April 26, 2006, 6:42 PM CT

Disassembling And Reassembling Tropical Storm Gert

To figure out how something mechanical works, people take it apart and look at its components, then try and put it back together. That's what NASA researchers are doing with hurricanes, to try to figure out what makes them tick. For Tropical Storm Gert, which formed in the Gulf of Mexico in July 2005, they found that the mountainous areas of Mexico helped the storm to form.

To see how a hurricane works, scientists take readings of all its pieces: wind, rain, temperature, humidity and air pressure. They can also use computer models to try to re-create the storm's conditions. By comparing model simulations to actual observations of the storm, they can determine how good or bad the models are. If the models do poorly, scientists try to figure out what went wrong. If they do well, scientists can then use the model results to try to better understand how hurricanes form and intensify. Researchers did this after the summer of 2005, using Gert as a test case to make sure that their computer models were accurately "re-assembling" the storm as it appeared.

Scott Braun, Atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. and his co-author on the Gert study, Michael T. Montgomery, an Atmospheric scientist from Colorado State University, took data produced by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction about the state of the atmosphere during Gert, and used it in their computer model. The model produced a re-creation of Tropical Storm Gert. Their conclusions were presented at the American Meteorological Society's 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology the week of April 24, 2006, in Monterey, Calif.........

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April 24, 2006, 7:06 PM CT

Series Explores Ships Lost At Sea

University Park, Pa. - "Andrea Doria: Dive to Adventure and Danger" is the first in a three-part lecture series, "Lost at Sea," that highlights research on shipwrecks at Penn State. The "Andrea Doria" presentation will take place April 13 at 7 p.m. in Room 26 of Hosler Building on the Penn State campus.

David Bright, Penn State alumnus and president of Nautical Research Group, Inc. of New Jersey, will present a multifaceted view of the Andrea Doria from her initial planning and construction to salvage dives in the 260 feet of cold North Atlantic waters.

The Andrea Doria was an Italian steamship with 1705 passengers and crew on board that was struck in fog off the coast of Rhode Island by the Swedish-American liner Stockholm. The ship was traveling from Genoa, Italy to New York City in 1956. The 29,000-ton liner sank in 11 hours.

Bright is an experienced shipwreck historian and deep technical diver. He studied the Titanic for more than 30 years and in 2003 and 2005, as part of scientific research, dove 3 miles to the wreck site of the ship on the Atlantic floor. He has studied the degradation of the ship caused by increased microbial activity. He has also worked on the wreck of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor. He is considered the foremost historical authority on the Andrea Doria.........

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April 24, 2006, 6:39 AM CT

Innovation on the Rock, An Ocean of Opportunity

Don't let Newfoundland and Labrador's old world charm fool you. The province is becoming known internationally as a hot bed for ocean technology research and development. With new companies and partnerships continually sparking growth of this dynamic industry, the world is set to experience this region's tidal wave of innovation!

At the centre of the ocean technology cluster sit two senior scientists at the NRC Institute for Ocean Technology (NRC-IOT). Antonio Simões Re and Bruce Colbourne were recently awarded NRC Outstanding Achievement Awards for the work they've done to build Newfoundland & Labrador's ocean technology cluster as solid as "the Rock" itself.

Tides of Change

The province has always had a historical and cultural attachment to the sea, and the strength of its economy has traditionally rested in the region's unpredictable waters. The past several years have been a time of mapping this relationship into an economic growth strategy to fuel innovation, job creation and make the region more competitive.

Central to this strategy has been OceansAdvance, a private-public partnership to build Newfoundland & Labrador's R&D capacities, expand business and export opportunities and identify investment prospects. NRC Outstanding Achievement Award recipient Bruce Colbourne was a driving force behind the development of this initiative and continues to remain a strong, visionary member of the group.........

