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Human-generated aerosols from northern hemisphere may affect rainfall patterns in Australia

August 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, August 27 (ANI): Australian scientists, using a climate model, have suggested that human-generated aerosols from the northern hemisphere may have contributed to increased rainfall in north-western and central Australia, and decreased rainfall in parts of southern Australia.

According to lead researcher, Dr Leon Rotstayn, Principal Research Scientist at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, a partnership between CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology, “Perhaps surprisingly, inclusion of northern hemisphere aerosols may be important for accurate modelling of Australian climate change.”Aerosols come from many different sources.

Sulphur is released when we burn coal and oil. More dust, also an aerosol, circulates in the atmosphere when land is cleared, burned or overgrazed.

Some aerosols occur naturally like sea spray and volcanic emissions, but NASA estimates ten percent of the total aerosols in the atmosphere are caused by people.

Most of this ten percent is in the northern hemisphere.
European researchers, attending the international ‘Water in a changing climate’ science conference in Melbourne from August 24-28, will discuss a new forecasting service that will identify in unprecedented detail where these aerosols are coming from and where they are going.

The new service, part of Europe’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative, will give global information on how pollutants move around the world across oceans and continents, and will refine estimates of their sources and sinks.

According to Dr Adrian Simmons from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which is coordinating the multi-institution initiative, “The service will give much more detailed forecast information on air quality over Europe and provide the basis for better health advice across Europe and beyond”.

The service has clear implications for environmental policy and legislation. (ANI)

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Cell phone towers can help predict the next big flood

July 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Tel Aviv, July 7 (ANI): Researchers from Tel Aviv University, Israel, have said that they can predict the intensity of the next big flood by using common cell phone towers across the United States.

Their model, which analyzes cell phone signals, adds a critical component to weather forecasting never before available.

“By monitoring the specific and fluctuating atmospheric moisture around cell phone towers throughout America, we can cheaply, effectively and reliably provide a more accurate ‘critical moisture distribution’ level for fine-tuning model predictions of big floods,” said Professor Pinhas Alpert, a geophysicist and head of Tel Aviv University’s Porter School for Environmental Education.

Cell phone towers emit radio waves that are diminished by moisture in the air, a factor that can be used to improve model warnings on flood levels.

In addition, the researchers measured the rainfall distributions and were able to accurately estimate the size of impending floods before they struck.

This was demonstrated in post-analysis of two case-studies of floods in the Judean Desert in Israel, where cell phone towers and flash floods are abundant.

Using real data measurements collected from the towers, the researchers demonstrated how microwave links in a cellular network correlated with surface station humidity measurements.

The data provided by cell phone towers is the missing link weather forecasters need to improve the accuracy of flood forecasting.

“Our method provides reliable measurement of moisture fields near the flood zone for the first time,” said Professor Alpert. “This new tool can add to the bigger picture of understanding climate change patterns in general,” he added.

“Accurate predictions of flooding were difficult before because there haven’t been enough reliable measurements of moisture fields in remote locations,” Professor Alpert further added.

Using the signals collected from cell phone towers as they communicate with base stations and our handsets, weather forecasters will now have a crucial missing piece of information for flood prediction that they never had before.

It will permit forecasters and residents alike to more accurately gauge the danger they face from an impending flood. (ANI)

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Virtual model of sunspots may unlock Sun’s mysteries

June 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 19 (ANI): Scientists have created the first-ever comprehensive computer model of sunspots, a breakthrough that will help scientists unlock mysteries of the sun and its impacts on Earth.

Sunspots are associated with massive ejections of charged plasma that can cause geomagnetic storms and disrupt communications and navigational systems.

They are also linked to variations in solar output that can affect weather on Earth and exert a subtle influence on climate patterns.

“Understanding complexities in the solar magnetic field is key to ‘space weather’ forecasting,” said Richard Behnke of NSF’s (National Science Foundation’s) Division of Atmospheric Sciences.

“If we can model sunspots, we may be able to predict them and be better prepared for the potential serious consequences here on Earth of these violent storms on the sun,” he added.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., collaborated with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, building on a computer code that had been created at the University of Chicago.

“If you want to understand all the drivers of Earth’s atmospheric system, you have to understand how sunspots emerge and evolve. Our simulations will advance research into the inner workings of the sun as well as connections between solar output and Earth’s atmosphere,” said lead paper author Matthias Rempel.

