White House unveils stunning interactive 3D maps of Alaska in bid to better track climate change in the Arctic

 In efforts to track the effects of climate change, researchers have launched a collaborative effort to create satellite-based elevation maps of the entire Arctic by 2017.
The first series of maps reveals the terrain of Alaska in unprecedented detail. Wolverine Glacier, pictured,  is a valley glacier in the mountains of south-central Alaska's Kenai Peninsula

From DailyMail by Cheyenne MacDonald

• The maps were produced as a result of an Executive Order from President Obama last year
• The project aimed to create high-resolution, satellite based maps of Alaska by 2016 and the Arctic by 2017
• The models were created using 2-meter resolution images from Digital Globe commercial satellites

As climate change poses an ongoing threat to the global ecosystem, few areas are being affected as rapidly or severely as the Arctic - which is is warming at double the rate of the global average temperature.
In efforts to track these changes and mitigate the risks they present, a White House-backed project plans to create satellite-based elevation maps of the entire Arctic by 2017.
Today, the first maps showing Alaska's terrain were released.

The project is the result of an Executive Order made by President Obama last year, and now, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Science Foundation have completed a major step toward this goal, revealing a stunning new series of 3D maps plotting Alaska’s terrain.
The Arctic Digital Elevation Models (Arctic DEMs) are all publicly available through an online portal, according to the White House’s official blog.
Visualizations of this kind can help to track sea level changes and monitor coastal erosion to help develop effective strategies as climate change worsens the effects of storms.
As Arctic warms and ice subsequently shrinks, open water will gain more area, putting coastal communities at risk.

The models were created using 2-meter resolution images from Digital Globe commercial satellites, providing an unprecedented glimpse at inhospitable and remote areas of the Arctic.
The new maps revealed by the White House show numerous locations across Alaska, including Kodiak Benny Benson State Airport, Wolverine Glacier, Anchorage, and Mount Aniakchak.
While the project is led by the NGA and NSF, many other organizations are involved as well, including the U.S. Geological Survey, the state of Alaska, Ohio State University, University of Illinois, Cornell University, the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota, and ESRI.

The map above focuses on Kodiak Benny Benson State Airport.

The image highlights the rugged relief surrounding the three runways of the airport and clearly depicts vegetation, buildings, coastal features and the drainage network of the area.

Blue indicates low elevations while green shows medium to higher elevations, with red revealing peaks

 This map shows Mount Aniakchak, a volcanic caldera located in the Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve in the Aleutian Range of Alaska. Aniakchak is one of the wildest and least visited places in the National Park System

President Obama's trip to the Arctic

In January 2015, Obama issued the Executive Order on Enhancing Coordination of National Efforts in the Arctic.
The resulting project pledged to create the ‘first-ever, publicly available, high-resolution, satellite-based, elevation maps of Alaska’ by 2016 and the entire Arctic by 2017, according to the White House’s official blog.
Months later, he became the first sitting US president to visit the Alaskan Arctic.
‘If another country threatened to wipe out an American town, we’d do everything in our power to protect it,’ President Obama said during his visit to the town of Kotzebue.
‘Well, climate change poses the same threat right now. And that’s why I care so deeply about this.’

The project is the result of an Executive Order made by President Obama last year, and now, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Science Foundation have completed a major step toward this goal, revealing a stunning new series of 3D maps plotting Alaska’s terrain. Obama is pictured above during his visit to Alaska

‘For the United States, the Arctic is simultaneously a strategic challenge and a human challenge,’ said Dr. Fabien Laurier, Senior Policy Advisory, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
‘These maps will allow all of our Arctic stakeholders, ranging from Native and Tribal, state and local, the Federal family, our international partners and the business community, to develop the best responses to the changing Arctic.’
The researchers say these types of maps can be produced regularly for weekly, monthly, or annual updates on the changing terrain, thanks to satellite capabilities.

The maps show the city of Kotzebue, which President Obama visited a year ago.

Kotzebue is located in the Northwest Arctic Borough right above the Arctic Circle
Kozebue Harbor the the GeoGarage (NOAA chart)

The Seward Peninsula is pictured.

‘If another country threatened to wipe out an American town, we’d do everything in our power to protect it,’ President Obama said during his visit to the town of Kotzebue.

‘Well, climate change poses the same threat right now. And that’s why I care so deeply about this’

‘This technology and resulting contributions are game changers for the Arctic region,’ said Robert Cardillo, Director, NGA.
‘Traditionally, our capabilities for imagery collection were limited to the availability and frequency of low flying aircraft.
‘With this renewed effort involving the US government, universities, and the commercial imagery and scientific communities, the possibilities for understanding this part of the world are practically limitless.’

