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HOW "PAPA MAU," LIQUID ROBOTICS' WAVE GLIDER ROBOT, SURVIVED A 9,000 MILE TRIP ACROSS THE PACIFIC FROM CALIFORNIA TO AUSTRALIA

Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider robot Papa Mau on the way across the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii to Australia (Click Image To Enlarge)

Surviving stormy weather and a shark attack, the Wave Glider just entered the record books for the longest autonomous trip ever taken.

 

On his first journey across the Pacific Ocean, Papa Mau was bitten by a shark, whipped by 100 mph winds, and tossed by 30 foot waves. Somehow he survived the whole 9,000 nautical mile trip from Northern California to Australia. Papa Mau now holds the world record for distance traveled by an autonomous vehicle on land or in the sea.

Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider robot Papa Mau prepares to leave San Francisco (Click Image To Enlarge)

Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider robot Papa Mau saying one last goodbye to the West Coast (Click Image To Enlarge)

The surfboard-sized robot is one of Liquid Robotics’ Wave Gliders--the first marine robots that propel themselves forward with wave energy. In November 2011, four Wave Gliders took off on a slow journey (they have a top speed of one and a half knots) across the Pacific, armed with sensors that measure oil spills, salinity levels, phytoplankton activity, and more. The goal: to spark interest in marine science, foster new innovations, and prove out Liquid Robotics’ technology. All data from the journey is available for free to anyone who registers on the Liquid Robotics website.

Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider robot Papa Mau halfway through the journey, still going strong off the coast of Hawaii (Click Image To Enlarge)

Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider robot Papa Mau arrives safely in Australia (Click Image To Enlarge)

Papa Mau is the first Wave Glider to finish his journey; the other three robots are still in transit. All four Wave Gliders were taken from San Francisco to the Monterey Bay, where they spent three weeks syncing their data with existing sensors in the area (from organizations like NOAA). From there, the robots’ paths diverged.

Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider robot Papa Mau finally completes it's 9000-mile trip as it is hoisted aboard the Liquid Robotics' chase ship (Click Image to Enlarge)

Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider robot Papa Mau gets a much needed rest.  Some of its brethren are still in the water (Click Image To Enlarge)

The four robots continued together in a straight line to Hawaii, where they encountered the aforementioned 100 mph winds and 30-foot waves on a bright, sunny day. A nearby sailboat was so overwhelmed by the sudden nasty weather that it lost its mast and had to get rescued by a freighter.  Liquid Robotics CEO Bill Vass says.

"When we first saw that, we thought a sensor must be broken. But all four [Wave Gliders] started to see it.  It didn’t show up on satellite systems. You hear stories like that from sailors and no one believes it."

Liquid Robotics' Wave Glider robot Papa Mau included this souvenir from its 9000-mile journey (Click Image To Enlarge)

On the way to Hawaii, one of the Wave Gliders (cost: approximately $200,000) was bitten by a shark, which chomped through the controller cable for its rudder system. The robot made a pit stop in Oahu (all of the bots stopped briefly in Hawaii to sync up with a set of buoys), where it picked up a cable before heading back into the water. Sharks are often intrigued by the Wave Gliders and like to taste them, but this was the first time such severe damage had been done. "The shark bit through a steel-braided protective cable all the way into the control lines. The tooth is still embedded," says Vass. As a result of the incident, the next generation Wave Glider control cables will run inside the body in a metal tube.

Two of the Wave Gliders headed out from Hawaii to Shikoku, Japan; the other two--including Papa Mau--set off for Brisbane, Australia. Mau shot down past American Samoa and the Fiji Islands, and then swung north and entered the East Australian Current before finally landing in Australia. The other Australia-bound Wave Glider, Benjamin, took a detour in American Samoa because of a malfunctioning sensor. He’s now seven weeks behind Papa Mau.

The Japan-bound robots are also on their way. One of them had to get serviced before continuing its journey. says Vass.

"The ocean’s a rough place to operate." 

The Wave Glider is currently being used for up to 60 different applications, including helping ships reduce fuel consumption, measuring carbon output, helping wit fishery management, and oil and gas exploration. As evidenced by the de-masted sailboat incident, the robot can detect things that satellites miss.  Vass explains.

"From a satellite system you can’t tell an algal bloom and plankton bloom from a hydrocarbon plume. We can measure down to two parts per trillion of hydrocarbons. We can tell [if a plume is] from fish, a natural oil seep, an oil rig, a plankton plume."  

In other words, the Wave Glider can detect oil spills in remote places where they might otherwise have gone unnoticed for too long. With so many capabilities, it’s no surprise that Wave Gliders are used by organizations as varied as BP and NOAA.

In addition to Papa Mau’s arrival in Australia, Liquid Robotics also announced this week that it has selected the five finalists for the PacX Challenge, a competition that asked scientists to submit a research abstract outlining what they could do with the Wave Glider data sets. Entrants are studying everything from the respiration of the ocean to phytoplankton.

The winner will get to use a Wave Glider for six months and receive a $50,000 research grant, sponsored by BP.  Vass says.

"If you were to hire a deep ocean research vessel, it would cost $37,500 per day on average. This is six months equivalent. It’s a pretty big award for scientists to go out and do that." 

COMMENTARY:  This is an incredible 9,000-mile journey across the Pacific Ocean by an aquatic fully-autonomous Wave Glider robot that succeeded in spite of a 100-mile per hour hurricane (after repairs from that shark bite).  The research data that could be gathered by hundreds of Wave Glider's sailing strategically in the Earth's oceans could be invaluable in testing ocean water salinity, temperatures and wave actions for the purpose of evaluating the effects of global warming on our oceans.  The oceans control the weather and any changes, even minute ones, can have devastating effects to ocean water salinity, temperatures and currents.  In a blog post dated October 2, 2011, I wrote about NASA's Aquarius satellite, and how that satellite had produced the first global map of ocean surface salinity.  Having a Wave Glider in the open seas provides a huge advantage over the Aquarius satellite.  The data gathered by Wave Glider's could be copared with the satellite-captured data, to determine if there are any anomalies and similarities and prove very helpful in guiding future actions concerning global warming.   

Courtesy of an article dated December 5, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Exist 

 

 

PRINCETON & MIT SCIENTISTS SAY CLIMATE CHANGE AND RISING SEAS COULD CAUSE MASSIVE STORM SURGES AROUND NEW YORK CITY

What the Statue of Liberty and New York City skyline would look like after a massive storm surge by the end of the 21st Century due to global warming and rising sea levels. (Click Image To Enlarge) 

As the Earth's climate changes, the worst inundations from hurricanes and tropical storms could become far more common in low-lying coastal areas, a new study suggests. Researchers from Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that regions such as the New York City metropolitan area that currently experience a disastrous flood every century could instead become submerged every one or two decades.

The researchers report in the journal Nature Climate Change that projected increases in sea level and storm intensity brought on by climate change would make devastating storm surges — the deadly and destructive mass of water pushed inland by large storms — more frequent. Using various global climate models, the team developed a simulation tool that can predict the severity of future flooding an area can expect.

