How Google Earth is busting Persian Gulf nations for overfishing

Caught in the act.
Large fish traps in the Persian Gulf could be catching up to six times more fish than what’s being officially reported,
according to the first investigation of fish catches from space conducted by University of British Columbia scientists.

Hasan Jamali/AOP

From Quartz

Weapons-grade uranium isn’t the only thing Iran may be hiding. 
The country does not report its fishing catch to the United Nations, which is problematic given that the Persian Gulf, like other areas of the world, suffers from overfishing. 
But thanks to Google Earth, scientists now know that Iran hauls in more than 12,000 tonnes a year from 728 weirs, large structures built in intertidal zones to trap fish.

In a first of its kind study, scientists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver used Google Earth images to calculate how much fish was actually caught by Persian Gulf nations compared to what they reported. 
The result: The official numbers are nothing but one big fish tale. 
Researchers Dalal Al-Abdulrazzak and Daniel Pauly estimated the fish catch in 2005, for instance, was 31,433 tonnes, six times what nations bordering the Persian Gulf reported. 
“Our results document the unreliability of catch data from the Persian Gulf, a small part of a global misreporting problem,” the authors write in the study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science. 

 Landings by fishing country in the waters of Iran

“Underreporting fish catches can jeopardize a country’s food security, economy, not to mention impact entire marine ecosystems,” Al-Abdulrazzak told Quartz in an email.
“This is particularly important in the case of the Persian Gulf, where fisheries are the second most important natural resource after oil.”

 A Persian Gulf weir.

It’s just the latest use of Google Earth satellite images to monitor environmental destruction, such as illegal logging in remote locations.
Similarly, the researchers say Google Earth can be used to detect illegal fishing and underreporting of fish catches.
To give some “ground truth” to the Persian Gulf’s fisheries take, Al-Abdulrazzak and Pauly studied Google Earth images from 2005 to 2010.
Unlike fishing boats, weirs are big structures—as long as 321 meters (1,053 feet)—that remain anchored in place and are easily detected by satellites.
The researchers spotted 1,656 weirs in 2005.
But after running an algorithm to correct for poor visibility, they estimated there were actually around 1,900 weirs.

Locations of Persian Gulf weirs.

The scientists used a Google ruler tool to measure the size of each weir’s traps and then calculated daily fish catch based on historical records, the length of the fishing season and composition of fish species, such as mackerel, crab, lobster and sardines, at each location.

Half the weirs belonged to Bahrain, giving that nation 54% of the Persian Gulf’s estimated catch. Bahrain’s actual catch was 142% higher than what it reported to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, according to the study. Iran accounted for 37% of weirs and 39% of the region’s fish catch.

At least one nation was more or less honest.
The researchers found that the estimated catch for Kuwait was within 300 tonness of what it reported to the UN. 

Links :

• Sea Around Us project

Master of the high seas: new Turner exhibition that gloriously evokes Britain's maritime past

The Power of Art - Turner (BBC Documentary)

From DailyMail ( by Andrew Marr)

The critics are right.
This is an astonishing show.
But it’s a show about Britain as well as about the painter.
It tells the story of a people surrounded by salt water, fishing, trading and fighting, and marked by their relationship with the sea as much as with the land.
Warm and safe in the gallery, the viewer huddles among huge storms and flinches at flying spray.
It’s quite an experience.

Turner’s greatest work was mostly done during the long and murderous struggle between Britain and Napoleonic France.
Showing these pictures at Greenwich, one of the Navy’s spiritual homes, in the first full-scale exhibition of the artist’s maritime work, means we look differently than we would at Tate Britain or the National Gallery.

But there’s a melancholy coincidence in the exhibition opening shortly after the announcement that naval shipbuilding would end at Portsmouth.
The curators could have called the exhibition: Requiem for an Island Nation.

The Battle of Trafalgar (1824): Turner's only royal commission, this huge canvas combines separate aspects of Britain's greatest naval victory

The exhibition 'Turner & the Sea' at the National Maritime Museum brings together 120 works of art by the great British painter

The very successes of Nelson’s navy, which the mature Turner celebrated, make it hard to imagine the political world in which the younger Turner began painting.
But the English coast had long been a place of danger, going far beyond bad weather.
It’s where the enemy was always just about to appear over the horizon.

At just the time when Turner was first becoming famous, invasion was seriously threatened by Napoleon, whose barges and ‘Armee d’Angleterre’ were marshalled on the Dutch and French coasts.
(Napoleon also contemplated invasion by balloon, but was put off by the fickle winds of the Channel.)

