What Climate Change Looks Like

Posted on by

How has your weather been lately?  In Minnesota we are going through constant storms and downpours. It’s been incredibly hot and feels tropical outside nearly all the time.  This is also turning out to be a record-breaking year of tornadoes. We have had 3 days of tornado warnings already this week.

Facilities on the Iowa State Univ. campus in Ames, Iowa, are flooded on August 12.

What do Pakistan, China, and Ames, Iowa have in common? They are all suffering from torrential rains leading to massive flooding.  Right now, 2/3rds of Pakistan is under water. Of any summer on record, this one is the wettest and hottest ever seen on much of the planet.  This is what climate change looks like.

James Hansen, NASA scientist, climate change scientist and author, and other scientists, released their latest findings on the climate today.  According to Hansen, the graphic below shows that “through the first seven months 2010 is warmer than prior warm years. The difference of +0.08°C compared with 2005, the prior warmest year, is large enough that 2010 is likely, but not certain, to be the warmest year in the GISS record.”

The article from Hansen introducing the findings, which you can download at the bottom after the break.

What Global Warming Looks Like

The July 2010 global map of surface temperature anomalies (Figure 1), relative to the average July in the 1951-1980 period of climatology, provides a useful picture of current climate. It was more than 5°C (about 10°F) warmer than climatology in the eastern European region including Moscow. There was an area in eastern Asia that was similarly unusually hot. The eastern part of the United States was unusually warm, although not to the degree of the hot spots in Eurasia.

There were also substantial areas cooler than climatology, including a region in central Asia and the southern part of South America. The emerging La Nina is now moderately strong, as evidenced by the region cooler than climatology along the equator in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean.

 

The 12-month running mean of global temperature (Figure 2) achieved a record high level during the past few months. Because the current La Nina will continue at least several months, and likely strengthen somewhat, the 12-month running mean temperature is expected to decline during the second half of 2010.

Will calendar year 2010 be the warmest in the period of instrumental data? Figure 3 shows that through the first seven months 2010 is warmer than prior warm years. The difference of +0.08°C compared with 2005, the prior warmest year, is large enough that 2010 is likely, but not certain, to be the warmest year in the GISS record. However, because of the cooling effect of La Nina in the remainder of the year, there is a strong possibility that the 2005 and 2010 global temperatures will be sufficiently close that they will be practically [...]

DP TRANSMITTER ABOVE TAPS

Posted on by

HAD A QUESTION ABOUT A DP METER ON A COMPRESSOR OIL COOLING SKID MANUFACTURED BY MOTION INDUSTRIES. THE OIL TANK ALONG WITH A SEPARATE PRESSURE AND TEMP TRANSMITTER HAS THE DP METER MOUNTED ABOUT 6" ABOVE THE HOLDING TANK FOR LEVEL MEASUREMENT. HIGH SIDE TAPED IN 1" FROM BOTTOM AND LOW ON TOP OF TAN

Show Off Your Research & Win Our Book! | The Intersection

Posted on by

A neat contest from the good folks at New Voices for Research:

Stop, wherever you are. Quick, grab your phone or closest camera and take a picture of what’s in front of you. Send it to hbenson at researchamerica.org to enter the Mystery Lab contest.

What is the Mystery Lab contest? A chance to show off your research. Monday through Thursday next week the most creative four images submitted will be posted in the order they were received. New Voices readers will be asked to guess what field of research is being represented in the photo (biology, chemistry, marine science, physics, mathematics, etc.)

How to participate: Send an image of your work with the general field you work in as the subject to hbenson at researchamerica.org or via Twitter @NV4Research. Then encourage your friends to guess each day next week.

How to win: The winning entry will be determined using the following formula:
Number of guesses x total daily visitors

The prize: The submitter of the winning entry will receive a copy of Unscientific America: How scientific illiteracy threatens our future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. If the winner already has a copy of this fabulous book, we’ll work something out.

Send your entries as soon as possible to be considered! Help us see what real science looks like.


The Next Decade of US Ground Based Astronomy | Cosmic Variance

Posted on by

On to the ground-based (i.e. NSF funded) recommendations (for large, new projects — i.e., not including on-going investments in ALMA; there are a number of interesting medium scale projects recommended, but I probably won’t have time to get to them).

First priority was the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) — a survey for a multi-color, multi-cadence survey of the sky with an 8m class telescope. As my colleague and LSST Project Scientist Zeljko Ivezic puts it, “LSST will make a movie of the sky,” which, you have to admit, is pretty cool. When you think about discovery space in astronomy, the largest gains come when you move into new regimes. We’ve largely run out of new wavelength regimes, but the time-variable regime has not yet been explored in a large scale systematic way (although PanSTARRS and the Los Cumbres Observatory will certainly be making headway). In addition, the co-adds of all the epochs will produce an 8m telescope version of the 2.5m Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging, which is a good thing. All data is non-proprietary, and can be used by anyone.