Simulation map shows flooding to Long Island and New York City due to storm surges resulting from global warming and rising sea levels with hurricane storms of different magnitudes by the New York State Emergency Management Office (Click Image To Enlarge)

The researchers used New York City as a test case and found that with fiercer storms and a 3-foot rise in sea level due to climate change, "100-year floods" — a depth of roughly 5.7 feet above tide level that occurs roughly once a century — could more likely occur every three to 20 years. What today are New York City's "500-year floods" — or waters that reach more than 9 feet deep — could, with climate change, occur every 25 to 240 years, the researchers wrote.

The research is not only the first to examine the future intensity of storm surges, but also to offer a tool for estimating an area's vulnerability, said co-author Michael Oppenheimer, the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geoscienes and International Affaris at Princeton.  He said.  

"Coastal managers in cities like New York make daily decisions about costly infrastructure that would be affected by such storms. They need a reliable indicator of the risk." 

Oppenheimer said. 

"Our modeling approach is designed as a key step in this direction.  As the world warms, risks will increase across a variety of fronts, and the threat to coastal infrastructure in the face of an already-rising sea level and potentially stronger hurricanes could be one of the most costly unless we are able to anticipate and reduce vulnerability."

Simulations by researchers from Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that projected increases in sea level and storm intensity brought on by climate change could make devastating storm surges more frequent. Using the New York City area as a model, the researchers found that floods experienced every century could instead occur every one or two decades. The worst simulated flood (left) was a 15.5-foot storm surge at Manhattan's Battery (black star) that stemmed from a high-intensity storm (black line) moving northeast and very close to the city. A weaker but larger northwest-bound storm (right) that was further from the city would result in floodwater nearly 15 feet deep as its strongest winds pushed water toward the Battery. The colored contours represent the maximum surge height, from 0 (blue) to 5 (violet) meters. (Image by Ning Lin)

Lead author Ning Lin, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, said that knowing the frequency of storm surges may help urban and coastal planners design seawalls and other protective structures. Lin, who received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2010, began the project at Princeton then continued it at MIT; the current report is based on her work at MIT.

Nothing that Manhattan's seawalls now stand a mere 5 feet high, Lin said.  

"When you design your buildings or dams or structures on the coast, you have to know how high your seawall has to be.  You have to decide whether to build a seawall to prevent being flooded every 20 years."

An atmospheric image of Hurricane Irene on the U.S. east coast in August 2011 - NOAA

Lin and Oppenheimer worked with study co-authors Kerry Emanuel, an MIT atmospheric science professor, and Erik Vanmarcke, a Princeton professor of civil and environmental engineering.  Lin, Vanmarcke and Emanuel also co-wrote a 2010 report on the project published in the Journal of Geophysical Research that was based on Lin's work at Princeton.

Carol Friedland, an assistant professor of construction management and industrial engineering at Louisiana State University, sees the latest results as a useful tool to inform coastal design — particularly, she notes, as most buildings are designed with a 60- to 120-year "usable lifespan."

Friedland said.  

"The physical damage and economic loss that result from storm surge can be devastating to individuals, businesses, infrastructure and communities.  For current coastal community planning and design projects, it is essential that the effects of climate change be included in storm-surge predictions."

The researchers ran a total of 45,000 storm simulations for the New York City region under two scenarios: current climate conditions from 1981 to 2000 based on observed data and four global climate models; and projected climate conditions for the years 2081 to 2100 based on the four climate models, as well as future carbon dioxide output as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Oppenheimer is a longtime participant in the IPCC.

Storms in the simulations occurred within a 125-mile (200-kilometer) radius of the Battery, at the southern tip of Manhattan, and generated a maximum wind speed of at least 50 miles per hour. Hurricanes are classified as having a maximum wind speed of at least 74 miles per hour.

Once the researchers simulated storms in the region, they then simulated the resulting storm surges using three different methods, including one used by the National Hurricane Center (NHC). In the days or hours before a hurricane hits land, the NHC uses a storm-surge model to predict the risk and extent of flooding from the impending storm. Such models, however, have not been used to evaluate multiple simulated storms under a scenario of climate change.

Again, the group compared results from multiple methods: one from the NHC that simulates storm surges quickly, though coarsely; another method that generates more accurate storm surges, though more slowly; and a method in between, developed by Lin and her colleagues, that estimates relatively accurate surge floods, relatively quickly.

The researchers found that the frequency of massive storm surges would go up in proportion to an increase in more violent storms and a rise in sea level, the researchers reported. They noted that climate models predict that the sea level around New York City could rise by 1.5 to nearly 5 feet by the end of the 21st century.

Flooding was amplified by the storm's wind direction and proximity to the city. The worst simulated flood, a 15.5-foot storm surge at Manhattan's Battery, stemmed from a high-intensity storm moving northeast and very close to the city. On the other hand, a weaker but larger northwest-bound storm that was further from the city resulted in floodwater nearly 15 feet deep as its strongest winds pushed water toward the Battery.

A storm surge modeling system developed by New York Sea Grant scientists predicted flood levels during storm surges that strike New York City due to global warming and rising sea levels. (Click Image To Enlarge)

Floods of this magnitude outstrip the most devastating storm surges in the city's recorded history, Lin said. The worst accompanied the 1821 Norfolk and Long Island hurricane, which packed winds of 135 miles per hour and is one of only four hurricanes known to have made landfall in New York City since pre-Columbian times.

Lin said.  

"The highest [surge flood] was 3.2 meters [10.4 feet], and this happened in 1821. That's the highest water level observed in New York City's history, which is like a present 500-year event."

The study was published online Feb. 14 by the journal Nature Climate Change, and was supported by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Princeton Environmental Institute through a fellowship from the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy based in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

COMMENTARY:    The Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers concentrated their storm surge and flooding study to the New York Metropolitan area. It should be kept in mind that extensive coastal flooding would be experienced along the entire Atlantic coastline due to global warming and rising sea levels.  Massive flooding would also affect all of the Gulf states, including low-lying areas along the Pacific coast.  

If you would like to see how global warming and rising sea levels accompanied by massive storm surges from hurricanes could affect areas where you live in the U.S., please check the National Hurrican Center's Storm Surge Interactive Risk Maps HERE.

Scientific evidence gathered by climatologists around the world clearly shows that worldwide carbon dioxide levels have been rising since the Industrial Revolution and that Earth's average temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.  Carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles, manufacturing plants and coal fired energy plants get most of the blame.  Global warming is happening as I write this. 

There will be some among you who still don't believe in global warming, and that it is something concocted by crazy liberals.  That's just fine.  You are entitled to your opinion.  Peace brother.

Courtesy of an article dated February 21, 2012 appearing in Research at Princeton and an article dated February 13, 2012 appearing in MIT News 

THE CRYOSCOPE HAPTIC WEATHERVANE IS A THERMOMETER THAT LETS YOU ACTUALLY FEEL THE TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE

AFTER DECADES OF WEARING THE WRONG COAT, NEVER AGAIN, I SAY!

