Watching Earth's winds, on a shoestring

A Portrait of Global Winds
High-resolution global atmospheric modeling provides a unique tool to study the role of weather within Earth’s climate system.

NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Model (GEOS-5) is capable of simulating worldwide weather at resolutions as fine as 3.5 kilometers.
This visualization shows global winds from a GEOS-5 simulation using 10-kilometer resolution.

Surface winds (0 to 40 meters/second) are shown in white and trace features including Atlantic and Pacific cyclones.

Upper-level winds (250 hectopascals) are colored by speed (0 to 175 meters/second), with red indicating faster.
This simulation ran on the Discover supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation.

The complete 2-year “Nature Run” simulation—a computer model representation of Earth's atmosphere from basic inputs including observed sea-surface temperatures

 and surface emissions from biomass burning, volcanoes and anthropogenic sources—produces its own unique weather patterns including precipitation, aerosols and hurricanes.

A follow-on Nature Run is simulating Earth’s atmosphere at 7 kilometers for 2 years and 3.5 kilometers for 3 months.
Image Credit: William Putman/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

( video )

From NASA

Built with spare parts and without a moment to spare, the International Space Station (ISS)-RapidScat isn't your average NASA Earth science mission.

Short for Rapid Scatterometer, ISS-RapidScat will monitor ocean winds from the vantage point of the space station .
It will join a handful of other satellite scatterometer missions that make essential measurements used to support weather and marine forecasting, including the tracking of storms and hurricanes.
It will also help improve our understanding of how interactions between Earth's ocean and atmosphere influence our climate.

Scientists study ocean winds for a variety of reasons.
Winds over the ocean are an important part of weather systems, and in severe storms such as hurricanes they can inflict major damage.
Ocean storms drive coastal surges, which are a significant hazard for populations.
At the same time, by driving warm surface ocean water away from the coast, ocean winds cause nutrient-rich deep water to well up, providing a major source of food for coastal fisheries.
Changes in ocean wind also help us monitor large-scale changes in Earth's climate, such as El Niño .

Scatterometers work by safely bouncing low-energy microwaves - the same kind used at high energy to warm up food in your kitchen - off the surface of Earth.
In this case, the surface is not land, but the ocean.
By measuring the strength and direction of the microwave echo, ISS-RapidScat will be able to determine how fast, and in what direction, ocean winds are blowing.

"Microwave energy emitted by a radar instrument is reflected back to the radar more strongly when the surface it illuminates is rougher," explains Ernesto Rodríguez, principal investigator for ISS-RapidScat at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
"When wind blows over water, it causes waves to develop along the direction of wind. The stronger the wind, the larger the waves."

ISS-RapidScat continues a legacy of measuring ocean winds from space that began in 1978 with the launch of NASA's SeaSat satellite. Most recently, NASA's QuikScat scatterometer, which launched in 1999, gave us a dynamic picture of the world's ocean winds.

But when QuikScat lost its ability to produce ocean wind measurements in 2009, science suffered from the loss of the data.
In the summer of 2012, an opportunity arose to fly a scatterometer instrument on the space station. ISS-RapidScat was the result .

Most scatterometer-carrying satellites fly in what's called a sun-synchronous orbit around Earth. In other words, they cross Earth's equator at the same local time every orbit.
The space station, however, will carry the ISS-RapidScat in a non-sun-synchronous orbit.
This means the instrument will see different parts of the planet at different times of day, making measurements in the same spot within less than an hour before or after another instrument makes its own observations.
These all-hour measurements will allow ISS-RapidScat to pick up the effects of the sun on ocean winds as the day progresses.
In addition, the space station's coverage over the tropics means that ISS-RapidScat will offer extra tracking of storms that may develop into hurricanes or other tropical cyclones.

Artist's rendering of NASA's ISS-RapidScat instrument (inset), which will launch to the International Space Station in 2014 to measure ocean surface wind speed and direction and help improve weather forecasts, including hurricane monitoring.

It will be installed on the end of the station's Columbus laboratory.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Johnson Space Center.

Anywhere the wind blows

"We'll be able to see how wind speed changes with the time of day," said Rodríguez. "ISS-RapidScat will link together all previous and current scatterometer missions, providing us with a more complete picture of how ocean winds change. Combined with data from the European ASCAT scatterometer mission, we'll be able to observe 90 percent of Earth's surface at least once a day, and in many places, several times a day."

ISS-RapidScat's near-global coverage of Earth's ocean -- within the space station's orbit inclination of 51.6 degrees north and south of the equator -- will make it an important tool for scientists who observe and predict Earth's weather.
"Frequent observations of the winds over the ocean are used by meteorologists to improve weather and hurricane forecasts and by the operational weather communities to improve numerical weather models," said Rodríguez.