Sunspots accompany intense magnetic activity that is associated with solar flares and massive ejections of plasma that can buffet Earth’s atmosphere.

The resulting damage to power grids, satellites and other sensitive technological systems takes an economic toll on a rising number of industries.

The new computer models capture pairs of sunspots with opposite polarity.

In striking detail, they reveal the dark central region, or umbra, with brighter umbral dots, as well as webs of elongated narrow filaments with flows of mass streaming away from the spots in the outer penumbral regions.

They also capture the convective flow and movement of energy that underlie the sunspots, and which are not directly detectable by instruments.

The models suggest that the magnetic fields within sunspots need to be inclined in certain directions in order to create such complex structures.

The researchers conclude that there is a unified physical explanation for the structure of sunspots in umbra and penumbra that’s the consequence of convection in a magnetic field with varying properties.

The simulations can help scientists decipher the mysterious, subsurface forces in the sun that cause sunspots.

Such work may lead to an improved understanding of variations in solar output and their impacts on Earth. (ANI)

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NASA uses satellite to improve global crop forecasting

May 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 27 (ANI): NASA researchers are using satellite data to cultivate the most accurate estimates of soil moisture, which would improve global crop forecasting.

Soil moisture is essential for seeds to germinate and for crops to grow. But, record droughts and scorching temperatures in certain parts of the globe in recent years have caused soil to dry up, crippling crop production.

The falling food supply in some regions has forced prices upward, pushing staple foods out of reach for millions of poor people.

Now, NASA researchers are using satellite data to deliver a kind of space-based humanitarian assistance.

They are cultivating the most accurate estimates of soil moisture and improving global forecasts of how well food will grow at a time when the world is confronting shortages.

In this context, NASA scientist John Bolten described a new modeling product that uses data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) sensor on NASA’s Aqua satellite to improve the accuracy of West African soil moisture.

The group produced assessments of current soil moisture conditions, or “nowcasts,” and improved estimates by 5 percent over previous methods.

“Though seemingly small and incremental, the increase can make a big difference in the precision of crop forecasts,” Bolten said.

The modeling innovation comes at a time when crop analysts at agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are working to meet the food shortage problem head on.

They combine soil moisture estimates with weather trends to produce up-to-date forecasts of crop harvests.

Those estimates help regional and national officials prepare for and prevent food crises.

“The USDA’s estimates of global crop yields are an objective, timely benchmark of food availability and help drive international commodity markets,” said Bolten, a physical scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

Crop analysts must estimate root-zone soil moisture, the amount of water beneath the surface available for plants to absorb.

But estimating the amount of water in soil has posed challenges and data gaps.

Under a new NASA-USDA collaboration known as the Global Agriculture Monitoring Project, Bolten and colleagues from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service are using AMSR-E to fill the data gaps with daily soil moisture “snapshots.”

Since its launch in 2002, the instrument has “seen” through clouds, and light vegetation like crops and grasses to detect the amount of soil moisture beneath Earth’s surface.

Bolten says that results from AMSR-E are just a precursor to dramatic new improvements in data and prediction accuracy researchers expect from the Soil Moisture Active and Passive satellite, slated to launch in 2013. (ANI)

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Global warming still looms large as threat to Polar Bears

May 26, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 26 (ANI): In a new research, scientists have strengthened the forecasts of polar bear populations and their likely responses to climate change, by refuting criticisms of the scientific basis for listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.

The research, by a team of scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), University of Alaska, University of Maryland, Canadian Wildlife Service and the US Forest Service, refutes point-by-point a widely publicized critique of polar bear population predictions.

The new rebuttal reinforces the reports written by the scientists and accepted by the Department of Interior in its May 2008 decision to list polar bears as a threatened species on the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

“The decision to list the polar bear as threatened was politically charged, and the scientific research on which it was based attracted some criticisms,” said WHOI biologist Hal Caswell, an author on two of the USGS reports and of the rebuttal.

“Our new study shows that the critique is incorrect and based on misconceptions about climate models, the Arctic environment, polar bear biology, and statistical and mathematical methods,” he added.

The rebuttal was published in the journal Interfaces online on April 22, 2009, and will be published in the July-August print edition.

In 2007, when the Department of the Interior was considering listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, it asked the USGS to assemble an international team to analyze information on polar bear populations.

