Improved model will boost weather forecasts across the U.S.
NOAA’s flagship weather model — the Global Forecast System (GFS) — is undergoing a significant upgrade today to include a new dynamical core called the Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere (FV3).
This upgrade will drive global numerical weather prediction into the future with improved forecasts of severe weather, winter storms, and tropical cyclone intensity and track.
The fine 3 km resolution of the FV3 makes this future simulation of clouds appear as an actual satellite.
NOAA research scientists originally developed the FV3 as a tool to predict long-range weather patterns at time frames ranging from multiple decades to interannual, seasonal and subseasonal.
In recent years, creators of the FV3 at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory expanded it to also become the engine for NOAA’s next-generation operational GFS.
“In the past few years, NOAA has made several significant technological leaps into the future – from new satellites in orbit to this latest weather model upgrade,” said Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.
“Through the use of this advanced model, the dedicated scientists, forecasters, and staff at NOAA will remain ever-alert for any threat to American lives and property.”
GFS is now the new version 15.1.1
"FV3-GFS." The name of the new model will
not change; it is still GFS.
One way to tell if your provider has
updated is to request the parameter REFC, simulated radar reflectivity.
This is an excellent parameter for forecasting squalls.
The US GFS should now be a contender to best global model.
The FV3-based GFS brings together the superior dynamics of global climate modeling with day-to-day reliability and speed of operational numerical weather prediction.
Additional enhancements to the science that produce rain and snow in the GFS also contribute to the improved forecasting capability of this upgrade.
“The significant enhancements to the GFS, along with creating NOAA’s new Earth Prediction Innovation Center, are positioning the U.S. to reclaim international leadership in the global earth-system modeling community,” said Neil Jacobs, Ph.D., acting NOAA administrator.
NOAA will be running the old version of the GFS in parallel for the next 3-months to compare the results
The GFS upgrade underwent rigorous testing led by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Environmental Modeling Center and NCEP Central Operations that included more than 100 scientists, modelers, programmers and technicians from around the country.
With real-time evaluations for a year alongside the previous version of the GFS, NOAA carefully documented the strengths of each.
When tested against historic weather dating back an additional three years, the upgraded FV3-based GFS performed better across a wide range of weather phenomena.
Upgrade of NOAA's supercomputing system will place it among 30 fastest in world, prepping for next gen Global Forecast System (GFS) next year, which will increase model resolution to 9 km & 128 levels out to 16 days, vs current 13 km & 64 levels out to 10 days.
The scientific and performance evaluation shows that the upgraded FV3-based GFS provides results equal to or better than the current global model in many measures.
This upgrade establishes the foundation to further advancements in the future as we improve observation quality control, data assimilation, and the model physics.
“We are excited about the advancements enabled by the new GFS dynamical core and its prospects for the future,” said Louis W. Uccellini, Ph.D., director, NOAA’s National Weather Service. “Switching out the dynamical core will have significant impact on our ability to make more accurate 1-2 day forecasts and increase the level of accuracy for our 3-7 day forecasts. However, our job doesn't end there — we also have to improve the physics as well as the data assimilation system used to ingest data and initialize the model.”
Uccellini explained that NOAA’s work with the National Center for Atmospheric Research to build a common infrastructure between the operational and research communities will help advance the FV3-based GFS beyond changing the core.
“This new dynamical core and our work with NCAR will accelerate the transition of research advances into operations to produce even more accurate forecasts in the future,” added Uccellini.
Meanwhile, the world’s most accurate model at the European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasting received a major upgrade Tuesday, as institutions worldwide endeavor to advance weather prediction.
Operating a new and sophisticated weather model requires robust computing capacity.
In January 2018, NOAA augmented its weather and climate supercomputing systems to increase performance by nearly 50 percent and added 60 percent more storage capacity to collect and process weather, water and climate observations.
This increased capacity enabled the parallel testing of the FV3-based GFS throughout the year.
The retiring version of the model will no longer be used in operations but will continue to run in parallel through September 2019 to provide model users with data access and additional time to compare performance. Links :
Scotland recently warned Ireland over fishing at Rockall, but the outcrop has long made headlines
Who owns Rockall?
The isolated Atlantic outcrop is in the news after the Scottish government warned Ireland it will send its fisheries patrol vessels to force Irish fishing boats to leave a 12-mile (19km) zone around the tiny disputed island.
But Rockall made headlines long before Friday.