The map above illustrates Anchorage Alaska based on new elevation data.

The researchers say these types of maps can be produced regularly for weekly, monthly, or annual updates on the changing terrain, thanks to satellite capabilities

Links :

• Seeker : Alaska has been mapped as precisely as Mars
• National Geographic : Alaska has finally been mapped as precisely as Mars
• Washington Post : These gorgeous new Alaska maps could transform our understanding of the Arctic
• USGS : USGS Alaska Mapping Initiative
  

Asian typhoons becoming more intense, study finds

 

Station Orbits Over Three Hurricanes:This time-lapse video taken from the space station on Aug. 30 shows Hurricanes Lester and Madeline in the Pacific Ocean, then Gaston in the Atlantic Ocean.

From The Guardian by Damian Carrington

Giant storms that wreak havoc across China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines have grown 50% stronger in the past 40 years due to warming seas

The destructive power of the typhoons that wreak havoc across China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines has intensified by 50% in the past 40 years due to warming seas, a new study has found.

The researchers warn that global warming will lead the giant storms to become even stronger in the future, threatening the large and growing coastal populations of those nations.
“It is a very, very substantial increase,” said Prof Wei Mei, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who led the new work.
“We believe the results are very important for east Asian countries because of the huge populations in these areas. People should be aware of the increase in typhoon intensity because when they make landfall these can cause much more damage.”

Typhoons can have devastating impacts in east Asia.
In 2013, typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, killing at least 6,300 people and affecting 11 million. Typhoon Nina struck China in 1975, dumping 100cm of rain in a day and leading to 229,000 deaths and 6m destroyed buildings.
Last week typhoon Lionrock left 11 people dead in northern Japan and caused power blackouts and property damage, while in July typhoon Nepartak hit Taiwan and China, killing at least nine people and leaving a trail of destruction.

In the new research, published in Nature Geoscience, the scientists took data collected independently by centres in Japan and Hawaii and, after accounting for differences in the way it had been collected, showed that typhoons in the north-west Pacific had intensified by 12–15% on average since 1977.
The proportion of the most violent storms - categories 4 and 5 - doubled and even tripled in some regions over that time and the intensification was most marked for those storms which hit land.

On 7 July 2015, satellite images showed the Pacific Ocean with two typhoons, one tropical storm, one formation alert and one large area of increased convection.

Photograph: JMA MTSAT-2/NOAA

The intensity of a typhoon is measured by the maximum sustained wind speed, but the damage caused by its high winds, storm surges, intense rains and floods increases disproportionately, meaning a 15% rise in intensity leads to a 50% rise in destructive power.

The researchers showed that the intensification of typhoons making landfall occurred because warmer coastal seas provided more energy to growing storms, enabling their wind speeds to increase more rapidly.

Scientists are not yet able to determine whether manmade climate change or natural cycles are to blame for the warming seas in the region because 40 years is a relatively short time span for such phenomena.
But Wei is clear that the future global warming, as projected by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, would heat the oceans in the region and lead to even more intense typhoons.
Mei said: “We want to give the message that typhoon intensity has increased and will increase in the future because of the warming climate.”
He said action was needed to both prepare for future typhoons and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to curb warming: “Understanding intensity change is very important for disaster preparation.”

Prof Kerry Emanuel, an expert on tropical cyclones at MIT and not involved in the new research said: “The results leave little doubt that there are more high intensity events affecting south-east Asia and China, and these are also intensifying more rapidly.”
“This is significant for these nations because what matters, in the end, is landfall size and intensity,” he said.
“Stronger storms cause higher storm surges, which often cause the most destruction and loss of life.”
Previous work by Emanuel showed tropical cyclones are likely to become more frequent and stronger if climate change is not curbed.

Links :

• Climate Central : Landfalling Typhoons Have Become More Intense
• New Scientist : Warming strengthens typhoons that batter Asian coast

No sailors needed: robot sailboats scour the oceans for data

Saildrone, an unmanned, fully autonomous ocean vessel powered by wind and solar energy, recently completed a record-breaking ocean voyage, crossing 2,100 miles of Pacific from San Francisco to Hawaii.

