Rain or shine, it’s always monsoon season for William Boos.
From his meteorological lair on Science Hill, Boos calmly monitors fluid dynamics and atmospheric depressions thousands of miles away. Volatile forces of nature in far-off places are his specialty. (more…)
Invertebrate numbers have decreased by 45% on average over a 35 year period in which the human population doubled, reports a study on the impact of humans on declining animal numbers.
This decline matters because of the enormous benefits invertebrates such as insects, spiders, crustaceans, slugs and worms bring to our day-to-day lives, including pollination and pest control for crops, decomposition for nutrient cycling, water filtration and human health. (more…)
Lab climate expert is a lead author on the National Climate Assessment.
By the end of this century climate change will result in more frequent and more extreme heat, more drought, and fewer extremes in cold weather in the United States. Average high temperatures could climb as much as 10 or more degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of the country. These are some of the projections made by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) climate scientist Michael Wehner and his co-authors on the National Climate Assessment (NCA). (more…)
With a $3.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, a UA-led international collaboration studies how microbes release greenhouse gases as they gain access to nutrients in the soil thawing under the influence of warmer global temperatures.
The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $3.9 million to an international collaboration led by University of Arizona ecologists Scott Saleska and Virginia Rich to study how microbes release greenhouse gases as they access nutrients in thawing permafrost soils under the influence of a warmer climate. (more…)
Scientists find surprising new answers in wetlands such as the Everglades
Scientists have uncovered one of nature’s long-kept secrets–the true fate of charcoal in the world’s soils.
The ability to determine the fate of charcoal is critical to knowledge of the global carbon budget, which in turn can help understand and mitigate climate change.
However, until now, researchers only had scientific guesses about what happens to charcoal once it’s incorporated into soil. They believed it stayed there.
Surprisingly, most of these researchers were wrong. (more…)
As big data access shifts to the masses, The Weather Company and other top global companies are showing the world how it’s done.
REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 12, 2012 —Big data is changing the way organizations do business, make discoveries, and interact with each other. In fact, pundits are predicting that 2013 will be the year organizations across a range of industries begin implementing big data strategies, or face obsolescence. As David Selinger wrote in a recent article on Forbes online: “If executives don’t find a way to trap, tame, and train their data monsters, they’ll be extinct in two years—fossils who’ve missed the new world order.”
Microsoft believes that big data has the power to drive practical and theoretical insights that have eluded people to date. In the past, high costs and technology limitations have constrained access to data storage infrastructure and the tools needed to manage and analyze large quantities of data. This is finally starting to change. (more…)
UD-Stanford team calculates maximum global energy potential from wind
Wind turbines could power half the world’s future energy demands with minimal environmental impact, according to new research published by University of Delaware and Stanford University scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers arrived at the determination by calculating the maximum theoretical potential of wind power worldwide, taking into account the effects that numerous wind turbines would have on surface temperatures, water vapor, atmospheric circulations and other climatic considerations.
“Wind power is very safe from the climate point of view,” said Cristina Archer, associate professor of geography and physical ocean science and engineering at UD. (more…)
Nearly one-third of CO2 emissions due to human activities enters the world’s oceans. By reacting with seawater, CO2 increases the water’s acidity, which may significantly reduce the calcification rate of such marine organisms as corals and mollusks, resulting in the potential loss of ecosystems. The extent to which human activities have raised the surface level of acidity, however, has been difficult to detect on regional scales because it varies naturally from one season and one year to the next, and between regions, and direct observations go back only 30 years.
By combining computer modeling with observations, an international team of scientists concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions, resulting from the influence of human beings, over the last 100 to 200 years have already raised ocean acidity far beyond the range of natural variations. The study is published in the January 22, 2012 online issue of Nature Climate Change. (more…)