Rockall with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO nautical chart)
Atlantic Sea Pilot, 1884
On September 2nd, 1861, the coveted patch 418km (260 miles) west of the Co Donegal coast gained attention on page four of The Irish Times after a letter writer predicted its bountiful waters would yield money “surpassing in value the gold discoveries of California or Australia”.
“I now forward an account of the second return here of Captains Rhodes and Gardener from the new fishing ground at Rockall,” wrote J Dawson, MD.
“They have again made a most successful fishing, having caught between thirteen and fourteen tons of codfish each in about six days’ fishing; while the account they give of the vast numbers of great fish that swarm around that insulated rock in the ocean is even more wonderful than before.”
Rockall has long a generated fierce nationalist rivalries since the first British royal navy expedition scrambled ashore in 1810.
Possession of Rockall, 386km (240 miles) west of the Scottish mainland, was for many decades deemed imperative in order to generate claims to the vast tracts of surrounding fisheries and the oil-rich Atlantic seabed.
Air view the survey ship HMS Vidal with Rockall Island in background. SV.
On deck of Vidal, one of the landing party preparing to take off by helicopter. He is hauled by helicopter from deck.
Voiceover claims: "Rockall is in line with British new rocket range, and since no one else claims it - it's safer in British hands."
The British navy annexed the rock in 1955 by hoisting the Union flag and cementing a brass plaque on its storm-washed summit.
The 1972 Island of Rockall Act, passed by parliament in Westminster, formally declared it to be part of Inverness-shire, even though the nearest permanently inhabited settlement is 367km (228 miles) away on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides.
Irish Governments have not recognised these claims.
British imperial ambitions were set back by international ratification of the UN convention on the law of the sea (Unclos) in 1982, which states that: “Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf.”
That decision meant ownership of Rockall, which is the eroded rump of an extinct volcano, would no longer be decisive in the international, diplomatic battle for control of the seabed below.
The rules of Uunclos stipulate that coastal states can register claims to the seabed up to 350 nautical miles (648km) offshore.
Claims are ratified by the UN commission on the limits of the continental shelf which sits in New York.
Gain control
The UK made its formal submission for the Hatton/Rockall area in 2009, using the deserted island of St Kilda, inhabited until 1930, as its baseline.
Rockall is 167 nautical miles (309km) to the west of St Kilda.
The UK, however, is not the only state eager laying claim to the the Hatton/Rockall basin.
Ireland, Iceland and Denmark (on behalf of the Faroes) have also lodged overlapping claims.
Consequently, there have been quadripartite talks shuffling between London, Dublin, Reykjavik and Copenhagen for years in an attempt to agree common underwater borders that would allow exploration to start.
Former SAS soldier, Paratrooper and Adventurer Tom McClean is an accomplished and entertaining speaker with many remarkable stories to tell including his famous occupation of the Island of Rockall in the Atlantic
Despite the tortuous negotiations, Rockall retains a symbolic attraction for adventurers.
Tom McClean, an SAS veteran, endured 40 days roped to the outcrop in 1985 in order to assert the UK’s claim.
In 1997, Greenpeace protesters lasted for 42 days as part of a protest against oil exploration.
Underwater reserves of oil, gas and minerals are increasingly eyed by rival nations eager to boost their reserves.
In the most recent chapter in the history of Rockall, Scottish external affairs minister Fiona Hyslop warned the Irish Government that it will deploy its vessels to protect Scottish fishing rights around Rockall.
The Irish Government contests the Scottish claim to the land, as well as the claim to exclusive fishing rights.
In a statement on Friday, the Irish Government said that its position “has been and remains that the waters around Rockall form part of Union waters under the Common Fisheries Policy, to which the principle of equal access for the vessels of all EU Member States applies.
Irish vessels have operated unhindered in the Rockall zone for many decades fishing haddock, squid and other species.”
Tánaiste Simon Coveney said it was the longstanding position of the Government is that Irish vessels are entitled to access the waters around Rockall.
He said: “We have never recognised UK sovereignty over Rockall and accordingly we have not recognised a territorial sea around it either.
We have tried to work positively with the Scottish authorities and to deal with sensitive issues that flow from it in a spirit of kinship and collaboration.
We very much regret that matters have reached this point and intend to do everything possible to achieve a satisfactory resolution.”
Irish people may associate the tiny island with Seán Loftus – who changed his name to Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus – the late TD, former lord mayor of Dublin and life-long environmentalist.
The island also has the distinction of having inspired a rousing republican anthem, Rock on Rockall, by the Wolfe Tones.