Space-based scatterometer instruments have been built before, but much of what makes ISS-RapidScat unusual is how it came to be. "Space Station Program Manager Michael Suffredini offered us a mounting location on the space station and a free ride on a SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply mission launching in early 2014," explained Howard Eisen, the ISS-RapidScat project manager at JPL. "So we had about 18 months to put together an entire mission."

This accelerated timeline is a blink of an eye at NASA, where the typical project is years or decades in the making.

NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Free ride

Next, Eisen and his team turned to getting creative and crafty with the mission's hardware. In lieu of using newly-designed instruments, which would be expensive and take too long to develop, ISS-RapidScat reuses leftover hardware originally built to test parts of the QuikScat mission.
That process involved dusting off and testing pieces of equipment that hadn't seen the light of day since the 1990s. Fortunately the old hardware seems ship-shape and ready to go.
"Even though they were spares, they've done an excellent job so far," said Simon Collins,ISS-RapidScat's instrument manager at JPL.
Despite their age, the old parts are more than capable of collecting the ocean wind data that ISS-RapidScat need to be a success.

In addition to old spare parts, some new hardware was needed to interface this instrument to the space station and the Dragon spacecraft. ISS-RapidScat will use off-the-shelf, commercially-available computer hardware instead of the expensive, hardened-against-radiation computer chips that are typically used in space missions.
"If there's an error or something because of radiation, all we have to do is reset the computer. It's what we call a managed risk," said Eisen.
The radiation environment on the space station is much less severe than that experienced en route to Mars, for example, or in more traditional sun-synchronous orbits.

This animations is a collection of beauty shots of cloud model output over Africa, Europe, Australia, North America, Florida, South America and Antarctica.

The clouds are derived from the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5). GEOS-5 is a system of models integrated using the Earth System Modeling Framework and used to help refine atmospheric weather models.
The lighting of this scene is completely artistic and not scientifically accurate.

If accurate lighting were used the diurnal effect would pulse across the globe approximately every 90 frames (3 seconds when played at 30 fps).

The slow strobing would have been undesireable for the intended purpose of this animation, which is to highlight the cloud model output.
credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

Science bounty

Cost-saving decisions like this are shaping up to make ISS-RapidScat an exceptional bargain of a space mission.
"We're doing things differently, and we're trying to do them quickly and cheaply," said Eisen.
Considering that the typical launch alone can cost $200 million, ISS-RapidScat's estimated $26 million price tag seems like a bargain.
Last year, NASA estimated the cost of a new, free-flying scatterometer satellite mission at approximately $400 million.

The real challenges of getting ISS-RapidScat into space lie in the details.
One of the major headaches of such a hurried schedule has been getting the special connectors that will allow ISS-RapidScat to physically attach to the International Space Station.
"They're special robotically-mated connectors that haven't been made in years," Eisen said.
"We're having to convince the company that produces these connectors to make us a small run in time for the mission, and it hasn't been easy."

The logistics of operating an instrument on the space station are also tricky.
"Typically, spacecraft are designed for the instruments they carry," said Collins.
"In this case, it's the other way around."
For example, ISS-RapidScat's docking point on the space station faces outward toward space - not down toward Earth and the ocean that the instrument is looking at.
The space station's flying angle will also change as new pieces are added to it, in response to changes in the station's drag profile.
ISS-RapidScat's mount can compensate for both of these challenges.

 

The Jet Stream

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

Another concern the ISS-RapidScat team confronted early on was that one of the space station's docking ports lies squarely within the field of view of the scatterometer.
"Bombarding astronauts and visiting supply vehicles with microwave radiation from the instruments was out of the question, and turning the instrument off when there were things docked there would take away too much science," explained Collins.
The project's engineers instead devised a plan where the instrument avoids irradiating docking vessels, but continues to scan across the vast majority of its viewing range.

Rodríguez is confident that the reward for overcoming such difficulties will be a bounty of vital science information.
"Because it uses much of the same hardware QuikScat did, ISS-RapidScat will allow us to continue the observations of ocean winds already started," said Rodriguez.
"Extending this data record will help us observe and understand weather patterns and improve our preparedness for tropical cyclones."

Links :

• NASA : Re-creating Earth's Oceans Inside a Supercomputer
• GeoGarage blog : Tracking a super storm / Perpetual ocean : currents looks like a living Van Gogh painting
• FairFax Climate : The Rise and Fall of the Westerlies
  

The longest straight line you can sail on Earth ?

The longest straight line only touching water ?

