tagged w/ evaporation
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Climate scientists have been saying for years that one of the many downsides of a warming planet is that both droughts and torrential rains are both likely to get worse. That’s what climate models predict, and that’s what observers have noted, most recently in the IPCC’s report on extreme weather, released last month. It makes physical sense, too. A warmer atmosphere can absorb more water vapor, and what goes up must come down — and thanks to prevailing winds, it won’t come down in the same place.
The idea of changes to the so-called hydrologic cycle, in short, hangs together pretty well. According to a new paper just published in Science, however, the picture is flawed in one important and disturbing way. Based on measurements gathered around the world from 1950-2000, a team of researchers from Australia and the U.S. has concluded that the hydrologic cycle is indeed changing. Wet areas are getting wetter and dry areas are getting drier. But it’s happening about twice as fast as anyone thought, and that could mean big trouble for places like Australia, which has already been experiencing crushing drought in recent years.
More than 3,000 robotic profiling floats provide crucial information on upper layers of the world's ocean currents. Credit: Alicia Navidad/CSIRO.
The reason for this disconnect between expectation and reality is that the easiest place to collect rainfall data is on land, where scientists and rain gauges are located. About 71 percent of the world is covered in ocean, however. “Most of the action, however, takes place over the sea,” lead author Paul Durack, a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in a telephone interview. In order to get a more comprehensive look at how water is exchanged between the surface and the atmosphere, that’s where Durack and his colleagues went to look.
Nobody has rainfall data from the ocean, so Durack and his collaborators looked instead at salinity — that is, saltiness — in ocean waters. The reasoning is straightforward enough. When water evaporates from the surface of the ocean, it leaves the salt behind. That makes increased saltiness a good proxy for drought. When fresh water rains back down on the ocean, it dilutes the seawater, so decreased saltiness is the equivalent of a land-based flood.
Fortunately, as the scientists make clear, research ships have been taking salinity measurements for decades in most of the planet’s ocean basins, so it’s possible to see where and how fast salinity has been changing. And it turns out that the saltiness has been increasing, especially in the waters surrounding Australia, southern Africa and western South America — all places where drought has increased as well.
The climate models weren’t really wrong, Durack hastened to add. “They’re accurately capturing the spatial patterns in hydrologic changes, and they’ve got the basic physics right. They’re just providing very conservative estimates of how big the changes are, and now we’re starting to understand that.”
More at the linkClimate scientists have been saying for years that one of the many downsides of a... more
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Still reeling from last year's devastating drought that led to at least $10 billion in agricultural losses across Texas and the South, the nation is enduring another unusually parched year.
A mostly dry, mild winter has put nearly 61% of the lower 48 states in "abnormally dry" or drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly federal tracking of drought. That's the highest percentage of dry or drought conditions since September 2007, when 61.5% of the country was listed in those categories.
Only two states — Ohio and Alaska — are entirely free of abnormally dry or drought conditions, according to the Drought Monitor.
The drought is expanding into some areas where dryness is rare, such as New England.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, stream levels are at near-record or record lows in much of New England. The Drought Monitor lists all of Vermont as "abnormally dry," just six months after the state's wettest August on record that stemmed mainly from disastrous flooding by the remnants of Hurricane Irene.
The rest of the East is also very dry. "Georgia is one area we'll really have to watch," says meteorologist David Miskus of the Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Md. More than 63% of the state is now in the worst two levels of drought, the highest percentage of any state.
Wildfires and brush fires have been common along the East Coast from New England to Florida in recent weeks because of wind and the unusual dryness.
The Southwest and Southeast had a very dry winter, but the southern Plains, including eastern Texas, had a much wetter winter than expected, Miskus says. The rain eased drought conditions in eastern Texas. The state dropped from 100% in the four categories of drought in late September to 64% this week. Much of western Texas remains in extreme to exceptional drought.
Trouble also looms for water-dependent California. The state Department of Water Resources announced last week that water content in California's mountain snowpack is 45% below normal.Still reeling from last year's devastating drought that led to at least $10... more
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This winter's heavy snowfalls and other extreme storms could well be related to increased moisture in the air due to global climate change, a panel of scientists said on Tuesday.
This extra moisture is likely to bring on extraordinary flooding with the onset of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, as deep snowpack melts and expected heavy rains add to seasonal run-off, the scientists said in a telephone briefing.
As the planet warms up, more water from the oceans is evaporated into the atmosphere, said Todd Sanford, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. At the same time, because the atmosphere is warmer, it can hold onto more of the moisture that it takes in.
Intense storms are often the result when the atmosphere reaches its saturation point, Sanford said.