The threat was taken utterly seriously, and for good reason.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 had been as much an achievement of the weather as the small English Navy.

In the latter part of the century before Turner started painting — in 1667 — the Dutch had successfully penetrated the Thames estuary, destroying English warships and attacking the naval dockyard at Chatham in Kent.

Dutch soldiers had been landed successfully and the rich fled London in panic.
Shortly afterwards, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 began as a Dutch-led invasion of French, German and other continental troops, landed in Devon after the Royal Navy utterly failed to catch King William’s fleet.

The Shipwreck (1805): The young artist's mastery of drama at sea is evident - chaos, courage and crests of foaming waves

So Britain’s naval forces in Turner’s day were not simply a matter of nostalgic patriotic pride, they were the state-of-the-art and solitary bulwark against invasion and the destruction of the state itself.

Go down to the South Coast, and look out, as Turner did, and you might imagine French or Dutch invaders appearing out of the mist.
When he paints the cliffs and shorelines of England, he is painting the front line.

By the time Turner was painting his great nautical masterpieces for public display at the Royal Academy, however, the Royal Navy in its finest years, was turning the tide.
The first-rate men-of-war of Nelson’s Navy were awesome constructions, vast and complicated.

Turner often portrays them from the waterline up, like floating tower blocks, or airy castles.
He paints from perspectives that make you feel dizzy and over-awed; and that’s part of the point.
He took great pains to be accurate, going to the River Medway to draw warships close-up.

The rigging, the planking and every detail had to be right.
In the Navy-obsessed London of the early 1800s, mistakes would have been quickly spotted and ridiculed.

Keelmen Heaving In Coal by Moonlight (1835) : Has hard work ever been so romantic?

The Fighting Temeraire (1838): Showing the sunset of ghostly sail and the onset of brash steam

Although he was a painter of many moods and subjects — English landscape and townscape, as well as scenes in France, Switzerland and Italy — for Turner, Britain was her coastline.
There has never been a greater nautical or maritime painter, and there probably never will be.

This did mean, of course, charting the triumphs of the Navy. His only Royal commission, The Battle of Trafalgar, celebrating Nelson’s 1805 victory over the combined fleets of France and Spain, is the jaw- dropping, stand-out masterpiece of this exhibition.

Here, you can stand close to the vast picture, so that you almost feel as if you are drowning in the bloody water, as you look up at the enormous ships.
It’s an astonishing achievement.

There had been a long tradition of painting sea-battles of course, and the Dutch painters were the masters of it.
But here the land-locked viewer is drawn not simply into the spectacle, but into the terrifying, exhilarating experience of the fight.
This was the closest you could get in the early 19th century to an immersive, 3D wraparound sound experience.

And it still beats anything in the cinema hands down.

A woman views 10 plates from the 'Liber Studiorum' by J.M.W. Turner at the exhibition

The great age of the ‘wooden walls of England’ driven by sail didn’t last long, and Turner was still around to lament its ending in his most-loved painting of all, The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged To Her Last Berth To Be Broken Up, painted in 1838.

As an angry sun sets, the old warship, which had fought at Trafalgar, is dragged by a steam tug, representing the new age, to be broken to pieces.

The old ship has a personality — grand, dignified and solemn.
The tugboat has one, too — a bustling, busy little terrier.
Towards the end of his life, the steam age brought Turner new opportunities — the pumping black smoke used to accentuate the mayhem of a snowstorm at sea, for instance.
But he was a painter of the age of sail.

One of the revelations of this show, however, is how much Turner focused on maritime action that had nothing to do with war.
Right at the beginning of his career he is celebrating the bravery of fishermen.
Again and again, he fills the forefront of beach scenes with skate, cod and other fish.

Maelstrom: Turner's sketchbooks displaying a study of a shipwreck

Holding the exhibition at National Maritime Museum in Greenwich adds to the poignancy of Turner's work, writes Andrew Marr

From the whiting fishing at Margate to the hunt for whales, he gave the fishermen the same attention to detail that he gave the Tars.
For them, too, the great danger was the sea itself — unpredictable, dark and heaving with menace, laced with foam.

Using jagged diagonals which made me feel seasick on a bright Saturday morning, he emphasises the mercurial and slippery dangers of life on the water.
Just getting a passenger ‘packet’ from France to England seems a perilous business; and when a major ship goes down it’s the fishermen, in their tiny wooden boats, who are there to try to save the drowning.