Second priority is a “Mid-Scale Innovations Program” — basically, a ground-based equivalent of the NASA Explorer program. The decadal survey committee reviewed a wealth of scientifically compelling medium size projects. These don’t rise to the level of building giant new facilities, and are typically seeking funding for an instrument and a decidated multi-year survey on existing facilities. The report recommends that there be a review and funding mechanism for such projects, which have the capability of responding nimbly to scientific and technological changes.

Third priority is contributing to the development of a 30m class ground-based optical/nearIR telescope (a “Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope”; GSMT). Such a telescope would be essential for carrying out spectroscopy of the sources found at the limits of 8m-class telescope imaging; basically, if you detect a source in an image, when you want spectra, you’re spreading the light over much larger areas, requiring bigger apertures to reach the same signal-to-noise as when all the wavelengths are being imaged together. There are currently 2 large US programs that are well underway (TMT and GMT), using private funding. For these programs to have enough money to be built and operated, an investment of Federal money is required. This money would also guarantee some degree of access for the larger US community, but probably significantly less than 50%. The report recommends that involvement should be at least a 25% share. However, they argue that there is only money enough to invest in one, and the community had better pick one as soon as possible, rather than letting both go forward.

The fourth priority is participation in the “Atmospheric Cerenkov Telescope Array” (ACTA), to detect and characterize the highest energy cosmic rays. Recent years have seen the detection of TeV cosmic rays, which places strong constraints on particle acceleration at the highest energy scales; a new array would greatly expand the chances of fully understanding the origin of these high energy events. Rather than funding a separate US initiative, however, the report recommends joining into an existing European project (CTA), in spite of the fact that the US would be a minor partner.

Reactions to the Ground-Based Recommendations:

Perhaps the biggest surprise was the drop in the GSMT from (1) its prioritization in the previous report, and (2) its prioritization in the actual optical/IR subcommittee (See Table B.1). The justification was that LSST was a much lower risk in terms of cost and technology, and, as in the space recommendations, pragmatism ruled the day. The committee was quite strong in their support for GSMT as a project, and pointed out that the combination with LSST is highly synergistic — LSST provides the targets, and GSMT tells you what they are. However, the pie was simply not big enough to give everyone a slice. In addition, if you can only dish out one slice of pie, you want it to feed the most number of people — LSST made a strong case that a much larger fraction of the US community could make use of the data.

Personally, I’m very sympathetic to this view. There are scientific advances that come because you have new facilities pushing into new territory, and GSMT has this in spades. However, there are also scientific advances that come about because you have the largest number of very clever brains thinking about how to exploit a given data set. Taking SDSS as a model, a ridiculously large fraction of the ridiculously large number of SDSS-related papers had absolutely nothing to do with anything in the “black book” of science justifications used to obtain funding for SDSS. You take good data, you let smart people work with it, and you’ll get science you never anticipated. I’m optimistic that LSST could work the same way, with the caveat that the scientific impact may well be blunted without a wide scale investment in spectroscopy (which SDSS had, and which LSST lacks). I very much hope that a 30m gets built, but not to the point where I’d be comfortable leveraging all public large ground-based investment over the next 10 years for a 25% share of a telescope. (Full disclosure: I am not at an institution that would have private 30m access, and am at one that has made early and ongoing investments in LSST. So, my perspective is undoubtedly shaped somewhat by viewing GSMT projects as a potential “outside” user. I do my best to be fair, but I’ve pretty much shaped my scientific research around the premise that I won’t have exclusive access to large aperture telescopes.)

I am also really pleased to see the “Mid-Scale Innovations” recommendation. I think this is a smart way to make sure we can take advantage of rapidly changing fields. When something like dark energy or extrasolar planets shows up on the scene, it’s great to have a mechanism in place to take advantage of new opportunities. In addition, it’s a smart way to skim the low hanging fruit, so that larger missions have a better understanding of what the scientific requirements really are — for example, you’d design a very different dark energy mission if you know that w is nearly equal to -1, than if you had no idea of its value.

The other noticeable lack here is a call for US participation in the Square Kilometer Array. (The panel did recommend some radio projects in the medium scale category.) However, if you look at Figure 4-8 (which I found fascinating and surprising) fewer than 10% of the members in the American Astronomical Society (ASS) categorize themselves as “Observational Radio” astronomers. I’d presume this would grow in response to investment in ALMA, but the community is clearly not enormous.

So, my take on the ground-based recommendations, is that they did pretty well at making hard choices. And the choices were indeed hard, and are going to be rightfully hard to swallow in many cases.