A small fleet of Saildrones will soon be patrolling the world's oceans; they'll track sharks, stand guard over protected areas and gather critical data to help stop climate change

From NYTimes by John Markoff

Two robotic sailboats trace lawn-mower-style paths across the violent surface of the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska.
The boats are counting fish — haddock, to be specific — with a fancy version of the fish finder sonar you’d find on a bass fishing boat.

 A Saildrone boat being carried back to its hangar in Alameda, Calif.

The self-sailing vessel can gather research data much more cheaply than ships with crews. 

Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times

About 2,500 miles away, Richard Jenkins, a mechanical engineer and part-time daredevil, is tracking the robot sailboats on a large projection screen in an old hangar that used to be part of the Alameda Naval Air Station.
Now the hangar is the command center of a little company called Saildrone.
At least 20 companies are chasing the possibly quixotic dream of a self-driving car in Silicon Valley.
But self-sailing boats are already a real business.
While they are counting fish, Saildrone’s boats are also monitoring the seals that feed on the fish by tracking transponders that scientists have attached to the heads of the seals.
“We can tell them what size fish they are eating and why they are going there,” said Mr.
Jenkins, who is the chief executive and a co-founder of the company.

 The Saildrone is a wind powered autonomous vehicle controlled from shore via satellite communications.

As part of the Innovative Technology for Arctic Exploration program, PMEL partnered with two NOAA Cooperative Institutes and Saildrone Inc. to deploy two Saildrones on a 97 day mission in the Bering Sea in the spring of 2015 .

Last summer, working with scientists and engineers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the boats skimmed along the edge of the retreating Arctic ice cap, giving scientists a detailed account of temperature, salinity and ecosystem information that would have been difficult and expensive to obtain in person.

The Saildrone autonomous sailboats look a little like shrunken America’s Cup racing yachts — small trimarans with hard, carbon-fiber sails.
The Saildrone’s carbon fiber sail acts like an aircraft wing.
When air passes over it, thrust is created.
The sail is stabilized by a counterweight that is placed in front of it and a tab trailing behind it that can automatically make small corrections to make sure it maintains an efficient angle to the wind.
Underneath the boat are both a rudder to aid in steering and a keel, which will right the boat if it is knocked over.
The big difference, of course, is that there are no sailors on board.
The boats are controlled through communications satellites from the operations center here as they collect oceanographic data and monitor fish stocks and the environment.

 A saildrone boat in San Francisco Bay.

The drone is a trimaran with a carbon-fiber sail. 

Jason Henry for The New York Times

One day, they may be used for weather prediction, oil and gas industry ocean operations, or even to police illegal fishing.
Mr. Jenkins has a much grander vision.
He believes the missing piece of the puzzle to definitively comprehend the consequences of global warming is scientific data.
He envisions a fleet of thousands or even tens of thousands of his 23-foot sailboats creating a web of sensors across the world’s oceans.
Vast amounts of data collected by his robots could reveal with greater detail the extent and rate at which global warming might become an existential threat to humanity and whether it is happening in decades rather than centuries.
That is, if someone is willing to pay for all that.
The boats are not sold — the scientists, commercial fisherman and weather predictors pay a $2,500-a-day fee per boat for the data they produce.

 Richard Jenkins uses a smartphone to plug in coordinates and communicate with the drone. 

Jason Henry for The New York Times

Saildrone got its start with $2.5 million in grants from Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, and his wife, Wendy Schmidt.
And Mr. Jenkins’s company recently received $14 million in financing from three socially minded venture capital firms: Social Capital, Lux and Capricorn.
“My interest in Saildrone is very practical,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive who is the founder of Social Capital.
“Let’s stop arguing about what is happening, and let’s measure.
Once you have data and it’s statistically significant and valid, then we can get to the next step, which is to find what the structural reforms are that need to happen.”

 Data capabilities

Missions can last  6 - 12 months, with all data streamed live via satellite

and accessible via Saildrone's API.

Each boat is packed with an armory of scientific sensors that beam data back to the control center.
“It’s not so much taking the earth’s temperature as it is its pulse,” said Mr. Jenkins, a 39-year-old, tousle-haired mechanical engineer who was trained at Imperial College London.
He has found willing clients in ocean scientists and engineers who previously had limited ways to collect highly specific and accurate data about the ocean surface.
“Richard had a great boat but no scientific sensors on it, and we had sensors but no boat,” said Christian Meinig, the director of engineering at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.
The scientists at the laboratory have already begun to use the boats to enhance their study of the El Niño warm-water pattern in the Pacific Ocean.

