Citizen science: trawl World War I navy records for weather data

From Wired

A new crowdsourced science project called Old Weather lets you look through handwritten ship captains’ logs from the early 20th century and help build better climate models at the same time.

The project, which is led by Oxford University and the UK Met Office, was launched Oct. 12 by the Zooniverse, the citizen-science powerhouse behind Galaxy Zoo and Moon Zoo.
Until now, most Zooniverse projects have relied on using human eyes to pick out shapes and recognize features of astronomical objects, something computers are notoriously terrible at.

Old Weather puts those sharp recognition skills to work on handwriting.
The writing in these logs ranges from scribe-quality copperplate to slapdash and scruffy, and computers make too many errors to be useful for transcribing them.
But human eyes and brains are good at interpreting written words, especially as the reader starts to recognize the style of writing and the words the ship captains used.

The data collected from the logbooks will be used by scientists, geographers, historians and the public.
Climate scientists can feed hundreds of individual observations of the weather, temperature and air pressure into atmosphere models to build weather maps of the entire globe.
Data on the ocean, which is a good store of heat, can provide information on what was happening on land as well.

“We need to collect as much historical data as we can over the oceans,” said Clive Wilkinson, coordinator of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, in a how-to video on Old Weather.
“If we wish to understand what the weather will do in the future, then we need to understand what the weather was doing in the past.”

Links :

• BBCNews : WWI ships to chart past climate
  

The rise of British sea power

Investment in offshore renewable technologies is making the prospect of the UK
becoming a net exporter of energy a real possibility
(Pelamis Wave Energy Converter generating electricity into the Portuguese grid off the coast of Aguçadoura, Portugal)

From TheGuardian

Speaking in his first address to the House of Commons as energy and climate change secretary, Chris Huhne outlined the full scale of the government's renewable energy ambitions.
"In due course," he said, "we may once again be a net energy exporter, as we were during the peak of oil and gas in the North Sea."

The ambitious goal is more credible than it sounds, with energy industry experts convinced offshore wind farms and marine energy parks could produce more power than the UK needs.
Citing recent research from the government and the industry-backed Offshore Valuation Group, Huhne argued it was possible to re-establish the UK as a net producer of energy, as it was between 1994 and 2004 – only this time using clean and sustainable sources of energy.

The study found that harnessing just over 75% of the available offshore energy resource would produce enough renewable power for the UK to power its own economy and export excess electricity to northern Europe.
"We have a resource that's larger than we can use in the UK and to accrue value from that resource we have to export energy," explains the report's lead author Tim Helweg-Larsen.
"We need a switch in mentality to realise this offshore energy is as valuable to the rest of Europe as it is to the UK."

Plans for a 'supergrid'

There are encouraging signs that both the energy industry and the government are beginning to understand the importance of linking Britain's planned offshore energy parks with the continent.
Last year, the UK joined with eight other countries to form the North Seas Countries' Offshore Grid Initiative – a new group dedicated to developing an international "supergrid" allowing countries across northern Europe to import and export renewable electricity.
Meanwhile, Huhne recently announced plans for a new offshore planning regime designed to "help speed up the connection of new generation to the grid", while industry insiders are confident a £60m plan to upgrade the North Sea ports that will support offshore wind farms will survive the imminent spending cuts.

The Carbon Trust is also overseeing a major research project to identify new turbine foundation technologies that promise to slash installation costs.
"Bringing down the cost of offshore energy is the cornerstone that is needed if we are to become a net exporter of energy," argues Phil de Villiers, head of the Carbon Trust's Offshore Accelerator Programme.
"We estimate that with the right R&D we can reduce the cost of offshore wind farms by 40% by 2020."

All this activity has attracted engineering firms looking to cash in on the second North Sea energy boom.
In a remarkable turnaround for a British wind energy sector that only last summer was mourning the closure of Britain's only large turbine manufacturing plant, the past few months have seen General Electric, Siemens, Mitsubishi Electric and US wind turbine developer Clipper Windpower all announce plans for new offshore wind turbine factories and R&D projects in the UK.

The appeal to investors is obvious, according to Peter Madigan, head of offshore energy at trade association RenewableUK.
"We have the most installed offshore capacity and the most ambitious plans for new capacity anywhere in the world," he says, adding that offshore wind farms are also less likely to face the planning objections that have routinely blocked onshore developments.
Moreover, the UK's oil and gas industry is providing offshore energy developers with a pool of engineers with experience working in marine environments.

Marine technologies

The burgeoning success of the offshore wind industry is also likely to have a knock-on effect on the embryonic marine energy sector.
Currently, wave and tidal generators are in the pilot phase with just 2MW of marine energy capacity installed in the UK – barely enough to power 2,000 homes.
However, earlier this year the Scottish government exceeded industry expectations by leasing waters off the coast of Orkney and in the Pentland Firth, which runs between northern Scotland and the islands of Orkney, to 10 projects that could add 1.2GW of capacity, a potential 600-fold increase.
At the other end of the country, off the Cornish coast, the £40m Wave Hub facility was successfully installed last month, providing developers with a state-of-the-art test site for new marine energy technologies.

For Helweg-Larsen, the combination of offshore wind and marine energy has the potential to transform both the British economy and the wider European energy landscape.
"The attraction of going offshore for energy is that we have this vast space and very strong winds," he observes.
"It is a massive challenge to tap that resource, but it is a challenge for politicians and industry because it is technically feasible."

