As millions of the nation’s city dwellers descend from high-rise apartment buildings to hail cabs or use local transit systems to dine at trendy restaurants, attend art exhibits, commute to and from work, or to head uptown to catch a championship ball game, many are unaware of the possible impact of urbanization on climate and weather.

More and more people live in cities. This means that cities will grow rapidly over the next several decades. Evidence continues to mount that cities affect the climate, said J. Marshall Shepherd, co-author of a paper that appeared in the May 2005 issue of AMS Bulletin, and Deputy Project Scientist of the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Yet current climate models don’t represent urban areas very well. Our research suggests that, using satellite data and enhanced models, we will be able to answer several critical questions about how urbanization may impact climate change 10, 25 or even 100 years from now.

Shepherd and co-author Menglin Jin, a visiting scientist at NASA, and research scientist at the University of Maryland-College Park, suggest that satellite-observed urban information is extremely useful for advancing our ability to simulate urban effects in climate models. They go on further to propose that satellite data is the only feasible way to represent the expanse of global urban surfaces and related changes to the Earth’s surface, vegetation, and aerosols.

Urbanization is the process by which an increasing proportion of the nation’s population resides in cities and the metropolitan areas surrounding cities, and is an example of human-induced land cover change. According to the United Nations Population Division, urban regions only cover 0.2 percent of Earth’s land surface, but contain nearly half of the world’s population. However, to date, global climate models (GCMs) and regional climate models (RCMs) do not reflect urban landscapes, according to the paper’s authors.

GCMs and RCMs are models, or complex mathematical computer simulations of the atmosphere and the oceans, and are the primary tool for predicting the response of the climate to increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

What is it about urban areas like New York City, Paris, Tokyo or Sydney that the paper’s authors believe would lend value to climate models, and subsequently, to climate predictions. According to scientific studies presented at a recent American Geophysical Union session organized by the authors, the construction of buildings, parking lots, houses, urban areas dramatically change the smoothness of a surface, thermal conductivity (the ability of a material to transmit heat), hydraulic conductivity (measure of the ability of soil to transmit water), albedo (reflectivity off of Earth’s surfaces), emissivity (the ratio of radiation emitted by a body or surface) and vegetation cover. As such, urban landscapes change the typical physical processes of land surfaces, and importantly, also add new and unique characteristics to land surfaces and atmosphere.

Also, structures like Trump Tower, for instance, a world famous building in the heart of the Big Apple, can change the basic wind flow in and around cities that can alter air quality, temperature, cloud distribution, and precipitation patterns. It is increasingly evident that such atmospheric changes near cities can be captured by NASA satellites such as Aqua, Landsat, Terra, and the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM).

It’s important for everyone to know that urbanization affects things we all care about like the amount and frequency of rainfall or how hot or cold the outdoor temperature may be, said Jin.

The paper’s authors believe that the story of satellites and the city deserves further review, and can be of great value to our understanding of how our global inclination to be urban dwellers can also change the climate of our home planet.

Image: This image is a Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)-captured land cover image of the southeastern U.S. (near Atlanta). The red color specifies Urban and Built-up as indicated from the color-coded classification system in the land cover classification world map. Credit: NASA GSFC

Original press release: Satellites and the City: NASA Scientists Encourage Satellite Observations to Improve Our Understanding of Urban Effects on Climate and Weather (NASA)

After an interval of six weeks 60 scientists from ten countries returned to the parched heart of Spain to complete testing a new type of sensor intended to yield new insights into global vegetation growth, as well as gather data for the design of a next-generation ESA Earth Observation mission and support efforts to use satellite data for irrigation management.

In Cervantes’ comic tale the central Spanish region of La Mancha was where Don Quixote undertook a series of knightly quests. Exactly four hundred years later researchers have been participating in a different type of quest: the direct in-situ detection of photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight into energy.

When the chlorophyll in plants absorbs energy then some is re-emitted at longer wavelengths as fluorescence. This fluorescence is routinely measured in laboratories to study photosynthetic activity but the signal is very weak compared to direct sunlight. This campaign is the first time that large-scale outdoor measurements have been successfully carried out.

Vegetation fluorescence represents a direct measurement of vegetation’s ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide that - if it could be mapped on a global scale by a space-based sensor would transform our understanding of the carbon cycle and climate change.

Researchers also gathered a host of multispectral data on the local vegetation from a pair of airborne sensors plus satellite acquisitions by Landsat, MODIS and ASTER as well as Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) and Advanced Along Track Scanning Radiometer (AATSR) sensors. The Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS) aboard ESA’s microsatellite Proba made several acquisitions, and complete field measurements were also made in-situ.

