The following is an excerpt from an official Whitehouse statement about the Energy Policy Act:

‘Today, President Bush Signed Into Law The First National Energy Plan In More Than A Decade. The President’s national energy plan will encourage energy efficiency and conservation, promote alternative and renewable energy sources, reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy, increase domestic production, modernize the electricity grid, and encourage the expansion of nuclear energy.”

Read the presidents speech here: President Signs Energy Policy Act

A collaborative research team will soon begin one of the largest hurricane research projects ever undertaken. Its goal is to better understand dramatic, rapid changes in tropical storm intensity that have baffled forecasters for years.

The team includes scientists from the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, the University of Washington, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Navy.

The project, called the Hurricane Rainband and Intensity Change Experiment (RAINEX), will study how the outer rainbands and inner eye of a hurricane interact to influence the storm’s intensity. The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided $3 million to fund the study, which may shed light on how and why a storm can change in strength in only a matter of hours.

“While great progress has been made in forecasting hurricane tracks, we need to improve forecasting hurricane intensity,” says Steve Nelson, director of NSF’s physical and dynamic meteorology program.

Many factors affect the intensity of hurricanes. RAINEX will investigate one of those factors: the interactions between a hurricane’s rainbands and its eyewall. “From RAINEX, we will better understand the impact of rainbands on a hurricane’s maximum winds,” Nelson says.

Although researchers have studied the eye and outer rainbands of hurricanes extensively, few if any experiments have ever examined these two components together and how their interaction might affect a storm’s strength, according to Shuyi Chen, an associate professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at Rosenstiel School and a RAINEX principal investigator. The outer bands of a hurricane often have strong winds and lots of rain, and that can actually affect the overall intensity of a hurricane.

The RAINEX team will study this interaction using data recorded during hurricane research flights. Beginning August 15 and running through the remainder of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, two NOAA P-3 aircraft and a U.S. Navy P-3 will fly simultaneously into hurricanes well before the storms threaten landfall. Flying in the hurricane’s outer bands and punching into the eyewall on most flights, the aircraft will use sophisticated Doppler radar and GPS dropsondes to record wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and other critical data.

Researchers at the University of Washington and NCAR will provide expertise in airborne Doppler radar analysis, while researchers at Rosenstiel School will construct a state-of-the-art hurricane model using the data collected during the research flights.

“Ideally, we’ll obtain a physical explanation of a hurricane’s intensity change in terms of the relationship between the inner and outer parts of the storm,” says Robert A. Houze, Jr., a professor in atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington and one of the project’s principal investigators. “These storms can jump up in intensity or drop a full category in a day, and the intensity changes are a big challenge.

Much of what scientists currently know about the interactions between the outer rainbands and the eyewall of a hurricane comes from numerical models developed for hurricane research and prediction, which can provide very detailed information but may not be completely accurate. Researchers need solid data to validate these models.

One of the breakthrough aspects of RAINEX is the use of the three aircraft equipped with Doppler radar. Although eyewall flights are a routine part of hurricane research, this is the first field study to include simultaneous flights in and near rainbands.

NCAR’s Wen-Chau Lee will be the lead scientist for the Naval Research Lab’s P-3 as it profiles rainbands. Dropsonde sensors will measure temperature and wind as the instruments fall from the plane through storms. On most flights, the ELDORA Doppler radar will collect data as the P-3 circles rainbands from six miles away, with occasional flights through a rainband as needed.

“These flights can be turbulent, especially when we’re penetrating the rainbands,” Lee says. “I think this is the wild card—the challenge of the experiment—to capture the internal rainband structure and its interactions with the eyewall in these conditions.”

Once the data are collected, the researchers will assimilate them into hurricane models to gain a better sense of whether a storm’s circulation speeds up or slows down as rainbands wrap around the hurricane. The researchers will share this information with hurricane operational centers and national environmental prediction centers around the world.

“Having the Navy P-3 fly with the NOAA P-3 aircraft will expand the area covered by airborne Doppler radar to include the rainbands as well as the inner core,” says Robert Rogers, field program director for NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division. “This data will improve our understanding of intensity change and contribute to the development and evaluation of the next generation operational hurricane model.”

Original press release: NCAR Radar Probes Hurricane Rainbands (NCAR)

A number of hypotheses have been used to explain how free oxygen first accumulated in Earth’s atmosphere some 2.4 billion years ago, but a full understanding has proven elusive. Now a new model offers plausible scenarios for how oxygen came to dominate the atmosphere, and why it took at least 300 million years after bacterial photosynthesis started producing oxygen in large quantities.

