Philippine agencies to map dengue outbreaks

GMA News (Philipppines): Can dengue fever outbreaks be predicted? Science officials in the Philippines think so. With the country in the grips of dengue fever, the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and the state weather bureau have launched a study that will enable health authorities to predict dengue outbreaks in the future.



Science Undersecretary Graciano Yumul Jr. said there might be a correlation between changes in weather, temperature, rainfall, and the location of the dengue fever surges in the country. Yumul said the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), the government meteorological agency, is currently conducting a review of its past data on weather variations, rainfall amount, and temperature changes.



These data will be cross-checked with information on dengue outbreaks and other infectious diseases that plagued the country in the past years. Yumul said the above-average rainfall that the country is experiencing due to climate change may increase the number of infectious diseases carried by mosquitoes and worms, creatures that thrive in damp climates and dirty environments.



“We have a dengue project. We are looking at dengue and its possible correlation with temperature and precipitation," he said in a phone interview yesterday. With enough information on, “maybe it will be possible to forecast it," he added. Yumul said there was a Pagasa and Department of Health studies in the past that showed the relationship between tropical diseases and weather. The study is being updated and will include information on malaria, another fatal mosquito-borne infectious disease, and parasitic worm illnesses, which affect children and the urban poor population....



A TEM micrograph showing Dengue virus virions (the cluster of dark dots near the center). From the Centers for Disease Control

Newly discovered Icelandic current could change climate picture

Terra Daily: If you'd like to cool off fast in hot summer weather, take a dip in a newly discovered ocean current called the North Icelandic Jet (NIJ). You'd need to be far, far below the sea's surface near Iceland, however, to reach it. Scientists have confirmed the presence of the NIJ, a deep-ocean circulation system off Iceland. It could significantly influence the ocean's response to climate change.



The NIJ contributes to a key component of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), critically important for regulating Earth's climate. As part of the planet's reciprocal relationship between ocean circulation and climate, the AMOC transports warm surface water to high latitudes where the water warms the air, then cools, sinks and returns toward the equator as a deep flow.



Crucial to this warm-to-cold oceanographic choreography is the Denmark Strait Overflow Water (DSOW), the largest of the deep, overflow plumes that feed the lower limb of the AMOC and return the dense water south through gaps in the Greenland-Scotland Ridge.



For years it has been thought that the primary source of the Denmark Overflow was a current adjacent to Greenland known as the East Greenland Current. However, this view was recently called into question by two oceanographers from Iceland who discovered a deep current flowing southward along the continental slope of Iceland. They named the current the North Icelandic Jet and hypothesized that it formed a significant part of the overflow water....



Northern part of Denmark Strait showing the location of the newly discovered deep current in relation to the known existing pathway of dense water. (Graphic by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Thawing permafrost could release vast amounts of carbon and accelerate climate change by the end of this century

Dan Krotz in the Lawrence Berkeley National Labotatory News: Billions of tons of carbon trapped in high-latitude permafrost may be released into the atmosphere by the end of this century as the Earth’s climate changes, further accelerating global warming, a new computer modeling study indicates. The study also found that soil in high-latitude regions could shift from being a sink to a source of carbon dioxide by the end of the 21st century as the soil warms in response to climate change.



The research was led by Charles Koven of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). He conducted the research with a team of scientists from France, Canada, and the United Kingdom while he was a postdoctoral researcher at France’s Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement. The modeling was conducted at a supercomputing facility run by France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission.



...Their findings counter results from a comparison of models that was included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 fourth assessment report. The comparison found that climate change will spark a growth in high-latitude vegetation, which will pull in more carbon from the atmosphere than thawing permafrost will release.



But unlike earlier models, the new model includes detailed processes of how carbon accumulates in high-latitude soil over millennia, and how it’s released as permafrost thaws. Because it includes these processes, the model begins with much more carbon in the soil than previous models. It also better represents the carbon’s vulnerability to decomposition as the soil warms.



As a result, the new model found that the increase in carbon uptake by more vegetation will be overshadowed by a much larger amount of carbon released into the atmosphere. “Including permafrost processes turns out to be very important,” says Koven, who joined Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division as a staff scientist earlier this year. “Previous models tended to dramatically underestimate the amount of soil carbon at high latitudes because they lacked the processes of how carbon builds up in soil. Our model starts off with more carbon in the soil, so there is much more to lose with global warming.”...