This data has being gathered to help identify requirements for ESA’s planned Sentinel-2 mission that will carry a multispectral imager, capable of monitoring plant pigments and so derive photochemical indicators of vegetation status.

Sentinel-2 is one of a series of operational Earth Observation satellites planned as the space segment of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) joint initiative between ESA and the European Commission. With this dataset all the potential spectral configurations of the Sentinel-2 mission can now be evaluated. The twin purposes of the campaign is reflected in its name: SEN2FLEX or SENtinel-2 Fluorescence EXperiment.

Also being closely measured during the SEN2FLEX campaign was energy and water fluxes from vegetation, along with a detailed characterisation of soil moisture and water motion in the soil.

Such data is useful for properly modelling the water balance in relation to water management issues, and in particular is intended to validate results from a European Union-funded project called DEMETER (DEMonstration of Earth observation Techologies in Routine advisory irrigation services) that is investigating the utility of satellite data as an aid to irrigation management of water-stressed regions.

Professor Jose Moreno of the University of Valencia, coordinator of the SEN2FLEX campaign, stated: “We have collected a tremendous amount of data, ranging from classical operational satellites up to the most recent and innovative airborne sensors, plus a notable collection of soil, vegetation and atmosphere data, and all necessary ancillary data and supporting validation measurements.

“It will take a few years to fully analyse the whole dataset, but we will learn many things in support of the definition of several future ESA missions.”

The campaign took place in the Barrax agricultural site in La Mancha, one of the best-documented stretches of ground on planet Earth. In the last 15 years Barrax has been used for many different campaigns and field experiments, being a validation site for a large number of ESA, European Union and national projects.

The new data gathered between 11 and 15 July serve to complement the initial measurements carried out in Barrax last month between 30 May and 4 June, demonstrating the capability of test sensors to detect variability among vegetation species and developmental states, but also to monitor changes in the same fields as crops grew from the six weeks between the previous measurements in June.

The first objective of the SEN2FLEX campaign was to validate data from the recently built AirFLEX airborne instrument. Developed under an ESA contract by the Laboratoire pour l’Utilisation du Rayonnement Electromagntique (LURE) Photosynthesis and Remote Sensing team in Paris, AirFLEX has been designed to detect vegetation fluorescence.

Flown together with AirFLEX on an aircraft supplied by the German Space Agency(DLR) was a hyperspectral sensor called Compact Airborne Spectral Imager-3 (CASI-3) that works in the visible to near-infrared, built by Canadian firm ITRES. To provide complementary measurements into the shortwave infrared and thermal infrared a new sensor called the Airborne Hyperspectral Scanner (AHS) was flown on aircraft operated by Spain’s National Institute for Aerospace Technology (INTA) following the same flightpath as the other two sensors.

A team of 16 scientists led by Professor Jose Sobrino of the University of Valencia made thermal measurements of the area to help define the need for such data on future missions.

Meanwhile Professor Bob Su from the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) in the Netherlands and Professor Guido d’Urso from Italy’s University of Naples were in charge of teams from several countries making water-related measurements using a series of sensors fitted to flux towers and placed within the soil.

Professor Alfonso Calera, from the University of Castilla-La Mancha, oversaw the work related to DEMETER, of which he is project coordinator. The research is regarded as way to define operational requirements for future GMES activities in the context of the EU Water Framework Directive.

The field campaign was made possible thanks to the support of the Institute for Agronomical Technologies of the Albacete Province (ITAP) that operates the Barrax site. The Institute for Regional Development (IDR) local support and logistics, while the University of Castilla-La Mancha provided access to laboratories and support in field measurements.

“It was nice to see that we have combined in a single activity some quite innovative techniques, such as mapping actual photosynthesis from vegetation fluorescence measurements, along with more basic operational aspects in practical applications, such as those related to water management,” Professor Moreno concluded.

“Such complete datasets as the one collected in the SEN2FLEX activity are essential to develop quite new science while keeping an eye on potential applications, particularly in the context of definition and exploitation of future ESA missions.”

Original press release: Don Quixote’s home shows way to future Earth Observation missions (ESA)

Your breakfast this morning came at a cost not only to your wallet. Your bowl of Cheerios and cup of coffee and all the other meals for the other 6 billion people in our world cost the Earth a bit of its water, a bit of its ecological diversity, contributed to its pollution and may one day cost us our livelihood.

In the July 22, 2005 issue of the journal Science, co-author Terry Chapin, professor of ecology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Institute of Arctic Biology (IAB), and colleagues point out that modern land-use practices may be trading short-term increases in food production for long-term losses in the environment’s ability to support human societies. Part of the solution, according to Chapin, is the students in UAF’s Regional Resilience and Adaptation Program (RAP).