The big reason for the long delay was that processes such as volcanic gas production acted as sinks to consume free oxygen before it reached levels high enough to take over the atmosphere, said Mark Claire, a University of Washington doctoral student in astronomy and astrobiology. Free oxygen would combine with gases in a volcanic plume to form new compounds, and that process proved to be a significant oxygen sink, he said.

Another sink was iron delivered to the Earth’s outer crust by bombardment from space. Free oxygen was consumed as it oxidized, or rusted, the metal.

But Claire said that just changing the model to reflect different iron content in the outer crust makes a huge difference in when the model shows free oxygen filling the atmosphere. Increasing the actual iron content fivefold would have delayed oxygenation by more than 1 billion years, while cutting iron to one-fifth the actual level would have allowed oxygenation to happen more than 1 billion years earlier.

“We were fairly surprised that we could push the transition a billion years in either direction, because those levels of iron in the outer crust are certainly plausible given the chaotic nature of how Earth formed,” he said.

Claire and colleagues David Catling, a UW affiliate professor in atmospheric sciences, and Kevin Zahnle of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ames Research Center in California will discuss their model tomorrow (Aug. 9) in Calgary, Alberta, during the Geological Society of America’s Earth System Processes 2 meeting.

Earth’s oxygen supply originated with cyanobacteria, tiny water-dwelling organisms that survive by photosynthesis. In that process, the bacteria convert carbon dioxide and water into organic carbon and free oxygen. But Claire noted that on the early Earth, free oxygen would quickly combine with an abundant element, hydrogen or carbon for instance, to form other compounds, and so free oxygen did not build up in the atmosphere very readily. Methane, a combination of carbon and hydrogen, became a dominant atmospheric gas.

With a sun much fainter and cooler than today, methane buildup warmed the planet to the point that life could survive. But methane was so abundant that it filled the upper reaches of the atmosphere, where such compounds are very rare today. There, ultraviolet exposure caused the methane to decompose and its freed hydrogen escaped into space, Claire said.

The loss of hydrogen atoms to space allowed increasingly greater amounts of free oxygen to oxidize the crust. Over time, that slowly diminished the amount of hydrogen released from the crust by the combination of pressure and temperature that formed the rocks in the crust.

“About 2.4 billion years ago, the long-term geologic sources of oxygen outweighed the sinks in a somewhat permanent fashion,” Claire said. “Escaping to space is the only permanent escape that we envision for the hydrogen, and that drove the planet to a higher oxygen level.”

The model developed by Claire, Catling and Zahnle indicates that as hydrogen atoms stripped from methane escaped into space, greenhouse conditions caused by the methane blanket quickly collapsed. Earth’s average temperature likely cooled by about 30 degrees Celsius, or 54 degrees Fahrenheit, and oxygen was able to dominate the atmosphere because there was no longer an overabundance of hydrogen to consume the oxygen.

The work is funded by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute and the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program, both of which foster research to understand life in the universe by examining the limits of life on Earth.

“There is interest in this work not just to know how an oxygen atmosphere came about on Earth but to look for oxygen signatures for other Earth-like planets,” Claire said.

Original press release: Model gives clearer idea of how oxygen came to dominate Earth’s atmosphere (University of Washington)

The latest issue of Conservation Biology examines the viability of the Sinai baton blue and the results of human population pressures. The study predicts that in the absence of global warming, grazing, and plant collection (three activities directly linked to humans) the world’s smallest butterfly would persist for at least 200 years. The population could withstand small increases in grazing intensity that would decrease their climate, but not increases in temperature. As the level of global warming raises its impact, extinction rapidly accelerates. This implies “…that there may be an annual average temperature, specific to each endangered species, above which extinction becomes much more likely,” authors Martin Hoyle and Mike James state. There is no such threshold of grazing pressure.

The authors mapped the entire global range of this butterfly and obtained data on the intensity of livestock grazing. The Sinai baton blue is one of only two endemic animals in St. Katherine’s Protectorate, one of Egypt’s most recently designated protected areas. Based on the authors’ model, the effect of global warming on the chance of extinction does not depend on the future level of habitat destruction due to this grazing; the growing number of families that live on the protectorate keep a small herd of goats and sheep that graze on the plants the butterflies thrive on. Global warming is the deadly culprit. “If the areas of habitat patches individually fall below certain prescribed levels, the butterfly is likely to go extinct,” the authors conclude.