Thermometers are superb at measuring temperature but lousy at describing it. A bulb of mercury tells me it’s 55 degrees--but what’s 55 degrees? When was the last time I walked into a room and said,

“This place feels exactly 55 degrees.”

Cryoscope from Robb Godshaw on Vimeo.

The Cryoscope Haptic Weathervane, created by Robb Godshaw of Syyn Labs, conveys the temperature by allowing you to experience it. Syncing with Wi-Fi to online weather reports, you can touch this aluminum cube to actually feel the outside temperature rather than simply reading about it through numbers or whimsical sunshine icons.  Godshaw tells us.

“I sought to develop a device that conveyed the forecast in a manner which left nothing to the imagination.  It provides a thorough and instantaneous understanding of what awaits the user outside.”

Technically, the 4-inch milled aluminum cube is stuffed with quite a bit of hardware, including an Arduino that controls a Peltier element and a heat sink, which work in tandem to pump heat appropriately. After the first weather sync, it’s just a few minutes before the device comes to temperature.

Click Image To Enlarge

But the best trick of the Cryoscope isn’t its ability to hit a perfect temperature, but its ability to hit the perfect perceived temperature.  Godshaw writes.  

“Due to the ‘cold’ nature of metal, the temperature is adjusted to match human perceptions of hot and cold.”

For the cube to feel neutral on human skin, it’s set to an 85°F baseline. From there, the cube adjusts its temperature by the number of degrees the outside differs from 73°F room temperature. In other words, if it’s 60°F outside, the cube will technically cool to 72°F.

So the imperfect temperature ends up feeling perfect.

Currently, Godshaw is open to commercializing the proof of concept, but that hasn’t stopped him from considering improvements to the simplistic temperature-only design to include all aspects of weather.  Godshaw writes.  

“A version of the device that could communicate precipitation or wind would be beneficial.  The addition of water would present numerous technical challenges. An Internet commenter suggested that a lightning feature should be added, where it gives the user a small shock. I do not plan to implement that feature.”

And if I might add, the water mixed with lightning sounds especially dangerous.

COMMENTARY:    I never thought I would say this, but this is the worst design for a household temperature thermometer that I have seen in a long time.  Steve Jobs designed the Apple cube idea too, and it didn't work.  The ability to feel the perceived outside temperature by simply touching the cube is a novel idea, but I would like to know the actual temperature displayed on a digital display.  How many individuals can tell the difference between 85 and 90 degrees fahrenheit, do you suppose? See my point?  

If I want to feel the outside temperature, I go outside. I want to feel just how the temperature feels to the skin of my face.  If it's too hot, I will know.  I will instantly go into a sweat.  The Cryoscope Haptic Weathervane just does not shake my world.  I just don't think that this cube gives you the sensitivity of the outside temperature as it would feel on your face.  For a blind individual who can't see a temperature reading, this might work wonders, but for normal people, this is not very practical.  In my opinion the Cryoscope Haptic Weathervane is a dude.

Courtesy of an article dated February 13, 2012 appearingi n Fast Company Design

 

RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS FINALLY REACH LAKE VOSTOK, A 1-MILLION YR OLD SUBGLACIAL LAKE UNDER THE ANTARCTIC ICE CAP, AFTER 20 YRS OF DRILLING

A man stands near drilling apparatus at the Vostok research camp in Antarctica (Click Image To Enlarge)

After drilling into Lake Vostok for over two decades, Russian scientists have confirmed that they reached the mysterious freshwater lake that was sealed beneath over two miles of Antarctic ice.

 

After decades of drilling, Russian scientists in the arctic have uncovered a rare piece of nature, an ancient lake buried thousands of feet under the ice. RT's Sean Thomas, toured the frozen continent exactly a year ago, and now explains what this discovery could mean.

Beneath the vast white landscape, Lake Vostok is the deepest and most isolated of Antarctica's subglacial lakes. Its size compares to Siberia's Lake Baikal or one of the Great Lakes, increasing the chance of biodiversity in its waters. Scientists estimate the body of water is roughly 1 million years old and supersaturated with oxygen, resembling no other known environment on Earth. John Priscu of Montana State University suspects that an oasis of life may lurk there, teeming around thermal vents.

A radar satellite image of the ice over Lake Vostok, a freshwater lake with a surface area of 14,000 square kilometres, that is under 4 kilometres of ice (Click Image To Enlarge)

Although reports on Lake Vostok came in Monday, the feat was not confirmed for two days. The Associated Press wrote Wednesday morning that according to a statement by Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute, its team reached Lake Vostok on Sunday.

Russian news source RT reports that the scientists were able to retrieve 40 liters of water from Lake Vostok which they are taking home in sterile containers to test.

Cross-section drawing showing the location of Lake Vostok, 2.2 miles below the Anarctic Ice Cap (Click Image To Enlarge)

Lake Vostok, which hasn't been touched by light in millions of years, has been a target of scientific exploration because of the unique lifeforms it may contain.

AP writes,

"The discovery has been avidly anticipated by scientists around the world, who hope that the lake, comparable in area to Lake Ontario, may contain microbial life and provide a clue in the search for life on other planets in similar conditions."

Click Image To Enlarge

According to Wired, Lake Vostok likely contains 50 times the amount of oxygen found in a typical freshwater lake. The conditions in the lake "are thought to be similar" to Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's Enceladus.

Despite the excitement surrounding the Russians' accomplishment, the project was not without environmental fears. The Washington Post explained that concerns exist that Lake Vostok "could be contaminated by the kerosene, Freon and other materials being used in the drilling."

AP reports,

"Russian researchers have argued that the water from the lake would rush up the borehole driven by a jump in pressure, safely sealing pollutants."

Russia's RT writes that drilling liquids did not enter Lake Vostok. They explained,

"The lake water, rising up to 40 meters due to under-pressure in the crack, pushed the drilling liquid back onto the surface."

Russian scientists pose for group photo after their drill hole successfully reached Lake Vostok on February 5, 2012 (Click Image To Enlarge)

Even with the concerns, the Russians' accomplishment at Lake Vostok has excited the scientific community. John Priscu, an Antarctic specialist at Montana State University, told The Washington Post,

"If they were successful, their efforts will transform the way we do science in Antarctica and provide us with an entirely new view of what exists under the vast Antarctic ice sheet."

The Russian operation is also significant because of the surface conditions which the scientists endured. The area above Lake Vostok is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. The lowest ever temperature on Earth, negative 128 degrees Fahrenheit (-82 C) was recorded there in 1983, according to the BBC.

In comparison, the temperature outside a commercial jetliner at a cruising altitude of around 35,000 feet is only about negative 69 degrees Fahrenheit.

COMMENTARY:   This is an incredible feat and if the Russians are able to successfully retrieve water from Lake Vostok after all these millions of years, and discover living microbes, sea life or other forms of life, the 20 years they spent drilling, would all be worth it.  We could end up discovering new species of life that existed in prehistoric times before Man walked on Earth.   