The chorus goes: “Oh rock on Rockall, you’ll never fall to Britain’s greedy hands/Or you’ll meet the same resistance that you did in many lands/May the seagulls rise and pluck your eyes and the water crush your shell/And the natural gas will burn your ass and blow you all to hell.”
This scientist couple created an airborne observatory to map tropical forests. Now they’re using it to identify threatened reefs.
Coral reefs comprise just 1 percent of the ocean floor yet they are home to 25 percent of the world’s marine fish, a growing source of protein for people.
But reefs are imperiled by a range of threats including warming waters, acidifying seas, destructive fishing methods, and agricultural and other runoff.
Moreover, scientists have only a rough idea of the extent of reefs worldwide; a reef thought to be 1,000 acres might be 1,500 or just 500.
Of the reefs that have been accurately mapped, little is known about their health, the kinds of fish that live there, or the composition of coral species.
The problem is seawater.
The oceans are vast, making reefs hard to pinpoint, and the water’s surface is difficult for satellite and airborne cameras to see through.
Now, a team of scientists led by Greg Asner and Robin Martin of Arizona State University, has developed a suite of technologies to overcome these obstacles.
The instruments are mounted on a low-flying plane and together make up the Global Airborne Observatory, which effectively can peel back the seawater and map the seafloor to a depth of 50 feet, in three dimensions.
(A huge proportion of the world’s most threatened reefs are in such shallow water, because ocean-warming events mainly occur near the sea surface.)
Mapping Biodiversity from the Air The Global Airborne Observatory is an airplane packed with sensors that can perform detailed analysis of the underlying terrain.
top : SCANNING FORESTS The observatory has used a laser scanning technology called lidar to make 3-D maps of forests around the world, including this riverscape in the Peruvian Amazon. MEASURING BIODIVERSITY A unique spectral sensor measures wavelengths of light bouncing off the forest canopy to identify distinct tree species, shown here in artificial colors.
middle : BLOCKED BY SEAWATER Coral reefs are of great interest to researchers, but most airborne and satellite instruments have difficulty peering through seawater. This 3-D map shows a Hawaiian bay in natural color.
bottom : IMAGING CORAL REEFS The observatory’s sensors are now able to pierce seawater to a depth of 50 feet to create 3-D reef maps, detect coral bleaching and identify different types of coral. CORAL BIODIVERSITY Bright colors represent communities of coral in a 3-D map with seawater removed:
By The New York Times | Images by Greg Asner, Arizona State University Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science
Honaunau Bay (Hawaii) with the GeoGarage platform (NOAA nautical chart)
Mapping reefs typically involves swimming with sonars or dragging them behind a boat, which makes for very slow progress.
The Global Airborne Observatory can map 250,000 acres a day, at resolution of 4 centimeters.
“If their methods are good to 50 feet deep, it’s a huge advance,” said Nancy Knowlton, a marine scientist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.
“People who work on coral reefs are so hungry for anything that could help in the conservation realm.”
Dr. Asner, director of Arizona State’s new Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, and Dr. Martin, a biochemist and remote-sensing expert, are married.
They worked side by side for years inventing techniques to map tropical forests.
They climbed trees in Madagascar and the Amazon to collect leaf samples, which Dr. Martin would analyze in the lab, to determine their chemical composition.
Later, Dr. Asner would fly over the forests in an early version of the observatory: a small plane outfitted with technology capable of measuring the wavelengths of light — most of it invisible to the human eye — that bounce off the forest canopy.
By linking the trees’ spectral signatures to their chemical makeup, the two scientists created the most detailed maps of forests yet devised.
Their maps have been used in Peru to identify locations for new national parks, and in South Africa to figure out how to improve lion habitat.
Dr. Asner and Dr. Martin are recreational scuba divers, each with thousands of hours of experience underwater.
“We used to keep it separate from the tropical trees career,” Dr. Asner said.
But a few years ago they realized their scientific methods had advanced far enough to be applied to coral reefs.
Greg Asner, of Arizona State University, in the field.
Mapping corals first requires getting close enough to collect samples.
Later, in the lab, the corals’ chemical makeup is matched to their spectral signatures
Credit : Rick Miskiv
“We’re interested in the ecology of all the corals,” Dr. Asner said.
He spoke by phone from a beach on the western side of Hawaii’s Big Island, where he was trying to decide whether the water was calm enough for a dive.
In 2016, the Hawaii governor David Ige announced a plan to protect 30 percent of the state’s reefs by 2030 — the Marine 30x30 Initiative.
This past winter, Dr. Asner and Dr. Martin went there to generate maps of the corals’ health.
Dr. Asner in the airborne observatory.