Links :

• YouTube : Wave power, how it works
• RenewableEnergyWorld : Catching waves
  
• Global wave market research (2009)

Kitesurfer breaks 100 kph speed sailing mark

French kitesurfer Alex Caizergues has become the first person to break the 100 kmh speed sailing mark, setting a new world record at an event in Namibia, organisers said on Wednesday.

Caizergues clocked an average speed of 54.1 knots (100.2 kmh) during his first run Tuesday at the 500m Luderitz Speed Challenge, an annual speed sailing event held on a windy lagoon off Namibia's Atlantic coast, organisers said on the event's web site.

'I am extremely happy about this world record,' Caizergues told AFP.
'It is my second record for speed sailing. I have two other records in kiteboarding and all four of them I broke in Namibia,' he said from Luderitz, a small harbour town some 750km south-west of the capital Windhoek. (Location in the Marine GeoGarage)

Organisers said the record has been officially recognised by the World Sailing Speed Record Council (WSSRC). The WSSRC awards records based on average speeds clocked over a 500m course.

Caizergues, 31, broke the previous record of 51.36 knots (95.1 kmh) held by fellow Frenchman Alain Thebault, who set the record last year using a hydroptere, an experimental multi-hull sailing craft that Thebault designed especially for speed (see GeoGarage blog).

This record also checks off the 60-mile and 100-kph mark, which have been coveted, and it raises the bar considerably for speed sailing programs that develop "real boats" like l'Hydroptere, Sail Rocket, SpeedDream etc.

Second-fastest was Sebastien Cattelan at 52.33 knots, who was the first person breaking the elusive 50 knots mark - the holy gral of speedsailing in 2008.

Five other national records were broken, including the US record by Rob Douglas, who pushed his own personal best to an average speed of 51.88 kts. measured over the 500-meter distance.

More records are expected as more big breeze is forecast for Luderitz on Friday and all through October.

Whale poo: the ocean's miracle grow

Whales play an important role in fertilizing the ocean, by carrying nutrients from the deeper water toward the surface, where they defecate.

Meanwhile, fish and zooplankton excrete nutrients in a way that pushes them deeper into the water.

From LiveScience

While many mammals produce excrement in clumps, whale poop is more of a slurry.
"Very liquidy, a flocculent plume," says whale expert Joe Roman at the University of Vermont.
Flocculence is a state of fluffiness, akin to a tuft of wool.

Whale poop doesn't sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Rather the fluffy plume floats at the surface.
And in a new study, Roman and colleague James McCarthy at Harvard University found this phenomenon explains an important way for ocean ecosystems are fertilized.

Smaller organisms, like microbes, plankton and fish, are typically thought of as the stars of the cycling of nutrients through ocean food chains.
However, marine mammals, as big as many of them are, have often been overlooked as players here, according to the researchers.

Whales, by virtue of their nutrient-rich feces, play an important role in transporting nutrients from where they feed, in deep waters, up to the surface, where they often do their business and fertilize tiny, floating plants called phytoplankton, the researchers explain.

"We think whales form a really important direct influence on the production of plants at the base of this food web," McCarthy said.

As part of the research, the team analyzed 16 fecal samples from humpback whales in the Gulf of Maine during two whale-tagging cruises, finding nitrogen concentrations in the humpback whale samples was elevated by as much as two orders of magnitude above typical in this area.
They also incubated the samples, with their constituent microbes and phytoplankton.
Results showed a strong link between the production rate of a form of nitrogen used by microbes and phytoplankton, and whale-poop nitrogen.

The presence of whales allows more phytoplankton to grow, pushing up the production of creatures that eat the phytoplankton, the researchers say of the findings.
The result: "bigger fisheries and higher abundances throughout regions where whales occur in high densities," Roman said.

In some parts of the ocean, nutrient pollution, such as agricultural runoff, over-fertilizes the water creating dead zones, as in the Gulf of Mexico.
However, many areas in the Northern Hemisphere lack sufficient nutrients, including the Gulf of Maine, where this study was conducted.
During the summer, productivity is limited there because of limited nitrogen, such that adding nitrogen to the waters, say, in the form of whale poop, should trigger phytoplankton growth.

The size of whale populations before they were decimated by whaling is not clear, although some genetic evidence indicates that about 10 percent of the original populations remain, according to Roman.

"Anyway you look at it, whales played a much bigger role in ecosystems in the past than they do now," Roman said.

In light of this finding, calls to loosen international restrictions on whaling are ill-conceived, they said.

Links :

• University of Vermont : whale poop pumps up ocean health
• work was published Oct. 11 in the open-access-journal PLoS ONE.

Horizon : the death of the oceans

BBC parts : I / II / III / IV

Sir David Attenborough reveals in this BBC documentary the findings of one of the most ambitious scientific studies of our time - an investigation into what is happening to our oceans. He looks at whether it is too late to save their remarkable biodiversity.

Horizon travels from the cold waters of the North Atlantic to the tropical waters of the Great Barrier Reef to meet the scientists who are transforming our understanding of this unique habitat.
Attenborough explores some of the ways in which we are affecting marine life - from over-fishing to the acidification of sea water.

The film also uncovers the disturbing story of how shipping noise is deafening whales and dolphins, affecting their survival in the future.

Links : Horizon, the death of the oceans? reviews

• TheArtDesk
  
• TheGuardian
• TheIndependant