But Russia must wait for the Antarctic summer to collect and study water samples, leaving the door open for U.S. and British missions to explore two other subglacial lakes and beat it to be the first to answer the question of whether life exists under the polar ice. Martin Siegert, head of the University of Edinburgh's School of Geosciences, said. 

"This is scientific exploration, this is work that no one has ever done before.  This is probably one of the last frontiers on our planet that remains largely unknown to us."

Siegert is leading a British expedition to explore Lake Ellsworth in West Antarctica in 2012-2013.

The British camp at the Lake Ellsworth drilling site as a team of British engineers have completed the first phase of a project to explore an ancient subglacial lake buried 1.8 miles beneath the ice in Antarctica (Click Image To Enlarge)

There's obvious cause for concern by British and American scientists that the Russians may release living microbes that may be harmful or dangerous to Man.  Let's hope that the Russians don't fuck this up.

 Courtesy of an article dated February 8, 2012 appearing in Huffington Post Green and an article dated February 9, 2012 appearing in The Guardian

HOW HONEYWELL'S SMARTVIEW ENHANCED 3D TERRAIN "SYNTHETIC VISION SYSTEM" AIDS PILOTS TO LAND THEIR PLANES A LOT SAFER

The EVS/SVS system combines infrared imaging and GPS-generated graphics to guide airplane pilots to the runway in low-visibility conditions.

You know the computerized voice that intones "Terrain! Terrain! Pull up!" when Tom Cruise is about to crash his plane in Mission Impossible 2? It's real; a company called Honeywell invented it. They followed it up with the SmartView "synthetic vision system,"which extends the terrain-warning system into a 3-D visual display based on GPS data of every runway on earth (some of which Honeywell purchased from cash-strapped Russian spy agencies). And now they've combined SmartView with real-time infrared imaging called EVS, giving pilots a kind of augmented-reality view of runways so they can land planes safely even in crappy weather. Here's how it works:

 

The live feed from an infrared camera in the nose of the plane -- which can "see through" certain kinds of bad weather to reveal runway landing lights or other pertinent ground features -- is perfectly registered via GPS on top of a 3-D graphical view of the terrain, creating a "blended image" that gives pilots "enhanced situational awareness in low visibility conditions," says Bob Witwer of Honeywell’s Advanced Technology group. In English, that means they can see what they're doing even when they can't actually see what they're doing. Think of it as something like X-ray vision, minus the titillating applications.

Because the system (called EVS/SVS) is "all about enhancing safety," Witwer tells Co.Design, "there are a lot of subtleties to the design that really underscored a critical philosophy for us in this man/machine interface in aviation: don't give any info that the pilot doesn't need, and only provide infowhen he needs it." First, EVS/SVS doesn't use fancy heads-up displays or any specialty equipment -- it's displayed on the same LCD flight panels that pilots are already trained to rely on. And the somewhat primitive 3-D graphics look that way for a good reason. "Some early customer feedback asked why we couldn't make the synthetic terrain look photo-realistic -- but our philosophy is, there's detail that aids the mission and there's detail that becomes clutter," Witwer explains. "You want the real detail of the runway -- the landing lights and numbers. You don't want the pilot looking at the display and trying to see his house on the ground."

Other subtle "human factors" in the system's design include context-aware colorizing of the image: when the plane is on the ground, the infrared portion stays monochrome, but during flight (and landing maneuvers) when the blending between infrared video and synthetic graphics is most important, the infrared box includes slight colorization. "We still kept it visually distinct so there's absolutely no ambiguity about the synthetic, constructed portions of the image," says Witwer. "If a pilot is going to be staring at this display for multiple minutes, you need to provide the information in an intuitive way."

But EVS/SVS isn't intended to rewrite the rules of air safety; it can't magically "see" in all low-visibility conditions. ("You can actually use other electromagnetic methods to penetrate weather better than infrared," says Witwer, "but then the image isn't as sharp. It's a tradeoff.") What Honeywell wants is to simply enhance the information that pilots already rely on. A common safety rating known as "Category 1" requires planes to abort a landing attempt if they descend to 200 feet and still can't see the runway; using EVS/SVS, that safety "floor" can be pushed down to just 100 feet off the ground. "At 100 feet, if you can't make out key runway features with the naked eye, you still have to abort," says Witwer. "But that extra 100 feet of descent that EVS/SVS provides is often enough to get it done safely." That could translate into significant savings on fuel, since aborted landings mean circling for another attempt or diverting to another airport.

EVS/SVS isn't a formal product yet; Honeywell is still testing it. But the company expects to receive FAA approval as early as 2013. If the winter storms are as bad two years from now as they were this time around, Honeywell's safety-design innovations won't come a moment too soon.

COMMENTARY:  I often wondered how commercial airline pilots can land their plane at night and under thick cloud cover or fog.  The landings and takeoffs are always the "scary' part of flying for me.  

I looked into what technologies military and commercial airline pilots are presently using for landings and takeoffs under adverse conditions, and they call these systems HUD, which is is short for Heads-Up Guidance Systems.  Rockwell Collins calls their system HUD EVS.  The EVS stands for enhanced vision system.   Rockwell Collins HUD EVS is very similar to Honeywell's EVS/SVS, except you do not see the realistic terrain detail of the Honeywell EVS/SVS.  Here's a look at Rockwell Collins HUD EVS takeoff and landing guidance system:

 

HUDs are split into four generations reflecting the technology used to generate the images.

• First Generation - Use a CRT to generate an image on a phosphor screen, having the disadvantage of the phosphor screen coating degrading over time. The majority of HUDs in operation today are of this type.
• Second Generation - Use a solid state light source, for example LED, which is modulated by an LCD screen to display an image. These systems do not fade or require the high voltages of first generation systems. These systems are on commercial aircraft.
• Third Generation - Use optical waveguides to produce images directly in the combiner rather than use a projection system.
• Fourth Generation - Use a scanning laser to display images and even video imagery on a clear transparent medium.

Newer micro-display imaging technologies are being introduced, including liquid crystal display (LCD), liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS), digital micro-mirrors (DMD), and organic light-emitting diode (OLED).

Here's what the onboard HUD/SVS display looks like.  Notice the difference with the regular HUD/EVS above.

Sure looks like Honeywell's EVS/SVS airline HUD guidance system is going to be a winner.  If I were a pilot, the decision is obvious. 

Courtesy of an article dated March 25, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design

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CAN NEST LABS AND ITS NEW 'NEST LEARNING THERMOSTAT' DISRUPT HOME THERMOSTATS LIKE THE IPOD DID PORTABLE MUSIC PLAYERS?

The Nest Learning Thermostat is gorgeous, intuitive, and more necessary than you think. Just like a certain blockbuster MP3 player was once upon a time.

Tony Fadell invented the iPod. Okay, he didn't do it singlehandedly--but the former Apple executive conceived it, got Apple on board, and then went on to shepherd the development of 18 (!) generations of the company's signature pre-iPhone product. In 2008 he left Apple and several years later founded a stealth startup called Nest Labs, which was revealed this year to be in the... thermostat business. Wait, what?