Note : the line does not appear straight on this image due to the Plate Carrée 2D projection. 
see Great Circle demo
 - map from gcmap -

source : wikipedia
From the south coast of Balochistan province somewhere near Port of Karachi, Pakistan (25°25′N 66°25′E) across the Arabian Sea, south-west through Indian Ocean, near Comoros, passing Namaete Canyon, near the South Africa coastline, across the South Atlantic Ocean, then west across Cape Horn, then north-west across the Pacific Ocean, near Easter Island, passing the antipodal point, near Amlia island, through the South Bering Sea and ending somewhere on the east-north coast of Kamchatka, near Ossora (59°38′N 163°24′E).
This route is almost 32,000 km (20,000 mi) long.

Actually, the video shows the best representation of “the way things are”:

kml file for use with Google Earth (17302 Nm / 32043 km)
GE “ruler” tool allowing you to calculate “straight line” distances over the globe

from Kamchatka Peninsula in Eastern Russia (south of the end of the Aleutian Islands archipelago)

to a point near to Graham’s Land (the long finger-like peninsula on Antarctica that points toward the Falkland Islands),

then directly between Madagascar and the African continent for ending in Pakistan

The longest straight line only touching water ? Really ?

Who would have guessed you could sail in a straight line from the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia to Pakistan ?
Actually not really because the straight line crosses over the Aldabra islands in the Indian Ocean...

 Aldabra atoll

 crossing line about 15 km inside the Alabra atoll in the North,
but only 7 km outside Anjouan island (Comoros) in the South

Note : by the way, if you tried to sail it you’d probably be sunk by drifting icebergs in the Southern latitudes, but that’s beside the point.

Southernmost passage (latitude : about 61°30' S)

True facts about sea life

True Facts About The CuttleFish

True Facts About The Mantis Shrimp

True Facts About The Sea Pig

True Facts About The Seahorse

True Facts About The Angler Fish

English seas get new marine conservation zones

JNCC interactive map

From BBC

The English government has announced it will create 27 new marine conservation zones (MCZs) to protect wildlife in the seas around the English coast.

The MCZs will help seahorses, coral reefs and oyster beds to remain safe from dredging and bottom-trawling.
The Marine Conservation Society welcomed the "significant milestone".
But it warned there were still fewer than a quarter of the number of MCZs recommended by scientists to complete an "ecologically coherent" network.

UKSeaMap 2010 interactive map : predicted habitat

'Better protected'

Last December a two-year £8m consultation involving the government's own science advisers recommended the creation of 127 MCZs to halt the rapid decline of fish, lobsters, oysters and seahorses.
But earlier this year, ministers announced plans to construct just 31 zones aimed at protecting life on the ocean floor.

At the time, campaigners described the plan as "pitiful" and a "bitter disappointment" - but the then environment minister Richard Benyon insisted that the scientific evidence for a large proportion of the zones was "just not up to scratch".
He said another £3.5m was being spent on gathering more evidence that could support more zones being designated in future.

Announcing the 27 new zones, marine environment minister George Eustice said the department was doing "more than ever" to protect England's marine environment and almost a quarter of English inshore waters and 9% of UK waters would be "better protected".
He said that the new MCZs - which would join over 500 marine protected areas that already exist - would cover an area roughly three times the size of Wiltshire and would span the waters around the English coast.
The scheme would ensure areas such as Chesil Beach and the Skerries Banks are safeguarded.
The minister said that the number of new sites had been reduced from 31 to 27 because two of the sites - at Stour and Orwell and Hilbre Island - were too costly,
A final decision on the two remaining sites - at Hythe Bay and North of Celtic Deep - will be made in the next phase of the project.

The areas within which are the new MCZs are:

Inshore sites:

• Blackwater, Crouch, Roach and Colne Estuaries, Essex;
• Aln Estuary, Northumberland;
• Beachy Head West, East Sussex;
• Chesil Beach and Stennis Ledges, Dorset;
• Cumbria Coast;
• Folkestone Pomerania, Kent;
• Fylde, Lancashire;
• Isles of Scilly;
• Kingmere, Sussex;
• Lundy;
• The Manacles, Cornwall;
• Medway Estuary, Kent;
• Padstow Bay and Surrounds, Cornwall;
• Pagham Harbour, Sussex;
• Poole Rocks, Dorset;
• Skerries Bank and Surrounds, Devon;
• South Dorset;
• Tamar Estuary, Devon/Cornwall;
• Thanet Coast, Kent;
• Torbay, Devon;
• Upper Fowey and Pont Pill, Cornwall;
• Whitsand and Looe Bay, Cornwall

Offshore sites:

• The Canyons, Cornwall;
• East of Haig Fras, Cornwall;
• North East of Farnes Deep, Northumberland;
• South-West Deeps (West), Cornwall;
• Swallow Sand, Northumberland

Mr Eustice also announced plans to designate two more phases of MCZs over the next three years, with a consultation on the next phase expected to be launched in early 2015.
"This is just the beginning," he said.