Twin lasers emit 500,000 pulses of light per second and record the echoes, revealing the location and three-dimensional shape of every object beneath the plane.
Credit : Marjo Aho/The Nature Conservancy
Currently just 12 percent of Hawaii’s waters are under state management.
Last year, the Airborne Observatory mapped reefs in the Caribbean that in 2017 were hit hard by back-to-back hurricanes.
The initial iteration of that map, produced in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy, already has been used to design the largest marine protected area in the Dominican Republic.
“In the forest work, once we got to scale and saw patterns, then we could say something bigger,” said Dr. Martin.
“The reefs community needed that.
We realized the spectroscopy from the plane could help us get there.”
The maps created by Dr. Asner and Dr. Martin reveal refuges of live coral — areas where corals are persisting, to be managed and protected — and the types of seafloor habitat that will support coral nurseries and help accelerate restoration efforts.
Robin Martin, a biochemist and remote-sensing expert at Arizona State.
This past winter, she and Dr. Asner were in Hawaii generating maps of the corals’ health.
Credit : Greg Asner
Mapping corals first requires getting close enough to touch them.
Dr. Asner and Dr. Martin dive to collect samples, and later, back in the lab, determine how the corals’ chemical makeup corresponds to their spectral signatures.
Next, the team searches for those spectra from, on average, several thousand feet overhead.
Cameras detect colors outside the range of human vision that correspond to the chemistry of the corals.
As the chemistry changes with the corals’ health, the cameras pick it up.
Bleaching, which can lead to death, is precipitated by a change in the chemistry that the cameras can see before the bleaching begins to take place.
With this knowledge, interventions can be planned and reefs can be managed.
The suite of tech onboard the Airborne Observatory, now in its third generation, is unique.
Its imaging spectroscopy device, which shows light beyond the visible range, was copied by NASA.
Its lidar instrument works like radar but with light instead of radio waves: Twin lasers emit 500,000 pulses of light per second and record the echoes, revealing the location and three-dimensional shape of every object beneath the plane.
High-resolution cameras collect data at 4-centimeter resolution.
By combining those three methods (with some help from artificial intelligence), Dr. Martin and Dr. Asner made a significant advance in remote mapping.
Each device has different geometries and measurement patterns that must be aligned to make an accurate map, or it would look like a 3-D movie viewed without the glasses.
An inertial motion unit, built by Grumman for use on military warheads, and so sensitive that its location must be reported to the State Department to make sure the technology is handled properly, aligns the images.
Reef-coral polyps of the genus Favia.
Bleaching, which can lead to death, is precipitated by a chemical change that special cameras can detect before the coral bleaches.
Credit : Greg Asner
The flights collect the spectral signature of every pixel, each a mixture of 427 colors.
(Imagine a printer with 427 ink cartridges.)
Back in the lab, deep-learning algorithms can sift the data to determine whether a coral is alive or dead, whether it is bleached (and therefore at risk of death) or on its way to becoming so, and even, in some cases, which species it is.
With the Global (formerly Carnegie) Airborne Observatory, Dr. Asner and Dr. Martin are 6 percent of the way toward building a spectral-chemical library for all 830 known species of coral.
Credit : Greg Asner
In their forest work, Dr. Asner and Dr. Martin have discovered the spectral signatures of 30,000 tree species, almost half the world total.
Now they are about 6 percent of the way toward building a spectral-chemical library for all 830 known species of coral.
“Whereas the pool of species is way lower, this is way harder,” Dr. Asner said.
“I’m after conservation applications that have real efficacy. We have plenty of journal papers.
We’re pushing the scientific community to make their work much more solutions-based, instead of a latency period where things are being researched forever.”
Nicholas Sloane doesn’t mind discomfort.
The 56-year-old South African marine-salvage master has survived two helicopter crashes and spent thousands of hours aboard ships that are burning, sinking, breaking apart, or leaking oil, chemicals, or cargo into the ocean.
Often, he gets calls in the middle of the night asking him to pack his bags and fly immediately to a disaster zone across the world, anywhere from Yemen to Papua New Guinea.
Twice, he’s fought off armed pirates using water cannons, sound cannons, and strobe lights.
Usually, Sloane rooms on location, bunking in makeshift beds aboard singed or waterlogged ships he’s working to rescue.
He once lived for three months with a family on Tristan da Cunha, the world’s most remote inhabited archipelago, orchestrating the logistics of catching and washing thousands of rockhopper penguins drenched in bunker fuel from a shipwreck.
