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What are Future Climate Projections for Precipitation and Temperature for Your County?

By Guest PostDecember 12, 2013Environmentcharacterizing climate change, climate change, climate model, climate model simulations, future climate projections, hydrologic unit, intercomparison project, jay alder, map, matthew larsen, mitigation purpose, NASA, oregon state university, precipitation, steve hostetler, temperature, usgs, your county

USGS Website Lets You See

For the first time, maps and summaries of historical and projected temperature and precipitation changes for the 21^st century for the continental U.S. are accessible at a county-by-county level on a website developed by the U.S. Geological Survey in collaboration with the College of Earth, Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.

The maps and summaries are based on NASA downscaling of the 33 climate models used in the 5^th Climate Model Intercomparison Project and the current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report. The resulting NASA dataset is on an 800-meter grid with national coverage. (more…)

NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft Obtains Best Views of Saturn Hexagon

By Guest PostDecember 7, 2013Scienceandrew ingersoll, antarctic ozone hole, atmosphere, ball of gas, best views, cassini spacecraft, cloud structures, earth, european space agency, hampton university, hexagon boundary, hurricane, ice caps, italian space agency, kunio sayanagi, motion, NASA, north pole, ozone destroying chemical, rotating storm, saturn, saturn hexagon, saturn summer, scott edgington, solar system, the hexagon, types of particles, virginia, weather patterns

Embedded video from
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn’s north pole. (more…)

Do Black Holes Come in Size Medium?

By Guest PostNovember 29, 2013Scienceblack holes, circinus spiral galaxy, dominic walton, exotic phenomenon, galactic landscape, hearts of galaxies, high energy xrays, immense gravity, Japan, largest black holes, matteo bachetti, NASA, nustar, open issue, size medium, suzaku satellite, topsy turvy galaxy, ulxs, xrays

Black holes can be petite, with masses only about 10 times that of our sun — or monstrous, boasting the equivalent in mass up to 10 billion suns. Do black holes also come in size medium? NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, is busy scrutinizing a class of black holes that may fall into the proposed medium-sized category.

“Exactly how intermediate-sized black holes would form remains an open issue,” said Dominic Walton of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. “Some theories suggest they could form in rich, dense clusters of stars through repeated mergers, but there are a lot of questions left to be answered.” (more…)

Curiosity Resumes Science after Analysis of Voltage Issue

By Guest PostNovember 26, 2013Scienceanalysis, cumberland, curiosity, data, electrical shorts, electrical system, engineering data, mars rover curiosity, mechanical frame, microbial life, multi mission radioisotope, NASA, rob zimmerman, robotic arm, Science, thermoelectric generator, voltage issue

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity resumed full science operations on Saturday, Nov. 23.

Activities over the weekend included use of Curiosity’s robotic arm to deliver portions of powdered rock to a laboratory inside the rover. The powder has been stored in the arm since the rover collected it by drilling into the target rock “Cumberland” six months ago. Several portions of the powder have already been analyzed. The laboratory has flexibility for examining duplicate samples in different ways. (more…)

NASA Helps Melt Secrets of Great Lakes Ice

By Guest PostNovember 15, 2013Environmentcanadian economy, ers 2, european, george leshkevich, great lakes ice, icebreaker, icebreaking ship, lake superior, major ice type, melt secrets, NASA, noaa, remote sensing satellite, satellite observation, son nghiem, US, us coast guard

Two scientists from NASA and NOAA have developed a new space-based technique for monitoring the ice cover of the Great Lakes that is so accurate it can identify a narrow channel of open water cut through the ice by an icebreaker — even at night.

“In the dark, it’s difficult to read a map that’s right in front of you,” said Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., one of the developers of the new technique. “Yet we now have a way to use satellite radars almost 500 miles [800 kilometers] out in space to see through clouds and darkness and map ice across the Great Lakes.” (more…)

Spitzer and ALMA Reveal a Star’s Bubbly Birth

By Guest PostNovember 11, 2013Sciencealberto noriega crespo, alma, atacama large millimeter, bouncing baby, bubbly birth, Chile, hector arce, herbig haro, hh objects, NASA, spitzer, spitzer space telescope, star, star making, submillimeter array, yale university

It’s a bouncing baby . . . star! Combined observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the newly completed Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile have revealed the throes of stellar birth as never before in the well-studied object known as HH 46/47.

Herbig-Haro (HH) objects form when jets shot out by newborn stars collide with surrounding material, producing small, bright, nebulous regions. To our eyes, the dynamics within many HH objects are obscured by enveloping gas and dust. But the infrared and submillimeter wavelengths of light seen by Spitzer and ALMA, respectively, pierce the dark cosmic cloud around HH 46/47 to let us in on the action. (more…)

Watching Earth’s Winds, On a Shoestring

By Guest PostOctober 30, 2013Scienceatmosphere, climate, earth, earth science mission, el niño, ernesto rodríguez, european ascat scatterometer, hazard for populations, hurricane, interaction, international space station, iss rapidscat, low energy microwave, michael suffredini, microwave energy, NASA, ocean, rapid scatterometer, scatterometer satellite mission, seasat satellite, simon collins, sun synchronous orbit, tropical cyclone

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. (more…)

Ghostly Specter Haunts the ‘Coldest Place in the Universe’

By Guest PostOctober 26, 2013Sciencealma, alma data, atacama large millimeter, big bang, boomerang nebula, coldest place, constellation centaurus, dwarf stars, ghost like appearance, ghostly specter haunts, lars ake nyman, NASA, patrick huggins, planetary nebula, raghvendra sahai, submillimeter array, telescope in chile, ultra cold object, universe, visible wavelengths, wouter vlemmings

At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang nebula is the coldest known object in the universe — colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, the explosive event that created the cosmos.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile have taken a new look at this object to learn more about its frigid properties and to determine its true shape, which has an eerily ghost-like appearance. (more…)

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