'Threatened sea bed'

Melissa Moore, senior policy officer at the Marine Conservation Society, said that the organisation broadly welcomed the new proposals.
"This announcement is a significant milestone for marine conservation", she said.
But she added: "We urge government to bring forward designation of future tranches to prevent many threatened seabed habitats being further damaged - these 27 sites represent less than a quarter of the number recommended by scientists to complete an 'ecologically coherent' network."

She also pointed to the need to "police" potentially damaging activities.
"The MCZs will be multi-use, so low-impact fishing such as potting will be permitted in most sites," she said.
"It is vital that within these sites there is a clear notion of what can and can't happen, and who is responsible for policing those activities, otherwise we're just creating paper parks."
Defra said it had received around 40,000 responses to their consultation to 31 March 2013, which asked for feedback on the proposals via their website.

Links :

• The Guardian : England names 27 new marine conservation zones
• Fish fight : a new network o MCZ around the UK can safeguard our seas
• Blue and Green tomorrow : Marine conservation could be worth ‘billions’ to UK economy
• Fugro : Fugro completes 2 year nautical charting survey for Maritime and Coastguard Agency

'Un-mappable' Great Barrier Reef finally mapped in 3D

From EOMap

German and Australian scientists launched a set of groundbreaking, high resolution, shallow water topography maps for the entire Great Barrier Reef.

These world-first digital maps of the coral reefs, using satellite derived depth (bathymetry) techniques, are a critical step towards identifying, managing and essentially preserving and protecting what lies within the waters of this global icon.

Project partner, Dr Robin Beaman of James Cook University, says the product is different to anything else available, as until this product, nearly half of the shallow water reef area on the Great Barrier Reef had not been mapped using modern digital surveys.
Dr Robin Beaman says the data provides a complete picture of the world's largest coral reef ecosystem.
"It's like a terrain map," he said.
"Google Earth is a good example, but in the ocean it's much harder to do.
"We use satellite images to look into the sea floor to about a 30-metre depth.
"Digital data is what's really critical in this day and age."
Dr Beaman says the data could provide policy makers and researchers with vital information needed to combat threats to the reef.
This includes measuring the impact of rising sea levels and helping to measure water quality and ocean currents.

A major study released in October 2012 found coral cover had been halved since the mid-1980s due to cyclones, bleaching and the crown of thorns starfish.

While these coral reefs are the most ecologically significant, they are also the most difficult to map due to being either too remote or because of their shallow nature, which makes them navigationally dangerous.

Instead of relying on traditional surveying vessels or aircraft to map the many 'un-mappable' areas of the reef, Germany-based aquatic remote-sensing company EOMAP used space-borne satellites to overcome these hurdles.

The result is the largest project of its kind ever conducted in Australia, and possibly the entire world. The 3D water depth maps have a 30m horizontal resolution over approximately 350,000 km2 of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and Torres Strait, providing not only more detailed individual reef data, but also a complete picture of Earth's largest coral reef ecosystem.

"This information is regarded as essential for any government or company involved with managing the reef environment," states Professor Stuart Phinn, University of Queensland, another partner on the project.

The EOMAP product will aid the 'big picture' assessments of the Great Barrier Reef including water quality modeling, measuring responses to both man-made and natural impacts, such as sediment transportation and tropical cyclones, and helping to predict the likely impacts of climate change effects, such as sea level rise and increased tropical cyclone frequency.

It will also help target priority areas for more detailed data collection, for example with the vast improvements this promises to ocean current modeling, scientists can model crown of thorn starfish larval trajectories to where they are next likely to inhabit the Great Barrier Reef.

"There is often a disconnect between research and industry, where researchers generally look at changes on individual reefs and habitats," comments Dr Nathan Quadros from the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, also a partner on the project.

"But industry want the overall picture of the reef -- this product brings the two together."

All of the mapped areas, no matter how small, are available for purchase by anyone via the EOMAP website.

A coarser product (500m spatial resolution) is also available, free of charge, together with sample data of the high resolution products.
Looking ahead, EOMAP has already demonstrated the viability of the next generation product: a 2m resolution version using DigitalGlobe's Worldview-2 satellite.

"Based on our trials, this promises to be an even more astounding product," says Dr Magnus Wettle, Senior Scientist at EOMAP.

"To be honest, I'd like to see the Australian Government partner with us on this, our next endeavor, so that it would belong to Australia as a national resource," he said.
"Having said that, our priority is to make it happen, so we have to be prepared to be pragmatic."

EOMAP last week received an award from Copernicus (the European Commission remote sensing peak body) for its work on making affordable aquatic remote sensing products for industry and the public sector.

GBR - Project 3DGBR:
High-resolution Bathymetry for the Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea (JCU)

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : 3-D maps reveal depths of sea floor
• Australian Geographic : Mapping Australia's sea floor