For Turner, the sea is the place where the British work.
There’s a wonderful painting of colliers loading coal by moonlight at Newcastle.
Here it is contrasted with a relaxed, sunlit view of Venice, and the implication is clear: the British strive and struggle; effete foreigners loll about.
For the British, the sea means wealth, food — everything.

A portrait of J.M.W Turner by Charles Turner (1841)

Finally, by the last rooms of this show, the sea has become almost his only subject.
In watercolour, Turner was painting with lightning-fast whips and squiggles of colour; in his notebooks, it’s as if his subject and his material had become the same thing.

In his last great oils, very close to abstract painting (but not abstract), he is being as fluent and risk-taking as Monet was in his final years.
This show allows you to go right up close to iconic paintings such as Snow Storm — Steam-Boat Off A Harbour’s Mouth, which horrified the critics in 1842, one of whom branded it a mess of ‘soapsuds and whitewash’.
The often-told story of Turner having himself lashed to a mast so he could experience such a storm feels all too true. It’s a painting of nature at her most hysterical; the slatherings of paint flying in all directions — up, down, sideways — are the storm.
It’s dizzying. It’s nauseating, but in a good way.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, the son of a humble barber, was always a prickly, publicity-conscious and highly competitive painter.
He sold for big sums, relatively speaking, and attracted rich patrons.
But he never made things easy for himself, and year after year he challenged the public with unfamiliar and radical work, mostly about the sea.
We all have some salt in our blood, but his was saltier.

He ought to have died at sea in the middle of a storm, though, in fact, he expired at his mistress’s house in Chelsea, having apparently declared ‘the sun is God’.
During his lifetime, Turner perplexed and fascinated the public in equal measure, which was just what he liked.
He wanted to be talked about and he wanted to be seen, which is why he spent so much time working on prints which were sold everywhere in Britain.

Well, right now, he is being talked about and seen as never before.

Turner & The Sea is at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich until April 21, 2014.
See www.rmg.co.uk for details.

Acid test

The world’s seas are becoming more acidic.

How much that matters is not yet clear.

But it might matter a lot.

From The Economist

Humans, being a terrestrial species, are pleased to call their home “Earth”.
A more honest name might be “Sea”, as more than seven-tenths of the planet’s surface is covered with salt water.
Moreover, this water houses algae, bacteria (known as cyanobacteria) and plants that generate about half the oxygen in the atmosphere.
And it also provides seafood—at least 15% of the protein eaten by 60% of the planet’s human population, an industry worth $218 billion a year.
Its well-being is therefore of direct concern even to landlubbers.

That well-being, some fear, is under threat from the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a consequence of industrialisation.
This concern is separate from anything caused by the role of CO2 as a climate-changing greenhouse gas.
It is a result of the fact that CO2, when dissolved in water, creates an acid.

That matters, because many creatures which live in the ocean have shells or skeletons made of stuff that dissolves in acid.
The more acidic the sea, the harder they have to work to keep their shells and skeletons intact.
On the other hand, oceanic plants, cyanobacteria and algae, which use CO2 for photosynthesis, might rather like a world where more of that gas is dissolved in the water they live in—a gain, rather than a loss, to ocean productivity.

Two reports attempting to summarise the world’s rather patchy knowledge about what is going on have recently been published.
Both are the products of meetings held last year (the wheels grind slowly in environmental bureaucracy).
One, in Monterey, California, looked at the science.
The other, in Monaco, looked at possible economic consequences.
Together, the documents suggest this is an issue that needs to be taken seriously, though worryingly little is known about it.

Omega point

Regular, direct measures of the amount of CO2 in the air date to the 1950s.
Those of the oceans’ acidity began only in the late 1980s (see chart).
Since it started, that acidity has risen from pH 8.11 to pH 8.06 (on the pH scale, lower numbers mean more acid). This may not sound much, but pH is a logarithmic scale.
A fall of one pH point is thus a tenfold rise in acidity, and this fall of 0.05 points in just over three decades is a rise in acidity of 12%.

Patchier data that go back further suggest there has been a 26% rise in oceanic acidity since the beginning of the industrial revolution, 250 years ago. Projections made by assuming that carbon-dioxide emissions will continue to increase in line with expected economic growth indicate this figure will be 170% by 2100.

Worrying about what the world may be like in nine decades might sound unnecessary, given more immediate problems, but another prediction is that once the seas have become more acidic, they will not quickly recover their alkalinity.
Ocean life, in other words, will have to get used to it.
So does this actually matter?