The team estimated the probabilities of future polar bear population growth or decline.

The USGS-led group presented its reports in fall 2007, and in May 2008, the Department of Interior listed the polar bear as a threatened species under the US Endangered Species Act.

Following that listing, a critique of the USGS reports was published in the Sept.-Oct. 2008 issue of the journal Interfaces.

“After going through their report, however, we decided we needed to do a rebuttal of this, and in the end, we went point by point to refute their criticism,” said Caswell.

According to Caswell, “We began by explaining why the sea ice habitat of polar bears is declining and showing how climate models, outputs from which we used as inputs to our analyses, are reliable for forecasting the future climate.”

“Finally, we took a look at their principles of forecasting, and found they are too ambiguous and subjective to be used as a reliable basis for auditing scientific investigations,” he said. (ANI)

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Gene in breast cancer pathway identified

May 13, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, May 13 (ANI): In a new study, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have unravelled a mechanism responsible for turning on and off a gene crucial to breast cancer spread.

Einstein scientists had previously discovered a gene called ZBP1 (zipcode binding protein 1), which helps cells to move, grow and organize spatially.

“ZBP1 is very active in the developing embryo but largely silent in adult tissues,” said Dr Robert H. Singer, professor and co-chair of anatomy and structural biology and co-director of the Gruss-Lipper Biophotonics Center at Einstein.

This gene has been found active in several types of cancer, including breast, colorectal, and non-small cell lung cancers; but the gene is silenced in metastasizing cancer cells.

In the new study, Singer and another Einstein scientist, Dr John Condeelis sought to determine how ZBP1 gene is activated and silenced and how it influences the spread of breast cancer.

The find may offer potential drug targets for preventing metastasis.

After examining mouse, rat, and human breast cancer cells, they found that ZBP1 silencing occurs when a methyl group (CH3) attaches to ZBP1′s promoter region (the segment of a gene where gene expression is initiated).

The attachment of CH3 prevents the promoter from binding to a protein called beta-catenin. And without beta-catenin, the ZBP1 gene is effectively silenced.

The study showed that the silencing of ZBP1 increases cancer cells’ ability to migrate and promotes the proliferation of metastatic cells.

The researchers claim that the study has important implications for forecasting breast cancer outcomes.

They said that signs of ZBP1 silencing in breast cancer cells would indicate that a breast tumour is likely to spread information that would help in choosing a treatment strategy.

“If you could turn on this protein in cancer cells, or prevent it from being turned off, you could seriously reduce the ability of the cells to metastasize,” said Singer.

The study appears in the Journal of Cell Science. (ANI)

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COPC launches seven new certifications

May 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

New Delhi, May 8 (ANI/Business Wire India): COPC, the world’s leading Business Excellence certification in the contact center industry worldwide, has recently launched secen new certifications in association with QAI, their exclusive implementation partner in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Starting April 2009 companies have the flexibility of going for certification for specific processes like hiring, training and skills verification, transaction monitoring, forecasting, staffing, scheduling and metrics Management.

COPC, the de-facto standard for BPOs and Customer Contact Centers worldwide has gained immense popularity in India.

Nine out of top 10 Indian BPO companies (as per Data Quest’s rankings) have implemented COPC in India. Over 35 organizations, with over 45 entities have been certified and many more are in the process of the same.

COPC has now introduced certifications that will address the huge request of the industry.

CSPs need not go for a comprehensive COPC certification. And yet, this allows them to get certified by specific process level certifications. This also helps channel efforts to a few, high impact processes and has a faster ROI.

Navyug Mohnot, CEO, QAI said, “Indian outsourcing Industry is growing despite the recession, specially the domestic market. The smaller companies are growing stronger. Since the deployment of the new certifications is likely to be quicker, its great for expanding from a single entity to widespread use of the standard.

It suits the CSPs who want to try out COPC standard or CSPs who want to find a specific problem or who want to split certification into multiple projects or large multi-location CSP who want to drive consistent processes throughout their organizations.” (ANI)

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Most people wrongly understand rainy weather forecasts

April 15, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 15 (ANI): Only half the people understand what a forecast means when it predicts a 20 percent chance of rain, according to researchers at the University of Washington.

Susan Joslyn, a UW cognitive psychologist and senior lecturer, has revealed that the majority of people think it means that it will rain over 20 percent of the area covered by the forecast or for 20 percent of the time period covered by the forecast.