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April 22, 2006, 5:51 PM CT

Drilling Into Fossil Magma Chamber

Researchers aboard the research drilling ship JOIDES Resolution have, for the first time, drilled into a fossil magma chamber under intact ocean crust. There, 1.4 kilometers beneath the sea floor, they have recovered samples of gabbro: a hard, black rock that forms when molten magma is trapped beneath Earth's surface and cools slowly.

The scientists, affiliated with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), published their findings on April 20 in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science.

Eventhough gabbro has been sampled elsewhere in the oceans where faulting and tectonic movements have brought it closer to the seafloor, this is the first time gabbro has been recovered from intact ocean crust.

The borehole into the magma chamber took nearly five months to drill, and mandatory the use of twenty-five hardened steel and tungsten carbide drill bits. Getting there "is a rare opportunity to calibrate geophysical measurements with direct observations of real rocks," said geophysicist Doug Wilson of the University of California at Santa Barbara, lead author on the Science Express paper. "Finding the right place to drill was probably the key to this success".

Wilson and his IODP colleagues found that place by identifying a region of the Pacific Ocean that formed some 15 million years ago when the East Pacific Rise was spreading at a "superfast" rate of more than 200 millimeters per year, faster than any mid-ocean ridge on Earth today.........

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April 20, 2006, 11:15 PM CT

Walrus Calves Stranded By Melting Sea Ice

Researchers have reported an unprecedented number of unaccompanied and possibly abandoned walrus calves in the Arctic Ocean, where melting sea ice may be forcing mothers to abandon their pups as the mothers follow the rapidly retreating ice edge north.

Nine lone walrus calves were reported swimming in deep waters far from shore by scientists aboard the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy during a cruise in the Canada Basin in the summer of 2004. Unable to forage for themselves, the calves were likely to drown or starve, the researchers said.

Lone walrus calves far from shore have not been described before, the scientists report in the recent issue of Aquatic Mammals. The sightings suggest that increased polar warming may lead to decreases in the walrus population.

"We were on a station for 24 hours, and the calves would be swimming around us crying. We couldn't rescue them," said Carin Ashjian, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a member of the research team.

The scientists found evidence of warmer ocean temperatures that may have rapidly melted seasonal sea ice over the shallow continental shelf where walruses dive to feed on bottom-dwelling animals such as clams and crabs. Walrus need the ice to rest themselves and to leave the pups to rest while the mothers feed. Ice remained over very deep water.........

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April 20, 2006, 9:23 PM CT

Evolving Seismic Technology

USGS scientist emeritus Waverly Person remembers the days when a rotary phone, a pen, a globe and a keen sense of geography were the mandatory ingredients for locating earthquakes around the world. Things have changed dramatically since he was a newly minted seismologist. "We really had to scramble," he says, referring to earthquake response in the '50s and '60s, when he and his fellow researchers did calculations on globes with tape measures and compasses. "It might take a day or a day-and-a-half to get information from remote locations."

That struggle makes Waverly all the more appreciative of the real-time data and global-monitoring systems available now. "It's great to be a part of the change and to have had a hand in getting there," said Person, who recently retired after a 51-year career as a premier earthquake scientist. Today, the USGS has the most extensive seismic monitoring and response system in the nation and works with numerous universities to advance understanding of the cause and effects of earthquakes and with emergency response agencies in the interest of public safety and hazards mitigation.........

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April 18, 2006, 11:21 PM CT

Gamma Radiation From The Cosmos Unlikely to happen

Are you losing sleep at night because you're afraid that all life on Earth will suddenly be annihilated by a massive dose of gamma radiation from the cosmos?

Well, now you can rest easy.

Some scientists have wondered whether a deadly astronomical event called a gamma ray burst could happen in a galaxy like ours, but a group of astronomers at Ohio State University and their colleagues have determined that such an event would be nearly impossible.

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are high-energy beams of radiation that shoot out from the north and south magnetic poles of a particular kind of star during a supernova explosion, explained Krzysztof Stanek, associate professor of astronomy at Ohio State. Scientists suspect that if a GRB were to occur near our solar system, and one of the beams were to hit Earth, it could cause mass extinctions all over the planet.