Local land-use practices such as clearing tropical and boreal forests, practicing large-scale agriculture, expanding urban centers and intensifying farmland production are so pervasive their effects are now observed globally. Fertilizer use, which has increased 700% in the past 40 years, and human-caused atmospheric pollution now negatively affect water quality and coastal and freshwater ecosystems. Biodiversity is lost due to modification, fragmentation and loss of habitats, soil, and water, and exploitation of native species. Land-use practices play a role in changing the global carbon cycle, and possibly, the global climate.

The key to resilient and sustainable land use, according to the paper’s authors, is closer collaboration between scientists and practitioners linking, for example, ecologists and land-use planners, climatologists and architects, and entomologists (insect scientists) and physicians and the development of land-use strategies that recognize both short and long-term needs.

Such collaboration and long-range planning is at the heart of UAF’s RAP. We need manager and policy makers who understand the ecological, economic, political, and social connections and unintended consequences of land-use decisions, said Chapin, RAP’s director. The program trains students to be scholars, policy-makers and resource managers able to address issues of regional and global sustainability.

All of the changes in local land-use are driven by human activities to meet local needs or create economic profits, but these changes have global consequences, Chapin said. We need to be aware of the local and global consequences of land-use change so that the true costs are considered when land-use planning and development take place. It’s not to say there shouldn’t be any land-use change, but it must be in context.

RAP graduate student Nancy Fresco’s work on carbon sequestration in boreal forests is an example of this new approach to land-use decisions.

Crossing between academic fields and taking a global perspective on local issues can be daunting, because linked social and ecological systems are innately complex, Fresco said. But global land-use problems are too serious to be ignored. Here in Alaska, we can see some of these problems first-hand, and we have the resources to find workable solutions.

Alaska has many of the properties of a third-world economy, Chapin said. An extractive economy subject to changes in the world economy, tremendous amounts of natural resources, diversity of cultures and we’ve got the money and the wealth to solve the problem if we know what to do, he said.

Original press release: Humans trading short-term food for long-term environmental losses (Institute of Arctic Biology)

The intense mechanical testing period is finally over for the CryoSat satellite, and with launch just a couple of months away - the very last checks are being made before the spacecraft is packed up and shipped to the launch site in Plesetsk, Russia.

During the last 12 months the satellite has been undergoing stringent mechanical and environmental tests at the Space Test Centre at IABG (Industrieanlagen-Betriebsgesellschaft mbH) in Ottobrunn, Germany. Unfortunately, some concerns were raised about how a few of the components were functioning and consequently, repair and replacement activities hampered the testing programme and slightly delayed the launch date. Now, however, there just remains the final software checks before the satellite and its support equipment are packaged for the long voyage to Russia for launch at the end of September.

The last phase of the testing programme focused on rigorous acoustic tests, which subjected the satellite to the same levels of noise that it will be exposed to during launch. CryoSat will be launched on a Rockot launch vehicle from the remote Plesetsk Cosmodrome about 800 km north of Moscow in Russia. Rockot is one of the modified Russian Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) SS-19 launchers, which were decommissioned as a result of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991. The adaptation of the SS-19 uses the original two lower liquid propellant stages of the ICBM in conjunction with a new ‘Breeze-KM’ third stage for commercial payloads.

A few weeks before the acoustic tests were carried out CryoSat underwent thermal balance and vacuum testing. This part of the programme ensured that the satellite will function properly in the harsh environment that space presents. The spacecraft was oriented in various positions in the ‘Sun chamber’ to simulate, as accurately as possible, the various degrees of heat that the spacecraft will encounter during its unusual polar-orbiting lifetime.

Now that the crucial testing period is over the CryoSat team is preparing for the launch campaign and the operations planned during the early life of the satellite in orbit.

It has taken just six years for CryoSat to go from a proposal idea to a full satellite mission about to be launched. Dedicated to monitoring precise changes in the thickness of the polar ice sheets and floating sea ice, CryoSat is the first Earth Explorer mission to be realised as part of ESA’s Living Planet Programme. The observations made over the three-year lifetime of the mission will provide conclusive evidence of rates at which ice cover may be diminishing as a result of global warming.

Original press release: CryoSat environmental testing over - preparations for shipment to launch site about to begin (ESA)

Researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and several other government and academic institutions have created four new supercomputer simulations that for the first time combine their mathematical computer models of the atmosphere, ocean, land surface and sea ice. These simulations are the first field tests of the new Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF), an innovative software system that promises to improve and accelerate U.S. predictive capability ranging from short-term weather forecasts to century-long climate change projections.

