According to NASA-funded researchers, developed land in the greater Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area is projected to increase 80 percent by 2030. Scientists used a computer-based decision support model loaded with NASA and commercial satellite images to simulate three policies affecting land use.
The researchers, Claire Jantz and Scott Goetz, from the University of Maryland, College Park, Md., and the Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, Mass., also found a 39 percent increase in
The spiral troughs of Mars’ polar ice caps have been called the most enigmatic landforms in the solar system. The deep canyons spiraling out from Red Planet’s North and South poles cover hundreds of miles. No other planet has such structures.
A new model of trough formation suggests that heating and cooling alone are sufficient to form the unusual patterns. Previous explanations had focused on alternate melting and refreezing cycles but also required wind or shifting ice caps.
“I
While climate may be impacted by carbon dioxide emissions, aerosols and other factors, a new study offers further evidence land surface changes may also play a significant role.
The study of summer climate in the United States reported changes in land cover, particularly vegetation, have impacted regional temperatures and precipitation. The study used data and computer models from NASA and other organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“The
By examining trapped air bubbles in an ice core, researchers extend atmospheric record of methyl bromide over 300 years
Human activity in the Industrial Age – approximately the last 150 years – has significantly increased atmospheric levels of methyl bromide, a gas known for harming the ozone layer in the Earth’s stratosphere.
A research team led by UC Irvine scientist Eric Saltzman reached this conclusion after examining an ice core recovered from Antarctica. By studying air
Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics Conference
University of Warwick, 4-7 April, 2004
Developments in predicting snow formation, snap-shot MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), organic semiconductor technology, high temperature superconductivity, and progress towards quantum computers are some of the topics being presented at a major conference organised by the Institute of Physics next month. The four-day conference, CMMP 2004, will take place from Sunday 4th
An international team of scientists has discovered new carbon-bearing particles, which they call “tar balls,” in air pollution over Hungary, the Indian Ocean, and southern Africa. Tar balls form in smoke from wood fires and agricultural and forest burning. Carbon-bearing particles like tar balls in the lower atmosphere are a concern, they say, because they may affect global climate change, as well as air quality.
The team, headed by Mihály Pósfai, an Earth and environmental science professo
Scientists at Oxford University have discovered that small-scale fluctuations, which are wide-spread in the atmosphere, may have a greater impact on weather systems than previously thought. The results, published in Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, may have important implications for accurate weather forecasting.
The fluctuations, known as inertia-gravity waves because they are sustained by a combination of inertial and gravitational forces, are prominent in the bottom 15 km of the atmosph
NASA scientists have an explanation for one of the worst climatic events in the history of the United States, the “Dust Bowl” drought, which devastated the Great Plains and all but dried up an already depressed American economy in the 1930’s.
Siegfried Schubert of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues used a computer model developed with modern-era satellite data to look at the climate over the past 100 years. The study found cooler than normal tropical
A spectacle unseen for 16 years occurred in Patagonia this week: a natural dam of blue ice gave way to crushing lake waters trapped behind it, finally breaking apart.
Watching tourists applauded as a section of the 60-metre high Perito Moreno glacier collapsed and the waters of the dammed southern arm of Lago Argentino surged through it.
Since last October this section – known as Brazo Sur – had been blocked off from the rest of the lake by the glacier’s flowing ice tongue, which exte
An answer to the long-standing riddle of whether the Earth’s ice ages occurred simultaneously in both the Southern and Northern hemispheres is emerging from the glacial deposits found in the high desert east of the Andes.
Using a new technique to gauge the effects of cosmic rays on minerals found in boulders carried by South American glaciers thousands of years ago, a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has demonstrated that the Earth’s most recent ice ages were gl
A decades-old mathematical model is being inappropriately used in at least 26 nations to make potentially costly predictions about how shorelines will retreat in response to rising sea levels, two coastal scientists contended in the Friday, March 19, 2004, issue of the research journal Science.
“Models can be a hazard to society, and this is certainly an example of such,” wrote Orrin Pilkey of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, and J. Andrew Cooper
An international team of geoscientists believes that carbon dioxide, and not changes in cosmic ray intensity, was the factor controlling ancient global temperatures. The new findings resulted from the researchers inclusion of the ocean’s changing acidity in their calculations.
“Reviewing the geologic records of carbon dioxide and glaciations, we found that carbon dioxide was low during periods of long-lived and widespread continental glaciations and high during other, warmer periods,” s
A NASA-funded study found some climate models might be overestimating the amount of water vapor entering the atmosphere as the Earth warms. Since water vapor is the most important heat-trapping greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, some climate forecasts may be overestimating future temperature increases.
In response to human emissions of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, the Earth warms, more water evaporates from the ocean, and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere increases. Since
A new study from the University of California shows, for the first time, that the deep-ocean circulation system of the north Atlantic, which controls ice-age cycles of cold and warm periods in the Northern Hemisphere, is integrally coupled to salinity levels in the Caribbean Sea.
This research reinforces concerns that global warming, by melting the glacial ice of Greenland, could quickly and profoundly change salinity and temperatures in the north Atlantic Ocean. One consequence might be mu
Using satellite and other data, scientists have discovered that sea surface temperatures and sea level pressure in the North Pacific have undergone unusual changes over the last five years. These changes to the North Pacific Ocean climate system are different from those that dominated for the past 50-80 years, which has led scientists to conclude that there is more than one key to the climate of that region than previously thought.
According to a study by Nicholas Bond, J.E. Overland and P.
Large-scale, long-lasting droughts in the United States – such as the present one in the West — tend to be linked to warmer than normal sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean, and not just cooling in the tropical Pacific, according to a USGS study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study statistically associates the patterns of U.S. droughts during the last century to multi-decade variations in North Pacific and North Atlantic sea sur
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