Top weather conditions that amplify Lake Erie algal blooms revealed

Of the many weather-related factors that contribute to harmful algal blooms (HABs) in Lake Erie, a new study has identified one as most important: the wind.

Over a 10-year period in Lake Erie, wind speed contributed more consistently to HABs than sunshine or even precipitation, researchers at The Ohio State University and their colleagues found.

The ongoing study is unusual, in that researchers are building the first detailed analyses of how the various environmental factors influence each other -- in the context of satellite studies of Lake Erie.

They gave their early results at the American Geophysical Union meeting on Dec. 17.

To C.K. Shum, Distinguished University Scholar and professor of geodetic science at Ohio State, the finding "underscores the need for environmental agencies to incorporate the threat of extreme weather events caused by climate change into future algae mitigation strategies."

Where other studies have linked weather phenomena to HABs, this study goes a step further to look at how environmental drivers impact each other, and "ranks" them by their relative importance in promoting HABs, said Song Liang, formerly of Ohio State and now an associate professor of environmental and global health at the University of Florida.

"What surprised us the most was how the impact of nonweather factors, such as nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, varied strongly by season, while weather factors remained consistently important throughout the year," he said.

Researchers have long known that high nitrogen and phosphorus levels are the actual causes of HABs, which choke freshwater ecosystems and render the water toxic. But when it comes to the various environmental factors that can amplify the amount of these nutrients in the water, or aid or hamper the spread of algae, the relationships are much more complex.

"One of the objectives of this project is investigating historical patterns of harmful algal blooms and their linkage to water quality and environmental factors," explained project leader Jiyoung Lee, associate professor of environmental health sciences at Ohio State. "By doing this, we can better understand and predict the future of HABs and water safety in the Lake Erie community with the impact of changing climate and environmental factors."

Liang and his group analyzed nine environmental factors, including solar radiation, wind speed, precipitation, nitrogen concentration, water temperature and water quality in Lake Erie from 2002 to 2012. Then the larger research team used data from the sensor onboard the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite MEdium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) to examine how the color of the lake water changed during those years -- an indication of the concentration of the toxic blue-green algae present in HABs.

The researchers examined the environmental drivers by season, and found that wind speed affected the spread of algal blooms consistently throughout spring, summer and fall. Seasons of low winds led to larger blooms. That's because when wind speed is low, lake water is more still, and algae can more easily float to the top and form thick mats that spread along the lake surface.

Sunlight, meanwhile, was important in the spring and summer as a source of energy for the algae. Precipitation was very important in the summer and the winter, when rains and melting snow boosted runoff and delivered nitrogen and phosphorus, which algae use as food sources, to the lake.

As the project continues, the researchers hope to get a better understanding of how the variables relate to each other, and explore the notion of weather and climate as factors in a kind of "early warning system" for HABs.

View the original article here

New airborne Gps navigation technology for climate conditions takes flight

Gps navigation technologies have broadly advanced science and society's capability to pinpoint precise information, from driving directions to monitoring ground motions throughout earthquakes. A brand new technique brought with a investigator at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC North Park stands to enhance weather models and hurricane predicting by discovering precise conditions within the atmosphere via a new Gps navigation system aboard planes.

The very first illustration showing the strategy, detailed within the journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), is pushing the project's leaders toward an objective of broadly applying we've got the technology soon on commercial aircraft.

Current measurement systems which use Gps navigation satellite signals like a source to probe the climate depend on Gps navigation devices which are fixed to ground and should not measure within the sea, or they depend on Gps navigation devices which are also on satellites which are costly to produce and just from time to time measure in regions near storms. The brand new system, brought by Scripps Institution of Oceanography geophysicist Jennifer Haase and her co-workers, captures detailed meteorological blood pressure measurements at different elevations at specific regions of interest, for example within the Atlantic Sea in regions where severe weather might develop.

"This area campaign shown the opportunity of creating a completely new operational atmospheric watching system for precise moisture profiling from commercial aircraft," stated Haase, an connect investigator using the Cecil H. and Ida M. Eco-friendly Institute of Physics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) at Scripps. "Getting dense, more information concerning the vertical moisture distribution near to the storms is a vital advancement, if you put these details right into a weather model it'll really have an effect and enhance the forecast."

"They are exciting results, especially because of the complications involved with working from an plane," states Eric DeWeaver, program director within the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the study. "Satellite-based dimensions are actually regularly employed for weather predicting and also have a large impact, but planes will go beyond satellites for making findings which are specific exactly where you would like them.Inch

The GRL paper particulars a 2010 flight campaign aboard NSF aircraft and subsequent data analysis that shown the very first time that atmospheric information might be taken by an airborne Gps navigation device. The instrumentation, that the researchers labeled "GISMOS" (GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System] Instrument System for Multistatic and Occultation Realizing), elevated the amount of atmospheric profiles for staring at the evolution of tropical storms by greater than 50 %.

"We are searching at just how moisture evolves then when we have seen tropical waves moving over the Atlantic, we are able to find out more about which goes becoming a hurricane," stated Haase. "So having the ability to take a look at what goes on during these occasions in the initial phases can give us considerably longer lead here we are at hurricane alerts."

"This really is another situation where the employment of Gps navigation can enhance the forecast and for that reason save lives," stated Richard Anthes, leader emeritus from the College Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which presently runs the satellite based Gps navigation dimensions system known as COSMIC (Constellation Watching System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate).