More recently, he spent 2½ years overseeing the almost $1 billion refloating of the Costa Concordia, the infamous Italian cruise ship that capsized inside a marine sanctuary off the coast of Tuscany, killing 32 passengers.
But at some point early last year, Sloane really wanted to take a bath and couldn’t.
He was home with his family in Cape Town, which had recently declared an emergency: After three years of severe drought, the city of 4 million was at risk of becoming one of the first in the world to run out of municipal water.
To forestall a shutoff, each household was permitted only 50 liters—about 13 gallons—per day per person to cover drinking, cooking, washing, and showers.
“That’s enough to fill less than half a tub,” says Sloane, a soft-spoken man with graying hair, ruddy skin, and a deep crease between his green eyes.
“My wife used to take a bath every night and a shower every morning.
She told me, ‘You’d better do something.’ ”
Captain Nick Sloane explains how he plans to tow an ice berg to Cape Town
More than a year later, disaster has been averted, thanks to badly needed rainfall and drastic reduction in water use.
But conditions in Cape Town remain far from normal.
The daily-use limit has been raised, but only to 70 liters, and people still take speed showers, collecting the runoff to use for toilet flushing.
Some hotels have removed stoppers from bathtubs to keep profligate tourists in line.
And farmers throughout the country are reeling.
More than 30,000 seasonal jobs have been lost in the Western Cape, and crop production has declined by about 20%.
During the height of the drought, hundreds of farmers in the Northern Cape killed off most of their livestock rather than truck in costly feed.
“Everyone has cut back their flocks of sheep to the bare minimum needed to start again when it rains,” one farmer told Bloomberg News in 2017.
Sloane still hasn’t taken that bath at home, and he isn’t optimistic about Cape Town’s future.
“We’ll never get back to the days where water is flowing all over the Cape,” he says, pointing out that the city’s population has grown almost 40% in the last 20 years.
“If the taps run dry, the first day people will be standing in lines at watering points throughout the city.
The second day, if you don’t get your water, well, people are killed for that.”
That’s why Sloane is working on a solution that might sound absurd.
Making use of his unusual skill set, he plans to harness and tow an enormous Antarctic iceberg to South Africa and convert it into municipal water.
“To make it economically feasible, the iceberg will have to be big,” Sloane says.
Ideally, it would measure about 1,000 meters (3,281 feet) long, 500 meters wide, and 250 meters deep, and weigh 125 million tons.
“That would supply about 20% of Cape Town’s water needs for a year.”
Sloane has already assembled a team of glaciologists, oceanographers, and engineers.
He’s also secured a group of financiers to fund the pioneer tow, which he calls the Southern Ice Project.
The expected cost is more than $200 million, much of it to be put up by two South African banks and Water Vision AG, a Swiss water technology and infrastructure company.
Now Sloane’s team needs an agreement with South Africa to buy the Antarctic water, if the plan succeeds.
His team could charter the necessary ships and prepare all required materials within six months, though the mission will need to take place in November or December, when the Antarctic climate is somewhat less ferocious.
“We’re taking on all the risk,” he says.
“We’re ready to go.”
Harvesting icebergs isn’t a new idea.
In the mid-1800s, breweries in Chile towed small ones, sometimes outfitted with sails, from Laguna San Rafael to Valparaiso, where they were used for refrigeration.
In the late 1940s, John Isaacs of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography began exploring more fantastical plans, such as transporting an 8 billion-ton iceberg to San Diego to mitigate California droughts.
(Icebergs of the size Isaacs had in mind—20 miles long, 3,000 feet wide, and 1,000 feet deep—are extremely rare.)
In the ’60s oil companies began using thick ropes to wrangle and redirect much smaller Arctic icebergs before they collided with rigs, a practice that’s now common.
If conditions are too rough, or a berg too big, the rigs sometimes need to be moved instead.
In the ’70s, the U.S. Army and the Rand Corp. both looked into using Antarctic ice as a source of fresh water.
At about the same time, Prince Mohammed al-Faisal began pouring funds into polar research, in hopes that his assembled team of international glaciologists and engineers would find a way to alter the drift of icebergs, potentially bringing them as far as Western Australia.
Prince Mohammed even sponsored the First International Conference on Iceberg Utilization for Fresh Water Production, Weather Modification and Other Applications in, of all places, Ames, Iowa, in 1977 and had a miniberg weighing 4,800 pounds trucked in from Alaska.
“The people of Ames have seen princes before, but it has been many millenniums since an iceberg has visited these parts,” wrote the New York Times, delighting in the spectacle.