The variable people most worry about is called omega.
This is a number that describes how threatening acidification is to seashells and skeletons.
Lots of these are made of calcium carbonate, which comes in two crystalline forms: calcite and aragonite.
Many critters, especially reef-forming corals and free-swimming molluscs (and most molluscs are free-swimming as larvae), prefer aragonite for their shells and skeletons.
Unfortunately, this is more sensitive to acidity than calcite is.

An omega value for aragonite of one is the level of acidity where calcium carbonate dissolves out of the mineral as easily as it precipitates into it.
In other words, the system is in equilibrium and shells made of aragonite will not tend to dissolve. Merely creeping above that value does not, however, get you out of the woods.
Shell formation is an active process, and low omega values even above one make it hard.
Corals, for example, require an omega value as high as three to grow their stony skeletons prolifically.

As the map above shows, that could be a problem by 2100.
Low omega values are spreading from the poles (whose colder waters dissolve carbon dioxide more easily) towards the tropics.
The Monterey report suggests that the rate of erosion of reefs could outpace reef building by the middle of the century, and that all reef formation will cease by the end of it.

Acidic Oceans: Why Should We Care? - Perspectives on Ocean Science
The ocean absorbs almost half of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities, changing its chemistry in ways that may have significant effects on marine ecosystems.
Join Scripps marine chemist Andrew Dickson as he explains what we know -- and what we don't -- about this emerging problem. 

Other species will suffer, too.
A study published in Nature last year, for example, looked at the shells of planktonic snails called pteropods.
In Antarctic waters, which already have an omega value of one, their shells were weak and badly formed when compared with those of similar species found in warmer, more northerly waters.
Earlier work on other molluscs has come to similar conclusions.

Not everything suffers from more dissolved CO2, though.
The Monterey report cites studies which support the idea that algae, cyanobacteria and sea grasses will indeed benefit.
One investigation also suggests acidification may help cyanobacteria fix nitrogen and turn it into protein.
Since a lack of accessible nitrogen keeps large areas of the ocean relatively sterile, this, too could be good for productivity.

Oyster farmer's under threat from ocean acidification :

The rise in global carbon dioxide is causing dramatic ocean acidification is threatening a number of aquatic species, including oysters farmed for human consumption.

The Monaco report attempts to identify fisheries that will be particularly affected by these changes.
These include the Southern Ocean (one of the few areas not already heavily fished) and the productive fishery off the coast of Peru and northern Chile, where upwelling from the deep brings nutrients to the surface, but which is already quite acidic.
The principal threat here, and to similar fisheries, such as that off the west coast of North America, is to planktonic larvae that fish eat.
Oyster and clam beds around the world are also likely to be affected—again, the larvae of these animals are at risk.
The report does not, though, investigate the possibility of increases in algal plankton raising the oceans’ overall productivity.

At the back of everyone’s mind (as in wider discussions of climate change) are events 56m years ago.
At that time, the boundary between the Palaeocene and Eocene geological epochs, carbon-dioxide levels rose sharply, the climate suddenly warmed (by about 6°C) and the seas became a lot more acidic.
Many marine species, notably coccolithophores (a group of shelled single-celled algae) and deep-dwelling foraminifera (a group of shelled protozoa), became extinct in mere centuries, and some students of the transition think the increased acidity was more to blame for this than the rise in temperature.
Surface-dwelling foraminifera, however, thrived, and new coccolithophore species rapidly evolved to replace those that had died out.

On land, too, some groups of animals did well.
Though the rise of the mammals is often dated from 66m years ago, when a mass extinction of the dinosaurs left the planet open for colonisation by other groups, it is actually the beginning of the Eocene, 10m years later, which marks the ascendancy of modern mammal groups.

Oceanic acidity levels appear now to be rising ten times as fast as they did at the end of the Palaeocene.
Some Earth scientists think the planet is entering, as it did 56m years ago, a new epoch—the Anthropocene.
Though the end of the Palaeocene was an extreme example, it is characteristic of such transitions for the pattern of life to change quickly.
Which species will suffer and which will benefit in this particular transition remains to be seen.

Links :

• ENS : Acidifying Oceans Alarm Hundreds of Scientists
• BBC : Emissions of CO2 driving rapid oceans 'acid trip'
• GeoGarage blog : Ocean acidification : the other CO2 issue / Oceans failing the acid test, U.N. says / An acid test for policy / Study: our oceans are so acidic they're dissolving snails

Volcano creates new Japan island

A volcanic eruption hundreds of miles south of Tokyo forms a new island.