“When a forecast says there is 20 percent chance of rain tomorrow it actually means it will rain on 20 percent of the days with exactly the same atmospheric conditions,” she said.

She added: “With the exception of the probability of precipitation, most weather forecasts report a single value such as the high temperature will be 53 degrees. This is deterministic because it implies that forecasters are sure the high temperature will be 53 degrees. But forecasting is probabilistic and 53 degrees is in the middle of the range of possible temperatures, say 49 to 56 degrees.”

In order to know about people’s understanding of the more familiar probability of precipitation, the researchers tested more than 450 Pacific Northwest college students in three experiments.

It was found that students wrongly perceived rainy weather forecasts, and that an explicit statement, such as there is a chance it won’t rain, could weaken the percent of time and area misconceptions.

The researchers said that a person, who thinks that a probabilistic forecast means that the weather event will occur (in some percent of the area or for some percent of the time), might be more likely to take expensive precautionary action than someone who realized that there was only a chance of that event occurring.

Joslyn added if the misunderstandings uncovered in this research exist among a college-educated group of students from the Pacific Northwest, where it frequently rains, then similar error probably occur in similar, or larger, numbers elsewhere among the general public.

According to the researchers, the errors are caused by the difficulty in making decisions when uncertainty is involved.

“In dealing with a forecast about rain people must simultaneously consider several hypothetical outcomes, their corresponding levels of uncertainty and their consequences. For some people it may be easier to commit to a single outcome, reducing cognitive load, and proceed as through the uncertainty has been resolved. In some cases they may not be aware of this simplification,” said Joslyn.

The research also has financial implications for forecast uncertainty and misinterpretations about such weather-related decisions as school closures, agricultural crop protection and highway and road clearing during storms.

The study has been published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. (ANI)

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New NASA model to improve forecasting of deadly cyclones

April 14, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 14 (ANI): NASA has used satellite data and a new modeling approach that could improve weather forecasting and save more lives when future cyclones develop.

About 15 percent of the world’s tropical cyclones occur in the northern Indian Ocean, but because of high population densities along low-lying coastlines, the storms have caused nearly 80 percent of cyclone-related deaths around the world.

Incomplete atmospheric data for the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea make it difficult for regional forecasters to provide enough warning for mass evacuations.

In the wake of last year’s Cyclone Nargis, which was one of the most catastrophic cyclones on record, a team of NASA researchers re-examined the storm as a test case for a new data integration and mathematical modeling approach.

They compiled satellite data from the days leading up to the May 2 landfall of the storm and successfully “hindcasted” Nargis’ path and landfall in Burma.

“Hindcasting” means that the modelers plotted the precise course of the storm.

In addition, the retrospective results showed how forecasters might now be able to produce multi-day advance warnings in the Indian Ocean and improve advance forecasts in other parts of the world.

“There is no event in nature that causes a greater loss of life than Northern Indian Ocean cyclones, so we have a strong motivation to improve advance warnings,” said the study’s lead author, Oreste Reale, an atmospheric modeler with the Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center.

In their modeling experiment, Reale’s team detected and tracked Nargis’ path by employing novel 3-dimensional satellite imagery and atmospheric profiles from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite to see into the heart of the storm.

AIRS has become increasingly important to weather forecasting because of its ability to show changes in atmospheric temperature and moisture at varying altitudes.

Lau, chief of Goddard’s Laboratory for Atmospheres, believes that regional forecasting agencies monitoring the region can readily access AIRS’ data daily and optimize forecasts for cyclones in the Indian Ocean.

According to Lau, the same technique can be useful to forecasts of hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the western Pacific, particularly when the storm is formed over open oceans out of flight range of hurricane-hunting airplanes.

“With this approach, we can now better define cyclones at the early stages and track them in the models to know what populations may be most at risk,” explained Reale. “And every 12 hours we gain in these forecasts means a gain in our chances to reduce loss of life,” he added. (ANI)

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U.S. forecaster sees 6 Atlantic hurricanes in 2009

April 8, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season is likely to produce six hurricanes, the noted Colorado State University hurricane forecasting team said on Tuesday.

The storm research team founded by hurricane forecast pioneer William Gray said the six-month season beginning on June 1 would likely see 12 tropical storms and predicted that a weak El Nino event could form during that period.