Tony Fadell (far left) at Apple together with (from left to right) Jon Rubistein Jonathan Ive, Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller posing for forTime Magazine

Tony Fadell as he appears today

Yeah, you read that right. But not just a thermostat--the iPod of thermostats: a device so desirable and intuitive that it'll turn home energy management into a must-have symbol of sustainable living. Fadell told Co.Design he intends the Nest Learning Thermostat, which will retail for $249.99 starting in November, to be "a jewel on the wall... most people try to hide the thermostat, but we're trying to make it sexy and coveted so that you cherish it, and at parties people ask you about it and you're proud of it." Big talk--but watch this teaser video and you just might become a believer:

 

The Nest thermostat actually is iPod-like:  The display and primary interaction are instantly intuitive and physically irresistible.

To adjust the temperature, turn a ring on the rim of the device--if you're making it cooler, the display turns blue, and if you're making it warmer, it turns red. The temperature itself is displayed in a clear, bright numeric readout--no more squinting at tick marks on a dusty dial. There's also a little green leaf that appears on the screen to guide to you into tweaking your settings for optimal energy savings. And Fadell, no stranger to the importance of a good "unboxing" experience, even went so far as to include a high-quality, custom branded screwdriver with every unit. Fadell says.  

"When you take it out of the box you want it to be easy to install. Apple taught me not to cut corners, and that you don't give up on user experience--ever."

As Fadell notes, the thermostat business was ripe for disruption, and a tantalizing business opportunity as well. He stumbled upon it when he was building his own dream home, an experiment in cutting edge green design in Lake Tahoe. As he considered spending tens of thousands of dollars on a heating and cooling system, it just seemed wrong to link all that tech up to a $90 thermostat from Home Depot that barely worked as advertised, simply because it's design was so poor. So he simply waited for a better product to come along, but it didn't. Upon investigating the market further, he discovered that 10 million thermostats are sold every year. Meanwhile, only 6% of programmable thermostats are actually programmed, even though a programmed thermostat can save 30-40% in heating and cooling costs. That's was clearly a serious design problem.

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So for users, the best thing about the Nest Learning Thermostat is under that gleaming case. It's equipped with software that analyzes and tracks your usage patterns over time, so that you only have to twist that dial a dozen times before the thermostat can simply anticipate your climate-control needs and take care of it automatically.  Fadell says.

"Instead of programming their thermostats, most people have given up and treat it like a light switch.  But, you have to make those manual adjustments about 1,500 times a year if you want to see any real energy savings."

Nest's version elegantly lets you set it and forget it--at least after that initial learning period. But this thermostat is so sexy, you probably won't mind. 

COMMENTARY:     I love the sleek, elegant, minimalist and simple design of the Nest Learning thermostat.  It definitely shows its Apple roots.   Who would've thought that the home thermostat was due for disruption.  Looks like Tony has definitely solved the home thermostat problem with a thermost that blends into the home and literally "learns" how to save energy as you set temperature settings.    The installation is overcome, too.  Nest sells the Learning thermostat with installation, and will even connect you with an installer located in your zip code.  

A Recap of the Nest Learning Thermostat:

 

Venture capital has rained down on Nest Labs.  In May 2010, the Nest Labs team raised somewhere in the vicinity of $50 million to $80 million from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Al Gore's Generation Investment Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Intertrust to build a better thermostat. VCs close to the deal put it at a ridiculously high valuation. As Vinod Coleslaw says, "$1 billion valuations are the new black."

In October 2011, Nest Labs finally came out of stealth mode to unveil its new product, the Nest Learning Thermostat.  Who would've guessed that in a world of social networks, mobile devices, and apps, that the next new cool device would be a damn wall thermostat.   Okay, it's not pretty, but it's cool.  No, it's Hot.  I mean its a hot idea, whose time has come.  We shall see if Tony Fadell and his team of engineers and designers got the wall thermostat right.

Courtesy of an article dated October 25, 2011 appearing in Fast Company Design

GLOBAL GREEN USA'S STAR-STUDDED VIDEO ABOUT THE THREAT OF RISING OCEAN LEVELS DUE TO GLOBAL WARMING

Mark Ruffalo, James Cameron, and Kevin Bacon want you. An exclusive look at Global Green USA's new one-minute video designed to get people concerned and taking action about rising oceans.

Did you know that 150 million Americans (53% of the population) are in danger just because they live in cities at risk for flooding? You didn’t? That’s exactly what Matt Petersen and his team at Global Green USA thought. So they created a short video featuring a celebrity cast of thousands (think Mark Ruffalo, Adrian Grenier, James Cameron, Kevin Bacon) to get you to sit up and take notice. Then do something.

 

Click Image To Enlarge

The video clip titled, “I Am,” clocks in at 31 seconds in length and is one part public service announcement, one part call to action and one part “how did they get all those people together to do this?” The intent, according to Petersen, who is currently attending the Clinton Global Initiative, is not only to educate but to call people to action in their communities.

 

Petersen tells Fast Company that climate change is “an indisputable scientific fact” and with over 12,000 miles of coastline the U.S. is particularly threatened by rising sea levels, as well increasing storms like Hurricane Irene. The flooding and erosion that follow could cost coastal cities trillions of dollars and thousands of lost lives.

He says.

“The influencers in our society in sport, music, and film, garner a great deal of attention. As an organization 95% of the work we do is substantive and technical so we reach out to them to help break through media clutter and get traction.” 

By traction, Petersen means viral. The hope is that a star-studded PSA will be enticing enough for people to click Global Green USA’s “Join the Fight” button on its landing page or via YouTube and commit to make a difference. Global Green USA is inviting concerned individuals to upload a photo of themselves touting their pledge to improve their city. The pledge is in the form of a sign, screen printing on a T-shirt, or anything else that says “I am[insert city name here].” 

All those photos are going to be pushed through Global Green’s back-end architecture, then Petersen maintains, individuals will be held to their commitment, whether it’s organizing a local awareness group or writing to a Congressional leader. “We are going to have follow-up and share their stories on our site and blog as they make progress. We will pick one person to win VIP tickets to our Oscars party,” traveling in eco-friendly style, of course.

There are also plans to launch a video campaign to track progress and engage even more people. Petersen says that this shouldn’t take the place of a continued effort to work with big corporations and government to raise awareness and demand change, but he says, “To do something, big or small, we need local action. Our main push is for individuals.”

Petersen concedes that the video’s celebrity status is no guarantee for success. He does have reason to be optimistic though, given examples like Crowdrise, which has managed to galvanize individual efforts into fund-raising for 1.5 million charities with a little help from Hollywood hotshot Edward Norton. 

Petersen has also witnessed the power of educating and empowering communities. His vision for the rebuilding of New Orleans has led to the greening of New Orleans schools, helped educate thousands of residents to rebuild their homes more energy efficiently, and helped create the Holy Cross Project, a sustainable village in the Lower 9th Ward with 23 units of affordable housing and a community/climate action center.

