The environmental impacts of a new dam project on the Nile River in Sudan were not assessed properly. Such billion dollar projects should be evaluated independently in order to guarantee that their design and operation will be based on the best available scientific knowledge. This is the main conclusion in a recent report by researchers of Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Switzerland, on the Merowe Dam Project – a new impoundment upstream of the Aswan High D
On 21 and 22 March 2006, the Strategic Implementation Team (SIT) of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) will be holding its 18th meeting at ESA’s ESRIN in Frascati.
Members of CEOS-SIT include the some of the most important space agencies in the world – NASA, NOAA, ESA, JAXA of Japan, ISRO of India and CONAE of Argentina. CEOS was set up in 1984 under the auspices of the G-7 group to coordinate space agency programmes in the field of Earth Observation. ESA chairs
2:00 p.m. Eastern, March 20, 2006 — Move over, Superman, with your X-ray vision. Marine scientists have now figured out a way to “see through” the ocean’s surface and detect what’s below, with the help of satellites in space.
Using sensor data from several U.S. and European satellites, researchers from the University of Delaware, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Ocean University of China have developed a method to detect super-salty, submerged eddies cal
An international team of scientists and engineers has taken a major step toward completion of what will be the world’s preeminent cosmic neutrino observatory, harnessing a sophisticated hot-water drill to build an observatory under the South Pole that eventually will encompass a cubic kilometer of ice.
Scientists leading a consortium building the massive neutrino telescope known as IceCube say that this year they have nearly doubled the size of the detector now under const
A satellite-based rapid mapping service developed to support civil defence activities in eastern France is ready and on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The pioneering service has been designed to manage flood events – the world’s most widespread category of natural disaster.
As well as being applied to risk assessment and prevention efforts, the ESA-backed Flood Plain Monitoring Service aims to deliver map products to end users within six hours during times of crisis, gi
The Amazon rainforest puts on its biggest growth spurt during the dry season, according to new research. The finding surprised the researchers. “Most of the vegetation around the world follows a general pattern in which plants get green and lush during the rainy season, and then during the dry season, leaves fall because there’s not enough water in the soil to support plant growth,” said lead researcher Alfredo R. Huete of The University of Arizona in Tucson. “What we
The Mediterranean looks better in the dark – at least in the view of an ESA-led effort to use satellites to take the daily temperature of Europe’s seas. A switch to data acquired at night is one of several improvements undertaken to enhance reliability and reach of Medspiration project outputs.
With sea surface temperature (SST) an important variable for weather and ocean forecasting – and increasingly seen as a key indicator of climate change – the concept behind Medspiration
Studies link strong storms with rising sea surface temperatures
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have released a study supporting the findings of several studies last year linking an increase in the strength of hurricanes around the world to a global increase in sea surface temperature. The new study strengthens the link between the increase in hurricane intensity and the increase in tropical sea surface temperature. It found that while factors such as wind shear
If you’re a scientist studying the surface of Mars, few discoveries could be more exciting than seeing recent gullies apparently formed by running water. And that’s what scientists believed they saw in Mars Orbital Camera (MOC) images five years ago. They published a paper in Science on MOC images that show small, geologically young ravines. They concluded that the gullies are evidence that liquid water flowed on Mars’ surface sometime within the last million years.
There is evidence that the McGinnis Glacier, a little-known tongue of ice in the central Alaska Range, has surged. Assistant Professor of Physics Martin Truffer recently noticed the lower portion of the glacier was covered in cracks, crevasses, and pinnacles of ice–all telltale signs that the glacier has recently slid forward at higher than normal rates. It has not been determined whether the glacier continues to surge.
Truffer, of the Geophysical Institute’s Snow Ice and Perma
Imagine a space tool so revolutionary it can determine the impact of climate change, monitor the melting of glaciers, discover invisible waves, predict the strength of hurricanes, conserve fish stocks and measure river and lake levels worldwide, among other scientific applications. This instrument is not the subject of a science-fiction novel. In fact, four of them are already operating 800 kilometres above Earth.
Fifteen years ago this ground-breaking instrument, called a radar altimeter,
Three unique photographs of a recent volcanic eruption in a remote part of Ecuador show a plume unlike any previously documented, and hint at a newly recognized hazard, say scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“The usual volcanic plume consists of a stalk capped with an umbrella, and resembles the mushroom of an atom bomb blast,” said geology professor Susan Kieffer, “but the umbrella on this plume was wavy, like the shell of a scallop.”
In a pap
A NASA-funded expedition to the Arctic to map the thickness of snow has a legion of unexpected furry fans hailing from one of the world’s coldest regions: polar bears.
From mid-March to mid-April, researchers embark on an Arctic field experiment using a new airborne radar to determine the accuracy of satellite measurements of snow’s thickness atop polar sea ice. Snow thickness is just one of several cutting-edge measurements taken by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiom
A review of the findings from more than 100 peer-reviewed studies shows that although many aspects of the global water cycle have intensified, including precipitation and evaporation, this trend has not consistently resulted in an increase in the frequency or intensity of tropical storms or floods over the past century. The USGS findings, which have implications on the effect of global climate change, are published today in the Journal of Hydrology.
“A key question in the global climate
The USGS and the Government of Afghanistan Ministry of Mines and Industry have completed the first-ever assessment of Afghanistan´s undiscovered petroleum resources and have determined that the resource base is significantly greater than previously understood. The assessment was conducted over the past two years, with funding provided by the U.S. Trade and Development Agency.
The estimates increase the oil resources by 18 times and more than triple the natural gas resources.
Studies have shown that over the last 40 years, a warming climate has been accompanied by fewer rain- and snow-producing storms in mid-latitudes around the world, but the storms that are happening are a little stronger with more precipitation. A new analysis of global satellite data suggests that these storm changes are affecting strongly the Earth’s water cycle and air temperatures and creating contrasting cooling and warming effects in the atmosphere.
The mid-latitudes extend f
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