“Data collected by the Saildrones will not only transform the understanding of our oceans, but will also bring insight into issues like weather, fish populations, ocean acidification and climate change — processes that will affect every person on this planet.”

The breakthrough for the robots was a sailboat design that Mr. Jenkins originally began pursuing when he set out to capture the world land-sailing speed record in 1999.
He succeeded in 2009 in a “land yacht” called Greenbird that reached a speed of 126.2 m.p.h.
on a dry lake bed in Southern California.
To reach such a high speed and remain stable, Mr. Jenkins replaced the traditional sailboat sail with a rigid vertical carbon-fiber wing coupled with a unique stabilizer trailing behind the wing that would automatically adjust the wing faster than a human sailor could respond by pulling ropes.
He has repurposed the wing to sail at slower speeds and to autonomously travel anywhere in the world.

Last year, in an experiment, one of the Saildrone boats made its way from Alameda to the Equator in 42 days, collecting a wealth of ocean surface data along the way.
A scientific research vessel with a large human crew would be faster, but it would cost about $80,000 a day.

 Saildrones deployed in the Gulf of Mexico,  demonstrating safe and precise piloting in one of the most challenging environments.

That researchers can move the autonomous boats — unlike the static ocean buoys that are now typically used — is significant, because it allows scientists to alter collection patterns in response to ocean conditions and interesting discoveries.
“A self-correcting model is really a superpowerful way of doing things,” said Christopher Sabine, an oceanographer who is director of Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.
“For climate modeling we need to know what’s going on year-round, and to be perfectly frank, we don’t like to go out into the middle of winter.”

Saildrone 2016 from Richard Jenkins

Saildrone is not the only autonomous vehicle on the sea.
Liquid Robotics, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., makes a boat called Wave Glider, which uses wave rather than wind action to move at more than two knots and carry up to 100 pounds of instruments.
The Saildrone payload is more than twice as large, and the boat is potentially twice as fast.

The sensor suite is made up of more than a dozen instruments that capture wind speeds, radiation, still and video imagery, temperature, ocean chemistry, and other data.

1-minute glimpse into the preparation work conducted for the collaborative 2016 research cruise between NOAA, Saildrone, Inc. and the University of Washington. Courtesy of NOAA Fisheries 

Mr. Jenkins’s contention is that a fleet of robot sensors spread across an ocean like the Pacific will make a huge difference in both weather and climate prediction.
For example, a better understanding of a weather phenomenon like El Niño could make a difference worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
“They completely failed to see the last one coming,” he said, noting that climate scientists acknowledge they don’t have the spatial resolution to make accurate predictions.
“They have a pressing need for more data.”

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : The drone that will sail itself around the world / Underwater drones being used to detect enemy submarines, piracy and illegal fishing : 3 projects / Brave robots are roaming the oceans for Science 
• DailyMail : Forget self-driving, try self-SAILING! Robotic boat can scour the oceans for data without the need for sailors 
• NOAA : How NOAA is transforming science with unmanned systems
• UBC Sailbot, fully autonomous sailboat, Ada, is crossing the Atlantic Ocean

Free diving under ice

Finnish freediver Johanna Nordblad holds the world record for a 50-meter dive under ice.

She discovered her love for the sport through cold-water treatment while recovering from a downhill biking accident that almost took her leg.

British director and photographer Ian Derry captures her taking a plunge under the Arctic ice.
“Once I had met her and gone to the location—which at that point was -24C—I knew I had to make the film. The environment and the silence there is something I will never forget.
“I dived under the ice to get a perspective on it and it was literally breath taking. What she does is so close to the edge, but she does it in such a comfortable way.”

see website

Monitoring the Oceans from Space MOOC

Gain a deeper understanding of the oceans through the upcoming, free, Monitoring the Oceans from Space MOOC run by EUMETSAT in support of the EU’s Copernicus programme.

Join oceanographer and BBC science presenter Dr Helen Czerski, (University College, London), Dr Hayley Evers-King, marine Earth observation scientist (Plymouth Marine Laboratory), and Dr Mark Higgins, (EUMETSAT), to learn more about how the satellites are used to keep an eye on the health of the oceans.

The Massive Open Online Course, funded by the EU’s Copernicus programme, is aimed at a general audience and will give an introduction to the benefits and potential uses of satellite-based ocean observations.
It will explain how to access and use marine Earth observation data and information from Copernicus/EUMETSAT missions, as well as the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service.
This free online course runs for five weeks from 24 October 2016 on the FutureLearn platform.
You can REGISTER for the course here.