This new initiative, he says, is just one more step to “building us better communities and finding solutions to global warming.”

Paraphrasing the words of former President Clinton--who Petersen was just listening to before this interview--he says, “[Climate change] is an opportunity--not a problem--if we approach it the right way with a sense of collaboration.”

COMMENTARY:  I totally agree with Global Green USA.  The world is headed for a catastrophic disaster unless we take serious action to curb greenhouse gas emissions NOW.  The facts are in:  The world's oceans are beginning to warm at accelerating rates.  The Arctic ice shelf is beginning to melt. Greenland's glaciers are already breaking away.  Please get the word out.  Join The Fight.

In a blog post dated October 3, 2010, I reported on June 10, 2011, NASA launched into space Aquarius, a scientific instrument used to measure the salt content of the world's oceans, information that could help confirm scientists' suspicions that climate change is accelerating the world's water cycle and causing sea levels to rise rapidly.  Aquarius is part of a joint mission between NASA and Argentina's space agency.

Courtesy of an article dated September 21, 2011 appearing in Fast Company

 

 

THE MALDIVE ISLANDS WILL SOON BE UNDERWATER DUE TO GLOBAL WARMING

Relocation! Relocation! Relocation!

At some point in the nearish future, much of the Maldive Islands will slip beneath the sea, large chunks of a nation swallowed up by the rising waters of global warming. Alarmed and increasingly desperate, the country's young president has an audacious plan: To buy a new homeland for his people. It's epic. It's borderline crazy. Can it possibly work?

 

It's 5 a.m., the tremulous hour, and I'm reading by lamplight at the tiny hotel-room desk when the predawn adhan, the Muslim prayer song, begins. The five-times-daily serenade, beautifully sung, is one of my favorite things about Male, capital of the Maldives. That and the absence of dogs, which are banned throughout this Islamic republic. Not that I don't love dogs. It's just that there's no room for them here, and it's an undeniable relief not to see them dodging traffic and starving on the margins. It occurs to me, in that dark hour when no dog howls, that it might be a similar relief to be done with wildlife as well. Just get it over with. Last night I had coffee with a local cleric, Ibrahim Nasrullah, who told me that every night a great tidal wave rises up in the sea and begs God's permission to destroy the sinners on shore. But God in his mercy holds it back another day. This morning I feel it out there, the dark smothering force coiled to strike, and hear the singer singing what a brinkman's game life has always been.

Obviously, I suffer from mal de Male, which most visitors to the Maldives—the Maldives of stilted huts and palm-shaded luxury—avoid by never setting foot in the capital. Here the paved-paradise all-human future is now; it's down to two: God and man. (I exaggerate; there are pigeons.) Maybe the singer is celebrating that exclusive relationship with Allah, but he sounds like a soul-sore troubadour to me, like Hank warbling of lonesome whistles. Resist the temptation to despair, he seems to sing, while his melody slips hopelessness under the door. The feeling is scary and new—both personal and world significant, Yeats's "The Second Coming" coming true.

I'm here in the Maldives to write about the end of the world, or at least the end of this world, and climate change, that big bummer blackening the horizon. You know the story. Science says: This thing's coming, deal with it. And the president of the Maldives—the first democratically elected president—Mohamed Nasheed, is attempting to deal. On the eve of his inauguration last November, Nasheed announced his plan to begin investing millions each year in a sovereign-wealth fund that would go toward the purchase of a new homeland—an insurance policy in the event that rising seas force a mass evacuation of these low-lying isles.

Remote from anywhere (the closest neighbor is India, 300 miles to the northeast), this archipelago of 1,190 islands in the Indian Ocean was nonetheless once at the center of world commerce—a lifesaving oasis in the liquid desert. Where the original inhabitants came from remains a mystery, but by around 300 b.c., when mariners from the East and West first met here, the shrewd middlemen of the Maldives were already provisioning the spice trade with fresh water and dried fish, amassing profit enough to become bankers and financiers. Buddhists for more than a millennium, the Maldivians were subjects of a Muslim sultanate for the next 800 years. For most of the latter half of the twentieth century, the state was a de facto dictatorship, but in November 2008, the Maldives emerged from a decades-long struggle to become the world's newest democracy. It now confronts the possibility—some scientists say certainty—of becoming the world's first modern sovereign nation to be forced to evacuate due to a man-made environmental catastrophe.

The long-term outlook is bleak indeed: At a major U.N. conference on the emissions crisis in March, scientists warned that the Arctic ice is melting faster than previous measurements indicated, and that sea-level increases would be more severe and occur sooner than had been predicted by the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change. That prognostication of a half-meter rise by the end of the century has risen to a full meter, more than sufficient to inundate the Maldives, where the average elevation is, you guessed it, a mere meter above the waterline.

So the president's plan may not be as hysterical as it sounds. The Maldives hopes to raise the exodus fund from its billion-dollar-a-year tourism industry, much of it of the $1,500-a-night TomKat and Brangelina variety. In this, the Maldives is caught in a classic catch-22. The country desperately depends upon the carbon-powered prosperity that is heating up the atmosphere and raising sea levels. So do we all. But we high-and-dry continentals can postpone thinking the unthinkable while our politicians tinker with the sputtering economic engine. Nasheed believes the Maldivians can't just wait and see how the repair turns out. Seen through their frontline lens, the world is on the brink of a tremendous reshuffling, a reorg beyond comprehension and prediction.

No wonder, then, that Nasheed can seem schizophrenic when faced with global economic psychosis, in which the economy and environment, actually two facets of one entity—like Jekyll and Hyde—pretend not to recognize each other. The president announced in March that the Maldives would become the world's first carbon-neutral nation by 2020. Though the cost of the proposed refit—155 wind turbines, half a square kilometer of rooftop solar panels, biomass plants burning coconut husks—would exceed the expected revenue for the homeland fund, it makes twisted sense for the young leader to promote both. Meanwhile, with the all-important U.N. climate-change conference coming up this month in Copenhagen, Nasheed hopes to make as big a splash as possible. He has directed his cabinet to learn to scuba dive, and on October 17 he convened the world's first underwater parliament. His mix of Barnum and Cassandra is pure "negative capability" in the Keatsian sense: the worst-case scenario abiding with the best.

NOTE: TO READ THE REMAINDER OF THIS ARTICLE CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW 

COMMENTARY: When I first read this article, I was struck with both fear and sadness, knowing that one of these days, the Maldives will be claimed by the Indian Ocean, and the lovely people who live there will have to be relocated in mass somewhere else. 

A lot of American's probably don't know where the Maldives are located, so just for the record, they are about 300 miles south of India, their closest neighbor.  

Rising ocean levels due to melting arctic ice and glacier's are very slowly raising ocean levels at a rate unseen in generations.  By 2050, if not sooner, the world's ocean's will rise about a meter, and this will be just enough to inundate the Maldives, parts of Bangladesh, other Pacific islands and many low coastal areas in the U.S., Asia and other nations. 