The GRB would have to be less than 3,000 light years away to pose a danger, Stanek said. One light year is approximately 6 trillion miles, and our galaxy measures 100,000 light years across. So the event would not only have to occur in our galaxy, but relatively close by, as well.

In the new study, which Stanek and his coauthors submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, they found that GRBs tend to occur in small, misshapen galaxies that lack heavy chemical elements (astronomers often refer to all elements other than the very lightest ones -- hydrogen, helium, and lithium -- as metals). Even among metal-poor galaxies, the events are rare -- astronomers only detect a GRB once every few years.........

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April 17, 2006, 9:36 PM CT

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles To Track Pollutants

A research consortium funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, has successfully sent a fleet of aerial drones through the pollution-filled skies over the Indian Ocean, thereby achieving an important milestone in the tracking of pollutants responsible for dimming Earth's atmosphere.

The instrument-bearing autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (AUAVs) completed 18 successful data-gathering missions in the vicinity of the Maldives, an island chain nation south of India, said Scripps scientist V. Ramanathan.

During the Maldives AUAV Campaign (MAC), groupings of three aircraft were flown in a vertical formation that allowed their onboard instruments to observe conditions below, inside and above clouds simultaneously. Scientists hope the data produced during the flights will reveal in unprecedented detail how pollution particles cause dimming and contribute to the formation of clouds which amplify the dimming caused by the pollution.

"MAC has demonstrated that lightweight AUAVs and their miniaturized instruments are an effective and inexpensive means of simultaneously sampling clouds in polluted environments from within and from all sides," said Jay Fein, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric Sciences, which funded MAC. "They will serve as critically important additions to our atmospheric measurement capability for one of the major issues in climate change science: How does pollution affect cloud microphysical and radiative processes in the context of weather and climate?".........

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April 15, 2006, 4:00 PM CT

Caribbean And Central America May Have Less Summer Rain

Parts of the Caribbean and Central America are likely to experience a significant summer drying trend by the middle of this century, UCLA atmospheric researchers will report in the April 18 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Their research is based on an analysis of 10 global climate computer simulations, from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and from Australia, Britain, France, Gera number of and Japan. (The study is published this week in the PNAS online edition.)

The majority of the computer models calls for a substantial decrease in tropical rainfall to occur by 2054, or sooner under some of the models, said J. David Neelin, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, a member of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and lead author of the study. By the end of this century, the models call for a decrease in summer rainfall of 20 percent or more in parts of the Caribbean and Central America, Neelin said. The winter change in rainfall in this region is not dramatic, added Neelin, who noted that summer and winter rains occur by very different climate phenomena. If the models prove correct, the decreased rainfall would be a consequence of human-induced global warming, he said.........

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April 15, 2006, 2:02 PM CT

Temperatures Causes Niagara Falls' Mist

Is Canadian hotels to be blamed for mist over Niagra fall? When the Niagara Parks Commission posed that question back in 2004, the concern was that high-rise hotels on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls were contributing to the creation of more mist, obscuring the very view that millions of tourists flock there every year to see.

The suspicion was that new high-rise buildings were altering airflow patterns, contributing to a higher, thicker mist plume.

Consultants conducted wind tunnel experiments that seemed to confirm that mist levels were enhanced by the tall buildings around the falls, a report that circulated in the Canadian news media.

Now University at Buffalo geologists have determined that the high-rise hotels are probably not to blame.

"As per our findings, it is unlikely that the buildings at the falls enhance the mist," said Marcus Bursik, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, who led the study with several students who were investigating the plume for their graduate-degree projects. "Rather, our data show that it's air and water temperature that control the amount of mist.

"It turns out that the bigger the temperature difference between the air and the water, the higher and more substantial is the mist plume and the thicker is the mist at the Falls," he continued.........

Posted by: Tyler      Permalink         Source

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