As the current GISMOS design occupies a refrigerator's price of space, Haase and her co-workers will work to miniaturize we've got the technology to shoe box size. After that, the machine can more possibly fit onto commercial aircraft, with 100s of daily plane tickets along with a potential ton of recent atmospheric data to greatly improve hurricane predicting and weather models.

We've got the technology also could improve interpretation of lengthy-term climate models by evolving scientists' knowledge of factors like the moisture problems that are favorable for hurricane development.

Paytsar Muradyan, who lately received a Ph.D. from Purdue College in atmospheric sciences, began dealing with Haase in 2007 like a graduate student throughout the formative stages of GISMOS's design and development. She eventually travelled using the group within the 2010 campaign and required away an abundance of experience in the demands from the project.

"It had been lots of responsibility and surely rewarding to utilize several world-known researchers within an interdisciplinary project," stated Muradyan.

View the original article here

Harsh climate conditions increase price of food

A lot of your preferred items in the supermarket are likely to are more expensive, based on Glynn Tonsor, connect professor of farming financial aspects at Kansas Condition College.

"When customers walk within the supermarket, they will need to still juggle the things they place in individuals baskets," Tonsor stated.

Several products will definitely cost more this season, including beef, pork, veggies and nuts. The majority of the rise in cost is due to extreme drought facing several states.

"Many people recognize weather includes a large submit food production," Tonsor stated. "What they may not recognize may be the actual location of food production round the country and for that reason how weather across the nation impacts the meals prices they see."

California, referred to because the salad bowl from the U . s . States, produces greater than 90 % of choose veggies and nut items. However, the condition is facing extreme drought conditions. Which means less of those items can be found. Tonsor states the limited supply will raise the cost from the items between five to twenty percent.

Drought can also be going for a toll on beef. The drought in Oklahoma, combined using the already in the past low quantity of cattle within the U . s . States, will hike in the cost for beef.

"It's not only a weather story," Tonsor stated. "Another factor that's getting spoken a great deal about this will go to the meat counter is animal health problems, especially in the pork industry.

These animal health problems don't affect human health, however they do decrease the quantity of pork available. That may modify the prices in the supermarket by summer time, Tonsor stated.

View the original article here

Picture of methods our weather conditions are impacted by green house gases is really a 'cloudy' one

The warming aftereffect of human-caused green house gases is really a given, but as to the extent are we able to predict its future influence? That's an problem which science is making progress, however the solutions continue to be not even close to exact, say scientists in the Hebrew College of Jerusalem, the united states and Australia who've analyzed the problem and whose work that has just made an appearance within the journal Science.

Indeed, you could state that the image is really a "cloudy" one, because the resolution of the green house gas effect involves multifaceted interactions with cloud cover.

To some degree, aerosols -- contaminants that float in mid-air triggered by dust or pollution, including green house gases -- combat area of the doing harm to results of climate warming by growing the quantity of sunlight reflected from clouds back to space. However, the ways that these aerosols affect climate through their interaction with clouds are complex and incompletely taken by climate models, the scientists. Consequently, the radiative forcing (that's, the disturbance to Earth's "energy budget" in the sun) triggered by human activities is extremely uncertain, which makes it hard to predict the extent of climatic change.

Even though advances have brought to some more detailed knowledge of aerosol-cloud interactions as well as their effects on climate, further progress is hampered by limited observational abilities and coarse climate models, states Prof. Daniel Rosenfeld from the Fredy and Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences in the Hebrew College of Jerusalem, author of this article in Science. Rosenfeld authored this short article in cooperation with Dr. Steven Sherwood from the College of Nsw, Sydney, Dr. Robert Wood from the College of Washington, Dallas, and Dr. Leo Donner of america National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. .

Their recent reports have revealed an infinitely more complicated picture of aerosol-cloud interactions than considered formerly. With respect to the meteorological conditions, aerosols might have dramatic results of either growing or lowering the cloud sun-deflecting effect, the scientists say. In addition, little is famous concerning the unperturbed aerosol level that been around within the preindustrial era. This reference level is essential for calculating the radiative forcing from aerosols.

Also requiring further clarification may be the response from the cloud cover and organization to losing water by rain fall. Knowledge of the development of ice and it is interactions with liquid tiny droplets is much more limited, mainly because of poor capability to appraise the ice-nucleating activity of aerosols and also the subsequent ice-developing processes in clouds.

Explicit computer simulations of those processes even in the scale of a complete cloud or multi-cloud system, not to mention those of the earth, require 100s of hrs around the most effective computer systems available. Therefore, a sufficiently accurate simulation of those processes in a global scale continues to be not practical.

Lately, however, scientists have had the ability to create groundbreaking simulations by which models were developed showing simplified schemes of cloud-aerosol interactions, This method offers the opportunity of model runs that resolve clouds on the global scale for time scales as much as many years, but climate simulations on the scale of the century continue to be not achievable. The model can also be too coarse to solve most of the fundamental aerosol-cloud processes in the scales which they really occur. Enhanced observational exams are required for validating the outcomes of simulations and making certain that modeling developments are on course, the scientists.

Even though it is unfortunate that further progress on understanding aerosol-cloud interactions as well as their effects on weather conditions are restricted to insufficient observational tools and models, experienceing this needed improvement in findings and simulations is at technological achieve, the scientists stress, so long as the financial assets are invested. The amount of effort, they are saying, should match the socioeconomic need for exactly what the results could provide: lower uncertainty in calculating human-made climate forcing and understanding and forecasts of future impacts of aerosols on the climate and weather.

View the original article here

Current Weather Conditions Across The 48 Contiguous United States

View the original article here