My biggest regret is that many people, especially in the United States, are not taking global warming that seriously. We can all sit there on our fat butts, bicker and argue amongst ourselves, and continue to believe that global warming does not exist, or we can do something.  If you need further evidence just ask a Maldavi.  The clock is ticking for this small nation. They are dealing with global warming right now.  

Courtesy of an article appearing in the December 2009 issue of GQ Magazine 

 

 

  

NASA'S AQUARIUS SATELLITE PRODUCES FIRST GLOBAL MAP OF OCEAN SURFACE SALINITY TO STUDY THEIR EFFECT ON OUR WEATHER

 

On June 10, 2011, NASA launched into space Aquarius, a scientific instrument used to measure the salt content of the world's oceans, information that could help confirm scientists' suspicions that climate change is accelerating the world's water cycle.  Aquarius is part of a joint mission between NASA and Argentina's space agency.

 

On September 22, 2011, NASA reported that Aquarius had produced its first global map of the salinity of the ocean surface, providing an early glimpse of the mission's anticipated discoveries.

Aquarius, which is aboard the Aquarius/SAC-D (Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas) observatory, is making NASA's first space observations of ocean surface salinity variations -- a key component of Earth's climate. Salinity changes are linked to the cycling of freshwater around the planet and influence ocean circulation.

Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef of Earth & Space Research in Seattle said. 

"Aquarius' salinity data are showing much higher quality than we expected to see this early in the mission.  Aquarius soon will allow scientists to explore the connections between global rainfall, ocean currents and climate variations."

The new map, which shows a tapestry of salinity patterns, demonstrates Aquarius' ability to detect large-scale salinity distribution features clearly and with sharp contrast. The map is a composite of the data since Aquarius became operational on Aug. 25. The mission was launched June 10 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Aquarius/SAC-D is a collaboration between NASA and Argentina's space agency, Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE).

Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division at agency headquarters in Washington said.

"Aquarius/SAC-D already is advancing our understanding of ocean surface salinity and Earth's water cycle. Aquarius is making continuous, consistent, global measurements of ocean salinity, including measurements from places we have never sampled before."

To produce the map, Aquarius scientists compared the early data with ocean surface salinity reference data. Although the early data contain some uncertainties, and months of additional calibration and validation work remain, scientists are impressed by the data's quality.

Aquarius science team member Arnold Gordon, professor of oceanography at Columbia University in Palisades, N.Y., and at the university's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said.

"Aquarius has exposed a pattern of ocean surface salinity that is rich in variability across a wide range of scales.  This is a great moment in the history of oceanography. The first image raises many questions that oceanographers will be challenged to explain."

Click Image To Enlarge

The map shows several well-known ocean salinity features such as higher salinity in the subtropics; higher average salinity in the Atlantic Ocean compared to the Pacific and Indian oceans; and lower salinity in rainy belts near the equator, in the northernmost Pacific Ocean and elsewhere. These features are related to large-scale patterns of rainfall and evaporation over the ocean, river outflow and ocean circulation. Aquarius will monitor how these features change and study their link to climate and weather variations.

Other important regional features are evident, including a sharp contrast between the arid, high-salinity Arabian Sea west of the Indian subcontinent, and the low-salinity Bay of Bengal to the east, which is dominated by the Ganges River and south Asia monsoon rains. The data also show important smaller details, such as a larger-than-expected extent of low-salinity water associated with outflow from the Amazon River.

Aquarius was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., for NASA's Earth Systems Science Pathfinder Program. JPL is managing Aquarius through its commissioning phase and will archive mission data. Goddard will manage Aquarius mission operations and process science data. CONAE provided the SAC-D spacecraft and the mission operations center.

Eric Lindstrom, Aquarium program scientist at NASA said.

"A sort of grand problem in Earth science is to understand the water cycle -- evaporation from the ocean, clouds, rain, the formation of ice, the runoff from the land back into the sea.  Ocean salinity turns out to be a pretty useful diagnostic of the big picture."

Aquarius will be able to measure changes in salinity caused by evaporation, rain and snow, and melting sea ice. Its measurements of ocean saltiness will also help scientists understand how changes in salinity affect the deep currents that drive ocean circulation.

 

A way to measure extremes

Recent studies have suggested that relatively salty portions of the oceans are getting saltier, and areas where water is relatively fresh are getting fresher.  Lindstrom said,

"If we can confirm water cycle acceleration, what this means to us in a practical way is that there are more extremes. There's more water circulating through the atmosphere, more flooding, more drought. I am just really excited about the idea that we can get this data all over the planet and be able to diagnose what's going on with the water cycle."

Gary Lagerloef, a principal investigator on the Aquarius mission, said the instrument can measure minute changes in the ocean's salt content.

 

Said Lagerloef, president of Earth and Space Research, a Seattle -based research institute,

"If you take a dash of salt, an eighth of a teaspoon, and you put that in a gallon of water, that's the amount of salinity change Aquarius will be able to observe from month to month over any part of the ocean." 

Aquarius is also notable for another reason. It's the first climate satellite NASA has launched since a faulty rocket sent the space agency's Glory probe crashing into the ocean in February. A similar problem doomed the launch of another climate satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, in 2009.

Two veteran travelers

But there is an important difference between Aquarius and the previous failed launches: It launached into space on a Delta II rocket, not the Taurus XL rockets that carried Glory and OCO.

NASA built the instrument in the United States but later sent it to Bariloche, Argentina, where crews from Argentina's space agency placed it on the SAC-D satellite framework, which carry seven other scientific instruments.

Officials then shipped the completed SAC-D, with Aquarius aboard, to Sâo José dos Campos, Brazil, for environmental testing at a Brazilian Space Agency facility.

COMMENTARY: Aquarius will continue to map the concentration of dissolved salt at the ocean's surface, information that scientists will use to study the ocean's role in the global water cycle and how this is linked to ocean currents and climate. Sea surface temperature has been monitored by satellites for decades, but it is both temperature and salinity that determine the density of the surface waters of the ocean. Aquarius will provide fundamentally new ocean surface salinity data to give scientists a better understanding of the density-driven circulation; how it is tied to changes in rainfall and evaporation, or the melting and freezing of ice; and its effect on climate variability. 

Salinity is defined as the number of grams of salt dissolved in 1000 grams of ocean water.

The salinity of average seawater is 35‰ [this symbol is read as permil – out of 1000 rather than 100 as you would have in percent (%) – your book gives some weird symbol for permil that looks like the congruent symbol (≈) I have never seen used for permil before.  In this class we will use ‰].

On average, there are 35 grams of salt in every 1000 grams of sea water (35 parts per thousand or 35‰). NOTE: Because all salinities are assumed to reported as permil, they often leave off the ‰ symbol (reported as simply 35 assuming that you know its unit is ‰).

The map of the ocean's salinity is shown below:

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and the California Institute of Technology produced this really cool video titled  "Eyes On The Earth 3D".  Check it out.