El Nino, an unusual warming of water in the eastern Pacific Ocean, tends to diminish Atlantic hurricane activity by contributing to strong wind shear that can tear apart nascent storms.

The CSU team lowered its forecast from December, when it predicted the 2009 season would see 14 storms and seven hurricanes.

The 2008 Atlantic season was one of the busiest on record, with 16 tropical storms. Eight of those became hurricanes, with sustained winds of 74 mph or higher.

Last season spawned five hurricanes of Category 3 or higher. A record number of consecutive storms hit the United States.

But Cuba got the worst of last season’s destruction. Three major hurricanes hit the Caribbean island, destroying or damaging nearly half a million homes, flattening sugar cane and tobacco fields and causing an estimated $10 billion damage.

The long-term average for the Atlantic hurricane season is about 10 tropical storms and six hurricanes. But experts said a period of heightened Atlantic hurricane activity started around 1995 and was expected to last 25 to 40 years.

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NASA study explains hazards of severe space weather for Earth’s technology

January 6, 2009 By Rajiv Gupta Leave a Comment

Washington, Jan 6 (ANI): In a NASA-funded study, researchers at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington have detailed how extreme solar eruptions could severely affect for communications, power grids and other technology on Earth.

The study offers some of the first clear economic data that effectively calculates today”s risk of extreme conditions in space driven by magnetic activity on the sun and disturbances in the near-Earth environment.

Instances of extreme space weather are rare and are categorized with other natural hazards that have a low frequency but high consequences.

“Obviously, the sun is Earth”s life blood. To mitigate possible public safety issues, it is vital that we better understand extreme space weather events caused by the sun”s activity,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The sun periodically releases billions of tons of matter called coronal mass ejections other than emitting a continuous stream of plasma called the solar wind.

And these immense clouds of material, when directed toward Earth, can lead to large magnetic storms in the magnetosphere and upper atmosphere and the resulting space weather can affect the performance and reliability of space-borne and ground-based technological systems.

Space weather can produce solar storm electromagnetic fields that trigger extreme currents in wires, disrupting power lines, causing wide-spread blackouts and affecting communication cables that support the Internet.

Also, severe space weather produces solar energetic particles and the dislocation of the Earth”s radiation belts, which can damage satellites used for commercial communications, global positioning and weather forecasting.

Ever since the telegraph was invented in the 19th century, space weather has been recognized as causing problems with new technology.

It is possible to diminish a catastrophic failure of commercial and government infrastructure in space and on the ground by raising public awareness, improving vulnerable infrastructure and developing advanced forecasting capabilities.

Society could become more vulnerable in the future if there are no preventive actions or plans leading to the trend of increased dependency on modern space-weather sensitive assets.

The study, which had national and international experts from industry, government and academia working on it, documents the possibility of a space weather event that has societal effects and causes damage similar to natural disasters on Earth.

“Whether it is terrestrial catastrophes or extreme space weather incidents, the results can be devastating to modern societies that depend in a myriad of ways on advanced technological systems,” said Daniel Baker, professor and director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Baker chaired the panel that prepared the report. (ANI)

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2009 may be worst for tourism Down Under

December 30, 2008 By admin Leave a Comment

Melbourne, Dec 30 (ANI): The number of tourists to Australia will decline in 2009 to the lowest level since 1989, a report has said.

As the global financial crisis bites, Australia could be short on overseas visitors for at least the next two years, impacting severely on destinations that rely solely on international guests.

The report said that the number of visitors is predicted to fall from 5.56 million to 5.33 million, with next year shaping as the industry”s worst since 1989.

The Tourism Forecasting Committee predicts international numbers will recover by 2010, but other experts warn the pain may continue well into 2010.

“Unless we see a huge pick-up in the global economy to the later half of 2009 into 2010, then that year could be looking just as bleak,” Age.com.au quoted the executive director of the Tourism and Transport Forum, Olivia Wirth, as telling ABC Radio.

“It”s too early to call at this stage,” she said.

Wirth said that with destinations such as Cairns and Uluru predominantly visited by international guests, some people might lose their jobs and businesses might close.

Other setbacks for Australia”s tourism industry include shark attacks and shark sightings.

And with recession taking a toll on Australia’s tourism industry, the country is to be promoted through a series of advertisements created by the filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. (ANI)

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