The paper also described some of the more outlandish suggestions floated by speakers, such as outfitting icebergs with nuclear-powered paddle wheels that would allow them to “be propelled as self-contained units.”
One skeptical delegate lamented: “There isn’t much money around these days for Arctic and Antarctic research, so they’ve flocked around like flies to the honey pot.
It’s embarrassing.”
Eventually, Prince Mohammed stopped funding polar research, but attempts to access iceberg water continued.
Today, in Newfoundland, a handful of small Canadian companies, including one called Iceberg Vodka, hire so-called iceberg cowboys, who use chainsaws, articulated claws, and even rifles to take off chunks of passing Arctic bergs, so they can be netted, melted, and used to distill premium alcohol.
(Icebergs form from compacted snow, and their water is uncommonly pure.)
This spring thieves made off with 8,000 gallons of Iceberg Vodka’s water, siphoning it from a large tank.
“Our suspicion is that whoever took it thought it was vodka,” said Chief Executive Officer David Meyers.
Berg Water, another Newfoundland company, sells 12-packs of “15,000-year-old” water for as much as $180.
More urgently, interest is being fueled by the world’s increasingly dire shortages of fresh water.
Today, as many as 2.1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water, according to the World Health Organization, and the United Nations says global water demand will outstrip supply by 40% as soon as 2030.
The problem is the result of poor government oversight, fracking, pollution, and failing infrastructure.
Even in the U.S., leaks and theft account for an estimated loss of 16% of fresh water, writes David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.
In Brazil and other places, the loss is as high as 40%.
There’s no magic fix.
Desalination is a poor solution—it’s expensive and energy-intensive and produces more chemical-laced brine than potable water.
Much of that brine, which is extra-salty and contains potentially harmful substances necessary for the desalination process, including copper and chlorine, is pumped back into the ocean.
There, its density causes it to sink to the ocean floor, where it depletes oxygen and destroys marine life.
According to a 2019 UN report, global desalination plants already produce 51.8 billion cubic meters of brine annually, enough to cover the entire state of Florida a foot deep.
Last year a study of almost 180,000 people in Israel linked desalinated water to a 6% to 10% increase in heart disease.
Plus, it tastes terrible.
Meanwhile, more than 100,000 Antarctic icebergs melt into the ocean each year.
They range from merely large to country-size (the biggest seen recently was the size of Jamaica), and by some calculations they contain more than the annual global consumption of fresh water.
Rather than let that water slip away, several groups are vying for berg-towing funds and know-how.
The European Union in 2010 received a proposal to pull icebergs from Newfoundland to the Canary Islands, which have long been short on fresh water; and the United Arab Emirates plans to test its prospects of importing icebergs by bringing one from the Antarctic to Australia or Cape Town by late 2020.
In Germany, a company called Polewater Gmbh says it’s spent $2.8 million over the past six years hiring experts to complete a strategy for getting Antarctic iceberg water to drought-stricken areas, with an emphasis on minimizing environmental impact.
Having won the blessing of some Greenpeace officials, Polewater says it needs $67 million to build the company over the next three years.
Towing a Berg
Data: Collecte Localisation Satellites, Natural Earth, Olav Orheim
But when it comes to towing a 100 million-ton iceberg through the notoriously rough Antarctic Ocean, where swells regularly reach 15 meters, investors are betting on Sloane.
“I was the greatest skeptic around,” says Bert Mulder, chief operating officer of Water Vision, Sloane’s Swiss backer.
“Then I started to listen to Nick Sloane. If anybody can do it, it’s him. I truly believe that.”
Sloane was born in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, and grew up exploring rivers and lakes.
“There was no TV, only basic radio, so the outdoors was your life,” he says.
At about 10 he moved with his family to a town outside Durban, South Africa, where he began sailing and found he loved ocean racing in stormy weather, particularly because daring counted for more than tactics alone.
After high school, he completed his national service with the merchant marine, then spent 10 years becoming a master mariner, running tankers and cargo ships and towing oil rigs.
From there, he stumbled into the high-intensity work of marine salvage, where successful teams are rewarded with payouts of 7.5% to 10% of the distressed ship’s assessed value, a fee that often reaches millions of dollars.
Today, Sloane spends roughly six months of the year in Cape Town with his wife and three kids.
But he’s always on call for his employer, Resolve Marine Group, a global salvage company based in Florida.
From one day to the next, he might find himself rappelling from a helicopter onto a burning supertanker or using his connections and organizational skills to oversee the complicated logistics of cleaning up a toxic spill in remote waters.