Although still under development, many organizations and research institutions are starting to adopt ESMF. Under a partnership, groups from NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Defense and research universities are using ESMF as the standard for coupling their weather and climate models to achieve a realistic representation of the Earth as a system of interacting parts, unifying much of the modeling community. ESMF makes it easier to share and compare alternative scientific approaches from multiple sources, uses remote sensing data more efficiently and eliminates the need for individual agencies to develop their own coupling software.

The development of large Earth system applications often spans initiatives, institutions and agencies, and involves the geoscience, physics, mathematics and computer science communities. With ESMF, these diverse groups can leverage common software to simplify model development, said NASA ESMF principal investigator Arlindo da Silva, a scientist in GSFC’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office.

NASA’s Earth-Sun System Technology Office/Computational Technologies Project funds the field tests and overall ESMF development. The partners on the field tests are DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) and National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), NSF’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The newly completed field tests, known as interoperability experiments, show that this new approach in coupling models can be successful. For instance, temperature and wind outputs are similar around the globe when ingesting data into an NSF-NASA atmosphere model as they are for the atmosphere model used operationally by NOAA. Although most of the experiments would require exhaustive tuning and validation to be scientifically sound, they already show that ESMF can be used to assemble coupled applications quickly, easily and with technical accuracy.

These interoperability experiments illustrate the role ESMF can play in integrating the national Earth science resources, da Silva said. Using existing data assimilation technology from NCEP, the finite-volume Community Atmosphere Model, or fvCAM, was able to ingest conventional and satellite observations, a capability that could open the door to using the fvCAM for weather as well as climate prediction. The fvCAM, which includes land surface capabilities, was developed by NCAR, with key components from GSFC.

The second experiment combines NCEP’s data assimilation technology with the Aries atmosphere model originally developed by the NASA Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction Project. Aries is typically coupled with an ocean model to run experimental forecasts of phenomena such as El Nino and its effects on precipitation. Among additional advantages, the two field tests enable the intercomparison of systems for satellite data assimilation.

The coupled experiments have many other potential applications. The third experiment, combining a GFDL atmosphere-land-ice model with an MIT ocean-sea ice model (known as MITgcm), may ultimately bring new insights into ocean uptake of carbon dioxide and other important atmospheric gases and how this process affects the climate.

In an early independent adoption of ESMF technology, UCLA researchers have successfully coupled their Atmospheric General Circulation Model to the MITgcm for the first time and updated a previous coupling to the LANL Parallel Ocean Program model. They made experimental predictions of the El Nino/Southern Oscillations with the coupled models using initial states provided by JPL’s Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) project. These preliminary results validate ESMF performance in terms of scientific fidelity and support the importance of ECCO products for improving short-term climate forecasts.

Demonstrations of the software and the field tests are taking place at the 4th ESMF Community Meeting at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., July 20-22. Reaching beyond the ESMF partnership, the research team releases the software to the scientific community via the Internet. NCAR, home of the core implementation team, is scheduled to release ESMF Version 2.2.0 this month.

Image: Using ESMF, researchers have coupled an atmosphere model and an ocean model that had not interacted before. This image depicts the sea surface temperature after five iterations of the simulation. The collaborators on this field test are the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Credit: Shep Smithline, GFDL; Chris Hill, MIT.

Original press release: Field Tests Unite Weather and Climate Models (NASA)

A futuristic design by Faber Maunsell and Hugh Broughton Architects has won the competition for the new British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Halley Research Station. In a very close-run contest, three finalists presented their ideas to a Jury Panel, technical advisory panel and BAS scientists.

Director of BAS, Professor Chris Rapley, CBE said, This was an incredibly tough choice for the Jury Panel to make. We were presented with three outstanding schemes - each one of them creating an exceptional solution for living and working in this extreme environment. Of course, only one scheme can go through to construction. In my view each team is a winner and I really hope that the runners-up realise how much we value their ideas. This competition was launched to bring innovation and creativity to the challenge of building a scientific research station on a floating ice shelf. The process, which involved a working partnership between each design team and the BAS technical teams, was stimulating and exciting for everyone involved. I extend my warm congratulations to Faber Maunsell and Hugh Broughton Architects on their success at winning this competition.

The new modular station, elevated on ski-based jackable legs to avoid burial by snow, can be towed across the ice. The modules are simple to construct and can be re-arranged or relocated inland periodically as the ice shelf flows towards the sea. A central module packed with stimulating areas for recreation and relaxation is flanked by a series of modules designed to suit the changing needs of the science programmes. It features renewable energy sources and new environmental strategies for fuel, waste and material handling.

Original press release: Futuristic design wins competition for new Antarctic Research Station (BAS - British Antarctic Survey)