searches should be expressed and how results are returned. It is adaptable to all languages and supports full-text search of documents as well as very large and complex bibliographic collections. The standard does not require a central authority or master index. Just as catalogs provide a common way to search many separate libraries, anyone can create information locators independently.
By applying a standard that has been widely used for many years, this initiative takes advantage of existing networks and software to access a vast array of valuable resources, including hundreds of libraries, museums, and archives worldwide—some containing as many as 35 million locator records. It also fits in with many other international and national programs focused on improved access to information, including the Government Information Locator Service being implemented in the United States and elsewhere.
Further information on the information locator service can be found at http://www.g7.fed.us/gils.html
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Delegates from the United States and 159 other countries recently agreed on two treaties on intellectual property rights, but dropped a controversial treaty that would have for the first time created a property right on databases.
The negotiators did agree on a treaty to clarify the application of copyright rules to material sent over the Internet or other electronic formats, generating a global standard of the kinds of electronic copyright protections that creators of books, movies, and other literary and artistic works already enjoy, and on another that would create legal protection for sound recordings if other copyright rules do not apply. The agreements came following a three-week meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva, Switzerland. The treaties will now be taken back to the member nations for ratification.
Critics of the Database Treaty contended that such an extension of protection would hinder the work of scientists and educators and might even allow sports leagues to tighten control over statistics generated by their teams. Critics worried that the proposal might seriously erode the long-established policies of "fair use" found in American law. That doctrine allows some copying of works for personal use—a student copying a magazine article at the library, for example—so long as the copying does not interfere with the commercial interests of the copyright holder. A concerted and successful effort was made by the science and engineering community, including AMS, UCAR, AAAS, and the National Academies of Science and Engineering to delay the treaty on databases until there had been time for input from the science, engineering, and education communities.
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Researchers report that they have designed a supercomputer that can handle a staggering one trillion mathematical operations per second, a breakthrough computer experts liken to the running of the first four-minute mile.
The $55 million computer, designed by the Energy Department (DOE) and Intel Corporation, will largely be used by government scientists to simulate nuclear weapons tests that are now banned by international treaty, according to officials. It also will be used for complicated weather forecasting, genetic research, space research, and many other sophisticated experiments, they said.
"This milestone was once thought unachievable, certainly within this century," Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary said at a news conference. "It's an extraordinary achievement."
The Intel computer is almost three times faster than the current supercomputing record holder, a machine at a Japanese university designed by Hitachi Ltd. The new supercomputer can handle 667 billion instructions in the time it takes a bullet to travel one foot, according to researchers. In 15 seconds, they report, it can crunch through calculations that would take today's average desktop computers about two days to process.
Intel accomplished the feat essentially by wiring together thousands of today's most powerful desktop computers. Using a technique known as "massively parallel computing," engineers linked together 7,264 high-end versions of Intel's popular Pentium processor and programmed them to operate in concert.
Researchers reported that although parallel technology has been used in supercomputers for several years, making the technique work with so many standard processors has been a complicated and elusive goal. DOE and Intel researchers worked almost two years in developing software and hardware to transform their theory into reality, officials said.
"Like an orchestra leader with 7,000 instruments in it, getting them all to play off the same piece of music is a big challenge," explained Edward A. Masi, an Intel vice president.
The big day came on 11 December, Masi said, when the machine housed in 57 refrigerator-sized cabinets at an Intel facility in Beaverton, OR, performed 6.4 quadrillion—that's 6,400,000,000,000,000—calculations in an hour and 20 minutes.
The system will eventually be made up of more than 9,000 Pentium Pro processors (each running at 200 megahertz) and will be able to operate at 1.4 teraflops—or 1.4 trillion operations per second—according to Masi. The supercomputer will be housed in a 1,600-square-foot room at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM, a DOE facility.
The Intel supercomputer is the first step in a 10-year government plan to develop a 100-teraflop computer, a machine that would be 100 times more powerful than one just announced. Energy officials said such a machine is needed to handle sophisticated nuclear test simulations.
That means that Intel's dominance of the supercomputer world could be short-lived, sources indicated. International Business Machines Corporation and Silicon Graphics, Inc., which earlier this year acquired supercomputer-maker Cray Research Inc., are both at work on three-teraflop machines using different technologies. Those computers are expected to be in operation by early 1999, officials indicated.
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The secretary of commerce presented the Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Achievement to Eugenia Kalnay, director of the National Weather Services's Environmental Modeling Center. She was awarded for her leadership in the improvement of computer models, which are the foundation of accurate and timely weather forecasts.
"Dr. Kalnay has demonstrated outstanding leadership as a scientist and innovative manager," said Elbert W. Friday, Director of the NWS. "Her scientific and technical insight into the complex field of numerical weather prediction has improved the weather services provided to the United States."
Kalnay was among five Department of Commerce recipients of the president's annual award. The award is presented to civil servants for outstanding career achievements, significant cost reduction, workforce productivity, initiative and innovation, quality of work, cooperative efforts, and successful efforts in fostering diversity.
The Environmental Modeling Center (EMC), one of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, improves weather, marine, and climate predictions for the nation by developing and improving computer models of the atmosphere and oceans. Computer models developed and improved by the center provide the basic guidance for meteorologists and oceanographers in making forecasts.
Kalnay has served as director of the EMC for the past 10 years and has been recognized by the Department of Commerce, the American Meteorological Society, and NASA for her achievements, as well as for the successes of the center. She has serviced on many professional committees and working groups and has published more than 200 papers in scientific journals.
A native of Argentina, Dr. Kalnay earned a degree in meteorology from the University of Buenos Aires in 1965, and in 1971 she received a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before becoming director of the EMC, she headed the Global Modeling Branch at NASA. She was also an associate professor at MIT and an assistant professor at the National University in Uruguay.
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Robert S. Walker, retiring chairman of the House Science Committee and chairman of the House Republican Leadership, has joined The Wexler Group, a Washington government affairs firm. He will serve as the firm's president.
Walker, 54, retired from Congress at the end of the last session having completed 10 terms as representative from Pennsylvania. Long considered one of the Republicans' chief strategists and experts on the parliamentary process, he held a number of key positions in the House during his 20 years on the hill.
From his first days in the House, he was a tireless champion for scientific research, technology, and space programs. He has long been a strong supporter of the manned space program, recognizing space as an economic frontier that must be explored. In 1996, he was the first sitting member of the House in history to be awarded NASA's Distinguished Service Medal.
The "Ballot Tellers" (members of the Admission Committee) met on 7 January 1997 at AMS Headquarters. The results of the election are as follows:
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