The iceberg is Sloane’s side project, and he’s enlisted perhaps the biggest names in the game.
The first is Georges Mougin, the French engineer whom Prince Mohammed tapped as CEO of his company, Iceberg Towing International.
Now 91 years old with bushy eyebrows—but still sharp and a dapper dresser—Mougin has spent much of the past four decades exploring the technologies and materials to be used for iceberg transport.
The second is Olav Orheim, trim and energetic at 77, who served as director of the Norwegian Polar Institute from 1993 to 2005.
Orheim has probably landed atop more icebergs than anyone in the world and once was stranded overnight on one with David Attenborough, the English broadcaster and voice of the nature series Planet Earth.
Together with oceanographers and engineers from Norwegian and South African universities and from government-affiliated institutes such as the Pretoria-based Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Sloane’s team began forging a plan and soon attracted press coverage.
“Unfortunately, the first article came out on April 1,” Sloane says.
“People still think it’s an April Fools’ joke.”
The team is focused only on Antarctic icebergs, which break off from the giant sea shelf that extends from the southern continent’s landmass.
These are often hundreds of times bigger than Arctic icebergs, and the biggest are almost always tabular and therefore more stable.
By contrast, Arctic icebergs, most of which descend from Greenland’s steep glaciers, are typically irregular and contain weak spots that make them liable to split or flip.
Using satellite data, the team will identify an iceberg that’s the right size and shape and on a course for Gough Island, a tiny landmass halfway between Antarctica and Cape Town—about 1,600 miles from Sloane’s final destination.
(There are typically three or four desirable bergs available on any given day.)
Next, they’ll inspect the iceberg on location, using sonar and radar scans to determine its precise dimensions and check for structural flaws.
If everything looks good, the team will employ two tugboats to encircle the berg in a gigantic net of 5-inch-diameter ropes fashioned from Dyneema, a supermaterial that, unlike metal cables, is neutrally buoyant and also stronger and better suited for low temperatures, friction, and tension.
Costing about $25 million, the net will extend about 2 miles across and 60 feet high.
It will act as a kind of belt around the belly of the iceberg, which could reach more than 70 stories below the surface of the ocean.
All this will be done amid high waves and winds reaching 80 mph.
“It’s the worst part of the ocean worldwide,” Sloane says.
“People don’t go there unless they have to.”
With the net in place, the iceberg will be attached to two supertankers at a distance of about a mile.
The tankers, which will remain about 1,000 feet from one another, will move at about 1 mph.
Because they’ll have little ability to steer at such low speeds, each tanker will be led by tugboat.
The operation will need to be insured by Lloyd’s of London in case the iceberg breaks apart en route, leaving dangerous debris in the path of other ships.
The goal will be to follow the Antarctic Circumpolar Current eastward and then, at the right moment near Gough Island, deploy full force to switch over to the Benguela Current, which will bring the iceberg upward toward South Africa’s western coast.
“If we hit the wrong current, that’s it,” Sloane says.
“Then we’ll have to call up the Aussies and say, ‘Do you want to buy an iceberg?’ ”
Traveling “slower than the slowest thing on Earth,” as Sloane puts it, the journey will take an estimated 80 to 90 days.
Sloane and Mougin aim to wrap the icerberg in a fabric mesh that could prevent it from melting (Credit: Georges Mougin & Nick Sloane)
The anticipated melt rate is about 0.05 meters to 0.1 meters per day from each side and the base, which would result in a reduction in size of about 8% by arrival—but certain factors, most notably storms, could increase erosion at the water line.
The final destination will be northwest of Cape Town, where the iceberg will run aground and sit amid the fairly cold, slow-moving Benguela Current, about 25 miles from land.
There, Sloane’s team will hold the berg in place with a 1,000-ton mooring system, and, like the French artist Christo, wrap the entire underwater portion in a giant, 800-ton geotextile skirt designed to reduce wave impact and inhibit further melting.
The skirt, expected to cost roughly $22 million, will let fresh water pass through, creating a buffer of cold water, while keeping salt water out.
As the iceberg gets smaller, it will be moved closer to shore.
To harvest the water, the team will ship earthmoving equipment, including grading and milling machines, to the iceberg via barge.
The machines will be used to excavate a shallow saucer, which will help speed melt to anywhere from 60 million to 150 million liters a day of an icy slurry.
The slush will be pumped into a rotating fleet of grocery-grade container ships.
Back on land, the slurry will be fed into a temporary pipe system and mixed with water from municipal reservoirs.