This year, a series of heavy storms over the U.S. Midwest to the Northeast have dropped up to 400 percent of average snows in some locations, said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground.
The amount of water in that snowpack is among the highest on record, Masters said.
"If you were to take all that water and melt it, it would come out to more than 6 inches over large swaths of the area," Masters said. "If all that water gets unleashed in a hurry, in a sudden warming, and some heavy rains in the area, we could be looking at record flooding along the Upper Mississippi River and the Red River in North Dakota."
That tallies with projections by the U.S. National Weather Service, which last month said a large stretch of the north central United States is at risk of moderate to major flooding this spring.
SPRING CREEP
Spring floods could be exacerbated by spring creep, a phenomenon where spring begins earlier than previously.
"We've documented in the mountains of the U.S. West that the spring runoff pulse now comes between one and three weeks earlier than it used to 60 years ago," Masters said. "And that's because of warmer temperatures tending to melt that snowpack earlier and earlier."
In the last century, global average temperatures have risen by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (.8 Celsius). Last year tied for the warmest in the modern record. One place this warmth showed up was in the Arctic, which is a major weather-maker for the Northern Hemisphere, according to Mark Serreze, director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.
One driver of this winter's "crazy weather," Serreze said, is an atmospheric pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation, which has moved into what climate scientists call a negative phase.
This phase means there is high pressure over the Arctic and low pressure at mid-latitudes, which makes the Arctic zone relatively warm, but spills cold Arctic air southward to places like the U.S. Midwest and Northeast.
This negative Arctic Oscillation has been evident for two years in a row, the same two winters that have had extreme storms and heavy snowfalls.
It is possible, but not certain, that the negative Arctic Oscillation is linked to warming of the Arctic, which is in turn influenced by a decrease in sea ice cover throughout the region.
The only underlying explanation for these events is climate warming due to heightened greenhouse gas levels, Serreze said.This winter's heavy snowfalls and other extreme storms could well be related to... more
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Drought conditions across Somalia are likely to cause further loss of life if nothing is done.A serious shortage of food as a result of a severe drought is driving a large number of Somali herders into the capital.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Friday that the drought is getting worse in the southwestern region of Gedo, where local residents are in dire need of water, food, and medical aid.
The UN body noted that many people have left Somalia's Middle and Lower Shabelle regions and are arriving in the suburbs of Mogadishu every day.
The regions worst affected by the drought are the areas bordering northeastern Kenya and southeastern Ethiopia, such as the villages of Wanlaweyne, Toro-torow, Furuqleey, Farsooleey, and Dugulle in the Shabelle regions.
At least 12,000 people have been displaced by the worsening drought in many parts of Somalia, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
The UN's food agency, the World Food Program, is appealing for donors to provide tons of food in order to halt a humanitarian tragedy and to stop more people from leaving their homes in the hardest-hit areas.
In some villages in central Somalia, men have left their families behind and have headed for the city seeking food.
About 2.5 million people need food aid across Somalia, according to the World Food Program.Drought conditions across Somalia are likely to cause further loss of life if nothing... more
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Droughts have wiped out plants that would have absorbed the carbon equivalent of all the man-made greenhouse gas emissions from the UK every year. Photograph: Patrick Pleul/EPA
Rising temperatures in the past decade have reduced the ability of the world's plants to soak up carbon from the atmosphere, scientists said today.
Large-scale droughts have wiped out plants that would have otherwise absorbed an amount of carbon equivalent to Britain's annual man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists measure the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed by plants and turned into biomass as a quantity known as the net primary production. NPP increased from 1982 to 1999 as temperatures rose and there was more solar radiation.
But the period from 2000 to 2009 reverses that trend – surprising some scientists. Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running of the University of Montana estimate that there has been a global reduction in NPP of 0.55 gigatonnes (Gt). In comparison, the UK's contribution to annual worldwide carbon dioxide emissions was 0.56Gt in 2007, while global aviation industry made up around 0.88Gt (3%) of the world total of 29.3Gt that year, according to UN data.
The researchers used data from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (Modis) on board Nasa's Terra satellite, combined with global climate data to measure the change in global NPP over the past decade.
"The past decade has been the warmest since instrumental measurements began, which could imply continued increases in NPP," wrote Zhao and Running in the journal Science.
But instead of helping plants grow, these rising temperatures instead caused droughts and water stresses, particularly in the southern hemisphere and in rainforests, which contain most of the world's plant biomass. The growth there has been curtailed by lack of water and increased respiration, which returns carbon to the atmosphere. These problems counteracted any increases in NPP seen at the high latitudes and elevations in the northern hemisphere.