Japanese Coast Guard observed the growing island on an aerial survey.

 Video shows white smoke mixed with black material, including rocks.
"It's too soon to tell" if the island will grow or erode into the sea, expert says.

From CNN

Japan is getting bigger and bigger and bigger -- one volcanic blast at a time.

The growth so far -- compared to the size of the Asian nation's main Honshu island or the vast continent of Asia -- is minuscule, about 200 meters (650 feet) long by about 50 meters wide.

That's small enough that, if the volcanic activity stops, the newly created island could wash back into the sea in months.

But if it keeps going, it could enlarge even more and stick around for the long haul, expanding Japan's footprint in the process.

 Surtseyan activity where a new island was formed.
It is just off the coast of Nishino-Shima Island, a small, uninhabited island in the Ogasawara chain, which is also known as the Bonin Islands.
The approximately 30 islands are 1,000 kilometres south of Tokyo, and along with the rest of Japan are part of the seismically active Pacific “Ring of Fire.

"A lot of it depends on how fast it erodes," said Ken Rubin, a University of Hawaii at Manoa professor and expert in deep submarine volcanism.

"Until it shuts off, it's too soon to tell."

Even it slips away, and even if such volcanoes poke up from the sea floor like this every few years, what's happened so far is exciting for volcanologists.

According to the JCG, the eruption occurred about 500 meters south-southeast of Nishinoshima island, with black volcanic smoke billowing up about 600 meters high.
An oval-shaped piece of land 200 meters long at its longest point emerged under the smoke.
Volcanic activity was also observed around Nishinoshima island in 1973.
A new islet was created in September that year, and eventually connected to Nishinoshima.
photos Ibtimes

And video of the steady eruption -- a stream of white smoke, interrupted by occasional blasts of blackish material -- is powerful imagery of what's unfolding, even if what's emitted doesn't spew anywhere as high into the sky as land-based volcanoes like El Chichon or Mount Pinatubo.

Nishinoshima island (NGA 97000 chart)

Japan's chief government spokesman welcomed the news of yet another bit, however tiny, of new territory :

"If it becomes a full-fledged island, we would be happy to have more territory."
The Japanese archipelago has thousands of islands.

In some cases, they help anchor claims to wide expanses of ocean overlying potentially lucrative energy and mineral resources.
Japan has plans to build port facilities and transplant fast-growing coral fragments onto Okinotorishima, two rocky outcroppings even further south of Tokyo, to boost its claim in a territorial dispute with China.

Unlike these deadly examples, this Pacific volcano started its eruption -- on Wednesday, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency, at the least -- in shallows off the small, remote island of Nishinoshima, hundreds of miles over sea due south of Tokyo.

The national agency since issued a warning for those around the island crater.

 Nishinoshima evolution in 30 years

The most common type of volcano, by far, are those that erupt and spew material underwater: Rubin estimates "probably more than 80% happen in the oceans, and we never know about them."

Volcanoes that erupt on land get the most attention, for good reason, given their impact on people, vegetation and (by virtue of their expansive eruptions into the atmosphere) on things like air traffic patterns and climate.

 Nishinoshima island, off the coast of Japan around 620 miles south of Tokyo
(Japan Coast Guard)

What's happening near these isolated Japanese islands is more of a sea-land hybrid.

It is rooted on the flank of a string of underwater volcanoes a few hundred feet from the main island, Rubin explained.

What's being expelled into the air -- a mixture of water that appears as whitish, fluffy steam and darker coarse rock fragments -- is distinct from the magma, he adds.

"In the shallow sea water, ... it causes it to behave explosively," Rubin said.

"It's kind of a short-term thing. If it kept growing, it would act differently."

By "differently," he means acting like a more traditional land volcano with the crater well out of the water.

Bathymetry around the Nishinoshima island

Whether or not that happens, people should be able to safely set foot on the island "pretty soon after it stops erupting," Rubin notes -- assuming experts are 100% sure it won't blow again.

If it's feasible, say, a year from now, remains to be seen.

There was a similar case two years off the Canary Islands (El Hierro) in 2011 where there was no breakthrough, and thus no new island.

Two years earlier, a new island did emerge in such circumstances near the Pacific island of Tonga -- as happened in 1963 with Surtsey, an island that built up over four years in the 1960s off Iceland.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Birth of an island /  New island rises in the Red Sea / Undersea volcano erupts, stains seas /  Island pops up after the earthquake in Pakistan

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