Sloane believes the iceberg could supply Cape Town for a year before it becomes unstable and breaks apart.
This, he says, will likely happen once the berg is reduced to about 30% of its original size—though it’s impossible to know for sure.
“Nobody’s tried this, so there are going to be unexpected discoveries,” he says.
Before even attempting the tow, the team will need a few months to perform a reduced environmental assessment for the government—reduced because Cape Town is still in crisis.
One problem may be the effect of parking a giant ice cube off Africa’s coast.
“We have no idea what such a thing would do to all the atmospheric, oceanic ecosystem dynamics in the area,” says Marcello Vichi, a professor of oceanography at the University of Cape Town who’s collaborating with Sloane’s team but has some reservations.
“We’d need to do a lot more research, but that’s where money comes in, and time.” Alan Condron, who works at the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and joined the project in May, will begin modeling impacts within the next months.
He also plans to model melt rates and various towing routes, as well as the carbon footprint of hauling icebergs vs. desalination.
But there’s a limit to what these projections can achieve, he says.
“At some point, you can throw all the modeling you have at it, but you just need someone to go out and do it.”
The price of delivering Antarctic water will be perhaps the biggest obstacle—Sloane says it would cost Cape Town about three times what it now pays for delivery of surface water.
Critics within the Cape Town government say it would cost substantially more.
“This proposal was not considered suitable for Cape Town,” says Xanthea Limberg, a member of the mayoral committee for water and waste services.
“Such a project is both complex and risky with an anticipated very high water cost.
The greatest challenges pertained to containment and transportation of the melt water as well as its injection into the water supply system.”
Other officials say the world’s worsening water crisis, along with South Africa’s booming population and the local impact of climate change, require looking beyond traditional water sources.
“We do not have the luxury to discard options,” says Dhesigen Naidoo, CEO of South Africa’s Water Research Commission, a nonprofit funded by the country’s water tax.
“An iceberg is 99% pure water, and you have the prospect of that sitting on your doorstep in a giant chunk that you can tap into.
It’s a terrific idea.”
Time is running out for South Africa to order an iceberg for delivery this year.
Instead, politicians will likely pray for rain, which is frustrating for Sloane’s backers.
“We silently sometimes think, A little more drought could bring the project closer,” says Mulder of Water Vision.
“But at the same time, you wish the best for the people in Cape Town and that abundant rainfall comes.”
In early April, Sloane jets to Paris to visit Mougin and Orheim, who both live there.
Dressed in a well-cut blue suit and brown leather dress boots, he looks like any other businessman, but for the Oakley sunglasses hanging from a cord around his neck and his Thule briefcase, which is worn to the point of shredding in one corner.
Over the previous month, he’s been to England, Japan, and Mozambique for salvage work.
“I thought I was going to have to attend to a shipwreck in Yemen, but it worked out that I could come here,” he says.
Sloane has put more than $100,000 of his own money into the Southern Ice Project.
“If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I probably would have said this was crazy, but now the time is right,” he says, sitting in the lounge at the InterContinental Paris Le Grand Hotel, where he’s staying.
Cape Town, he points out, is by far the most conveniently located city for a pioneer tow, given its relative proximity to Antarctica and the path of the Benguela Current, but he believes icebergs may eventually be pulled to Perth, Australia, and Santiago, Chile.
“And if you can get it to Cape Town, you can get it to Namibia and maybe as far as Angola.”
For now, Sloane is focused entirely on his continent, where cities and towns across several nations are running dry.
“I promise you, the water situation in some parts of Africa is getting worse all the time.
It’s certainly not getting better,” he says.
“Twenty or 30 years from now, I think towing icebergs will be a regular thing.”
Superb story Map by Elizabeth Della Zazzera made on Lapham's Quaterly
on the relationship between mapping and the development of maritime trade.
A fantastic historical introduction to nautical maps and the
essential cartographic breakthroughs that made global trade (and
colonialism/imperialism) possible
From
the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, European powers sent voyagers
to lands farther and farther away from the continent in an expansionist
period we now call the Age of Exploration.
These journeys were propelled by religious fervor and fierce colonial sentiment—and an overall desire for new trade routes.
They would not have been possible without the rise of modern cartography.
While
geographically accurate maps had existed before, the Age of Exploration
saw the emergence of a sustained tradition of topographic surveying.
Maps were being made specifically to guide travelers.
Technology
progressed quickly through the centuries, helping explorers and traders
find their way to new imperial outposts—at least sometimes.
On other occasions, hiccups in cartographic reasoning led their users even farther astray.
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