Reduced plant matter not only reduces the world's natural ability to manage carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but could also lead to problems with growing more crops to feed rising populations or make sustainable biofuels.
"Under a changing climate, severe regional droughts have become more frequent, a trend expected to continue for the foreseeable future," said the researchers. "The warming-associated heat and drought not only decrease NPP, but also may trigger many more ecosystem disturbances, releasing carbon to the atmosphere. Reduced NPP potentially threatens global food security and future biofuel production and weakens the terrestrial carbon sink."
The researchers conclude that further monitoring will be needed to confirm whether the decrease in NPP they have observed in the past decade is an anomaly or whether it signals a turning point to a future decline in the world's ability to sequester carbon dioxide.Droughts have wiped out plants that would have absorbed the carbon equivalent of all... more
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By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
A dire report prepared for President Medvedev by Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources is warning today that the British Petroleum (BP) oil and gas leak in the Gulf of Mexico is about to become the worst environmental catastrophe in all of human history threatening the entire eastern half of the North American continent with “total destruction”.
Russian scientists are basing their apocalyptic destruction assessment due to BP’s use of millions of gallons of the chemical dispersal agent known as Corexit 9500 which is being pumped directly into the leak of this wellhead over a mile under the Gulf of Mexico waters and designed, this report says, to keep hidden from the American public the full, and tragic, extent of this leak that is now estimated to be over 2.9 million gallons a day.
The dispersal agent Corexit 9500 is a solvent originally developed by Exxon and now manufactured by the Nalco Holding Company of Naperville, Illinois that is four times more toxic than oil (oil is toxic at 11 ppm (parts per million), Corexit 9500 at only 2.61ppm). In a report written by Anita George-Ares and James R. Clark for Exxon Biomedical Sciences, Inc. titled “Acute Aquatic Toxicity of Three Corexit Products: An Overview” Corexit 9500 was found to be one of the most toxic dispersal agents ever developed. Even worse, according to this report, with higher water temperatures, like those now occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, its toxicity grows.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in discovering BP’s use of this dangerous dispersal agent ordered BP to stop using it, but BP refused stating that their only alternative to Corexit 9500 was an even more dangerous dispersal agent known as Sea Brat 4.
The main differences between Corexit 9500 and Sea Brat 4 lie in how long these dangerous chemicals take to degrade into their constituent organic compounds, which for Corexit 9500 is 28 days. Sea Brat 4, on the other hand, degrades into an organic chemical called Nonylphenol that is toxic to aquatic life and can persist in the environment for years.
A greater danger involving Corexit 9500, and as outlined by Russian scientists in this report, is that with its 2.61ppm toxicity level, and when combined with the heating Gulf of Mexico waters, its molecules will be able to “phase transition” from their present liquid to a gaseous state allowing them to be absorbed into clouds and allowing their release as “toxic rain” upon all of Eastern North America.
Even worse, should a Katrina like tropical hurricane form in the Gulf of Mexico while tens of millions of gallons of Corexit 9500 are sitting on, or near, its surface the resulting “toxic rain” falling upon the North American continent could “theoretically” destroy all microbial life to any depth it reaches resulting in an “unimaginable environmental catastrophe” destroying all life forms from the “bottom of the evolutionary chart to the top”.
Note: For molecules of a liquid to evaporate, they must be located near the surface, be moving in the proper direction, and have sufficient kinetic energy to overcome liquid-phase intermolecular forces. Only a small proportion of the molecules meet these criteria, so the rate of evaporation is limited. Since the kinetic energy of a molecule is proportional to its temperature, evaporation proceeds more quickly at higher temperatures.
As over 50 miles of the US State of Louisiana’s coastline has already been destroyed by this spill, American scientists are warning that the damage may be impossible to repair, and as we can read as reported by the Associated Press News Service:
“The gooey oil washing into the maze of marshes along the Gulf Coast could prove impossible to remove, leaving a toxic stew lethal to fish and wildlife, government officials and independent scientists said. Officials are considering some drastic and risky solutions: They could set the wetlands on fire or flood areas in hopes of floating out the oil. They warn an aggressive cleanup could ruin the marshes and do more harm than good.”
And to understand the full import of this catastrophe it must be remembered that this disaster is occurring in what is described as the “biologically richest waters in America” with the greatest amount of oil and toxic Corexit 9500 set to come ashore in the coming days and weeks to destroy it completely for decades to come.
Reports are also coming from the United States that their government is secretly preparing to evacuate tens-of-millions of their citizens from their Gulf of Mexico States should the most dire of these scientific warnings start to come true.