For a long time meteorologists have suspected that ocean currents and the temperature and salinity of our oceans have a direct affect on our weather.  Just a small increase in the temperature and salinity of our oceans can have devastating affects on surface temperatures.  As ocean temperatures rise or decrease, the this creates a sort of sauna effect or cooling effect, increasing surface temperatures or lowering them in others parts of the globe.  This is why we are experiencing the frequency and intensity of tornados, rain storms, hurricanes, very cold winters and drought in different parts of the world. 

Aquarius will confirm how the temperature and salinity of the world's oceans change over time. I hope Aquarius makes it into earth orbit and does it job.  We really need to understand our oceans processes and how they affect things on the surface of Earth.  just hope that we are not too late for the sake of mankind and avoid this:

 

Courtesy of an article dated May 18, 2011 appearing in Scientific American 

GLOBAL WARMING IS NO LONGER IN DOUBT, BUT HOW WELL PREPARED IS YOUR COUNTRY IN THE EVENT OF CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE CHANGES?

Using different factors to assess how well a country can respond to changes in food and water availability (as well as rising seas), the Global Adaptation Index shows which countries have the most work to do to prepare.

Climate change is here, and as it worsens, it will affect the entire planet. But it's the hard truth that it won't happen equally: Some areas will be affected more than others. Those areas, one would hope, would be spending the most time and energy preparing for the eventualities of drought, food shortages, and rising sea levels. But this is largely not the case. The most ill-prepared countries are the ones that will be hit the hardest.

That's just one of the major conclusions of the Global Adaptation Index (GAIN), which provides scores for every country based on their vulnerability to climate change and their readiness to deal with those issues. Denmark is ranked the highest (it isn't very vulnerable to begin with, and has done a lot to get ready), while Ethiopia, which is doing very little while being very threatened, is the lowest. On the map above, the more red a country is, the worse their score.

The index, which was created by the Global Adaptation Institute, tracks over 35 different specific indicators over 15 years to get these scores, and you can see the trend lines for each indicator for each country, as well:

If you look at the countries of the world on a matrix, you'll see the sad truth: The most vulnerable countries are by and large the countries without the resources to do anything about it. Sure, the U.S. is quite ready, but they didn't have that much to do be worried about. Zimbabwe, the dot all the way to the left, is incredibly unready for what's coming its way, and what's coming its way is going to be quite bad:

There is clearly a lot to be done to prepare for climate change, and a lot of that needs to be done in the developing world. Look at it as a challenge, or as an opportunity. Sooner or later, those countries will realize the potentially dire straits they're in, and will need a rapid infusion of projects to get them ready.

COMMENTARY:     There is a lot of confusion as to how the level of carbon dioxide emissions in the Earth's atmosphere effect our weather and worldwide temperatures.  Carbon dioxide emissions are released into the Earth's atmosphere as a result of both naturally occurring and manmade causes. Carbon dioxide emissions have also been referred to by other names, such as carbon emissions, CO2 emissions and greenhouse gases.

Regardless of what you call them, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere have been increasing at an alarming rate.   Meteorological studies now show that world temperatures have been steadily rising as a result of rising CO2 levels.  Regardless whether greenhouse gases are naturally occurring or manmade, the effects could eventually be irreversible with catastrophic consequences on our weather, water and food.

Climate 101

CLIMATE 101 from The Climate Reality Project on Vimeo. 

The Greenhouse Effect

Firstly, we need to understand that our atmosphere is a layer surrounding the earth held in place by gravity and primarily made up of Nitrogen (78%), Oxygen (21%), with water and other gases making up the remainder. Scientists now realise that the proportion of these gases has increased significantly over a few hundred years. The real increase began around the time of the Industrial Revolution. This is when we began to burn fossil fuels (coal) in large quantities to power our steam engines.

These gases are termed 'greenhouse gases' because during the day the earth absorbs heat from the sun, although much of this is radiated back out into space. The atmosphere surrounding our earth contains these gases, and acts like a blanket keeping some of the heat in. If there weren’t an atmospheric ‘blanket’ we would freeze during the night, like some of the other planets or our moon.

These gases are called greenhouse gases as they effectively make the blanket around our globe thicker, trapping more heat and turning the globe into a green house. (A green house is a structure that market gardeners use to grow vegetables in.  It is covered in clear plastic or glass to let the sun light in, and traps the heat inside, increasing the temperature. Sometimes these are also referred to as 'hot houses').   

In its simplest terms, Earth is like one gigantic green house.  The bulk of carbon dioxide gases are naturally absorbed by plants to produce oxygen through the process of photosynthesis and by our oceans through physiochemical and biological processes.   However, meteorological studies now show conclusively that there is a buildup of excess of carbon dioxide gas in Earth's atmosphere, and that over time, this will create what is commonly referred to as The Greenhouse Effect.

This is where it gets a bit frightening! The fossil fuels we are burning in ever-increasing amounts contributes to higher concentrations of methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous dioxide, effectively turning up the heat and turning the globe into a veritable greenhouse.

Effects 

Here are some of the effects of the Earth becoming a 'green house'

• Land and ocean temperatures rise
• North and South Poles (Arctic and Antarctic) melt
• Glaciers melt
• Ocean currents change
• Weather patterns change
• Sea levels rise (due to oceans warming the water 'swells' and from increased water as  polar regions melt

So What!

Well, I wish we could simply say that! However turning the globe into a green house has dire consequences for all of us. We already experiencing heatwaves associated with land temperature increase and thousands of people will die through future heatwaves. (In the 2003 heatwaves in France over 20,000 people died). 

Droughts will become more prolonged and be even more devastating than anything we have experienced. This is because higher temperatures evaporate water from the land, which will also give rise to more wildfires. Agriculture and food crops will be devastated in some regions and diseases like malaria and dengue fever will increase as conditions favourable to these diseases spread.

Higher ocean temperatures increase the power in cyclones and hurricanes, (stimulating more tornadoes ) and we will see a higher frequency of severe storms (like Hurricane Katrina)and associated flooding that will do extraordinary damage to infrastructure, and destroy houses, towns and villages. This is already driving up insurance costs.

Rising sea levels will displace millions of people, (already on some Islands people are being moved off due to rising seas) and the geography of the land will change dramatically, with millions needing to be relocated along with loss of buildings.

The truth can only remain hidden for so long.  In reality, there is no remaining reasonable doubt of about man's influence on climate change.  This time it is not the lives of millionss at stake, but billions.  

Want to know where your country ranks on Gain Vulnerability and Readiness?  Lookup your country below:

VULNERABILITY  - Vulnerability measures a country's exposure, sensitivity and ability to cope with climate related hazards, as well as accounting for the overall status of food, water, health and infrastructure within the nation.  

Global Adaptation Vulnerability Index Rankings by Country

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READINESS - Readiness targets those portions of the economy, governance and society that affect the speed and efficiency of absorption and implementation of Adaptation projects. 

Global Adaptation Readiness Index Rankings by Country

View more documents from turk5555. 

Courtesy of an article dated September 19, 2011 appearing in Fast Company