Original press release: Global Warming’s Effects Extend to World’s Smallest Butterfly (NASA Earth Observatory)

Supported by UNEP and other agencies, the World Glacier Monitoring Service has launched the next edition of the Fluctuations of Glaciers report (1995-2000).

The series ‘Fluctuations of Glaciers’ (FoG), prepared by the WGMS, continously publishes internationally collected, standardised data on changes in glaciers throughout the world at 5-yearly intervals. The objective of the publication is to reproduce a global set of data which affords a general view of the changes,encourages more extensive measurements,invites further processing of the results,facilitates consultation of the further sources, and serves as a basis for research.

In fact, this standarised data set should be regarded as a working tool for the scientific community, especially concerning the fields of glaciology, climatology, hydrology, and quarternary geology.

Original press release: ‘Fluctuations of Glaciers’ Report Launched (UNEP)

The damage done to Spain’s Guadalajara province by July’s fierce forest fire has been measured from space by Envisat.

The four-day blaze began on 16 July, when a barbecue in pine woodland went out of control, spread by strong winds across a very dry landscape. Eleven volunteer firefighters died tackling the blaze, which at its height threatened to engulf the nearby villages of Selas and Ablanque. Firefighters succeeded in creating a fire-break to stop its spread, backed up by water-bombing aircraft.

As the Spanish authorities assess the fire’s aftermath, a rapid damage estimate has been performed using Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument.

A 24 July MERIS Full Resolution mode image with a spatial resolution of 300 metres was processed to reveal burned areas by a team led by Dr. Federico González-Alonso, head of the Madrid-based Laboratorio de Teledetección (Remote-sensing Laboratory) of the Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria (National Institute for Agriculture, Food Research and Technology or INIA).

“MERIS measures the solar radiation reflected by the Earth in 15 selectable spectral bands in the visible and near infra-red,” explained González-Alonso. “We utilised bands that were particularly sensitive to vegetation, then performed an automatic matched filtering analysis on the stacked bands to designate ‘endmembers’ - spectrally pure areas that could be visually classified as very burnt.

“The file obtained was reclassified by modifying the histogram or graphical bar used, so pixels with values over 0.3 were considered burnt. The resulting perimeter gives us a burnt area estimate of 11 313 hectares.” This figure compares well to forest fire burnt area estimates from other sources of 12 000 hectares.

“The results of our completed study will be sent to the Spanish Ministry of Environment for economic, social and ecological damage assessment,” González-Alonso added. “Our team has been studying the use of MERIS data for fire-damage assessment - the obtaining of images from ESA in near-real time via the internet being an essential point in this kind of application.”

“The results achieved so far show that estimates can be extremely useful not only in establishing the scale of the damage but also for the subsequent forest renewal projects and for subsidy management.”

The team is also participating in ESA’s Dragon Programme of cooperation with Chinese researchers, using MERIS Full Resolution imagery to map forest fires across China.

Guadalajara forest fire devastation
González-Alonso explained that MERIS’s visible and infra-red multispectral imaging capability combined with a better spatial resolution than comparable satellite sensors make it especially useful for providing fire-damage information.

MERIS’s capability is being employed in a variety of different projects, including as part of GLOBCARBON, a project to better characterise changes in the amount of land-based carbon on a global basis across ten years from 1997.

Monitoring the location, duration and affected area of forest fires is an important part of GLOBCARBON, since blazes are a major way for carbon to be released from land-based ’sinks’ into the atmosphere. The project, part of ESA’s Data User Element, should improve scientific understanding of the carbon cycle and improve climate change modelling.

MERIS is also being utilised in combination with other satellite sensors for the Risk-EOS initiative, which is rolling out a series of operational services for fire and flood risk management, with burn scar mapping initially being offered within a total area of 180 000 square kilometres across two parts of Europe: Spain’s Castilla y Leon Region and the Éntente area of southern France.

Risk-EOS is taking place as part of the GMES Services Element (GSE), a suite of Earth Observation services being developed as part of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) joint endeavour between ESA and the European Commission, aimed at merging ground- and space-based information sources to develop a comprehensive planetary monitoring capability in support of Europe’s environment and security goals.

A follow-on to MERIS is planned as payload for the GMES-1 spacecraft, intended to support operational GMES services into the next decade.

Original press release: Spanish Forest Fire Aftermath Surveyed by Envisat (ESA)