To the greatest lesson to be learned by these Americans is that their government-oil industry cabal has been just as destructive to them as their government-banking one, both of which have done more to destroy the United States these past couple of years than any foreign enemy could dare dream was possible.
But to their greatest enemy the Americans need look no further than their nearest mirror as they are the ones who allowed these monsters to rule over them in the first place.
www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1374.htm
© May 23, 2010 EU and US all rights reserved
[Ed. Note: Western governments and their intelligence services actively campaign against the information found in these reports so as not to alarm their citizens about the many catastrophic Earth changes and events to come, a stance that the Sisters of Sorcha Faal strongly disagrees with in believing that it is every human beings right to know the truth. Due to our missions conflicts with that of those governments, the responses of their ‘agents’ against us has been a longstanding misinformation/misdirection campaign designed to discredit and which is addressed in the report “Who Is Sorcha Faal?”.]By: Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers
A dire report prepared... more
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How the Yogee Is Able To Survive Purely On The Air! - TRCB: http://bit.ly/bBcH6E via @addthisHow the Yogee Is Able To Survive Purely On The Air! - TRCB: http://bit.ly/bBcH6E via... more
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"THERE is a lot of water on Earth, but more than 97% of it is salty and over half of the remainder is frozen at the poles or in glaciers. Meanwhile, around a fifth of the world’s population suffers from a shortage of drinking water and that fraction is expected to grow.
One answer is desalination—but it is an expensive answer because it requires a lot of energy. Now, though, a pair of Canadian engineers have come up with an ingenious way of using the heat of the sun to drive the process. Such heat, in many places that have a shortage of fresh water, is one thing that is in abundant supply."
One more excerpt:
"Moreover, the only electricity needed is the small amount required to pump the streams of water through the apparatus. All the rest of the energy has come free, via the air, from the sun."
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14743791
At the article they explain that this method would only use less than 1 kWh of electricity to produce fresh water and no other paid-for source of power is needed.
In contrast with the current desalination methods:
Heating the water and Reverse osmosis.
They require 3.7 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy to produce 1,000 litres of drinking water.
This shows me how creativity can accomplish innovation and with some tweaking and further research, we could suddenly get hit with a revolutionary invention.
What do you think?"THERE is a lot of water on Earth, but more than 97% of it is salty and over half... more
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At the end of every year, after the monsoon rains, Noor Hossain dismantles his houseboat on the Bangladeshi delta and heads to the mainland. This time he will not be coming back.
Hossain is one of about 800,000 river gypsies, known locally as bedey, who for generations have lived on the nation's waterways between May and December, and on land for the rest of the year.
But now he has decided to give up his nomadic lifestyle because he says the rivers are increasingly erratic and impossible to navigate -- which experts attribute to effects of climate change and upstream development.
For Hossain, who wears only a "lunghi" cloth wrapped around his waist, it means an end of the eight-month season during which he and the families of his four children paddled two rickety bamboo houseboats across the vast delta.
"Many rivers, canals and streams are drying up. We can no longer get to remote areas and without that, we can't make a living," said Hossain, 48, who earns some income diving for jewellery lost by women bathing.
He also catches fish, mainly for his own family's consumption, while his wife and two daughters-in-law are the biggest income earners, selling ornaments and offering herbal treatments for toothache.
Although there is no caste-system in Bangladesh, bedeys are on the bottom rung of society and almost all are illiterate and desperately poor.
They mostly survive by being skilled snake charmers or by selling ornaments, traditional medicine and cosmetics in villages. Some Bangladeshis believe they also have secret healing powers.
But, according to Grambangla Unnayan Committee, a Dhaka-based charity, Bangladesh's bedey community could disappear within a few decades as they abandon their annual migration between land and water.
"The shift to the mainland is happening at a speedy rate. Just 15 years ago, all bedeys were based on water. Pretty soon we may not have any gypsies on our rivers," said A.K.M Maksud, the charity's head.
He said that in the past decade alone 250,000 bedeys had been forced off the water and predicted that within two years 90 percent of gypsies would have to live on land permanently.
Retired history professor Jainal Abedin Khan, who has written books about bedeys, said that they arrived in Bangladesh in the 17th century when the region was part of the Mughal empire.
"They originally hail from what is now Myanmar but they moved across into the delta," he said. "They are a huge part of folklore here, and are the origin of many myths and legends."
Low-lying Bangladesh has one of the world's largest water networks, criss-crossed by 700 rivers, tributaries and canals which cover 24,000 kilometres (15,000 miles) or seven percent of the country's surface.At the end of every year, after the monsoon rains, Noor Hossain dismantles his... more
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