A sink becomes a source, as revealed by these two simulations of net CO2 fluxes due to climate change at the end of 21st century. The control simulation on the left did not include permafrost processes. The permafrost simulation on the right included processes that depict how carbon accumulates in soil and how it decomposes. In the latter simulation, large carbon losses are seen in central Canada where substantial permafrost stocks exist that are vulnerable to warming. Units are in grams of carbon per square meter per year.

Nepal dams won't stop Indian floods

Joydeep Gupta in China Dialogue: “Every monsoon when there is a flood in Bihar, including this year right now, local politicians blame Nepal and the lack of dams there” For decades, Indian planners working to harness the waters of the Ganges and its tributaries have believed building dams in Nepal will save Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh from the floods that occur almost every year. A recent comprehensive study led by the World Bank says this belief is no more than a myth.



The belief was that there were substantial upstream reservoir storage possibilities in the Ganges basin that straddles India, Nepal and Bangladesh. But the Ganges Strategic Basin Assessment (SBA) coordinated by the World Bank and carried out by experts in the region has found that the largest 23 dams that have been conceived would only hold an additional 13 percent of the annual flow of water. The preliminary findings of the SBA have been presented to government officials in all three countries and were unveiled in public at the World Water Week in Stockholm.



The experts working with the South Asia Water Initiative (SAWI) coordinated by the World Bank found that in terms of flood control, there would be little basin-wide effect of upstream storage, and that effects were unlikely at the sub-basin level either. The models – developed by the Institute of Water Management in Bangladesh, the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and RMSI, a consultancy firm in India, and vetted by SAWI experts – showed that at the sub-basin level, the dams would reduce peak flows, but would not necessarily reduce floods. Most rivers in the basin are largely embanked, and local rainfall and embankment failures cause the most flooding, the study found....



Bihar flooding in 2008, shot by Sharada Prasad, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Measurements at California pier reveal extent of leakage from damaged Fukushima reactor

University of Califorinia at San Diego: Atmospheric chemists at the University of California, San Diego, report the first quantitative measurement of the amount of radiation leaked from the damaged nuclear reactor in Fukushima, Japan, following the devastating earthquake and tsunami earlier this year.



Their estimate, reported August 15 in the early, online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on a signal sent across the Pacific Ocean when operators of the damaged reactor had to resort to cooling overheated fuel with seawater. “In any disaster, there’s always a lot to be learned by analysis of what happened,” said senior author Mark Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at UC San Diego. “We were able to say how many neutrons were leaking out of that core when it was exposed.”



On March 28, 2011, 15 days after operators began pumping seawater into the damaged reactors and pools holding spent fuel, Thiemens’ group observed an unprecedented spike in the amount of radioactive sulfur in the air in La Jolla, California. They recognized that the signal came from the crippled power plant.



Neutrons and other products of the nuclear reaction leak from fuel rods when they melt. Seawater pumped into the reactor absorbed those neutrons, which collided with chloride ions in the saltwater. Each collision knocked a proton out of the nucleus of a chloride atom, transforming the atom to a radioactive form of sulfur.



When the water hit the hot reactors, nearly all of it vaporized into steam. To prevent explosions of the accumulating hydrogen, operators vented the steam, along with the radioactive sulfur, into the atmosphere. In air, sulfur reacts with oxygen to form sulfur dioxide gas and then sulfate particles. Both blew across the Pacific Ocean on prevailing westerly winds to an instrument at the end of the pier at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography where Thiemens’ group continuously monitors atmospheric sulfur.



Using a model based on NOAA’s observations of atmospheric conditions at the time, the team determined the path air took on its way to the pier over the preceding 10 days and found that it led back to Fukushima....



Air laden with radioactive sulfur can be traced to the source near the Fukushima reactor in Japan using data collected by NOAA. Image Credit: Gerardo Dominguez

NASA research leads to first complete map of Antarctic ice flow

NASA: NASA-funded researchers have created the first complete map of the speed and direction of ice flow in Antarctica. The map, which shows glaciers flowing thousands of miles from the continent's deep interior to its coast, will be critical for tracking future sea-level increases from climate change. The team created the map using integrated radar observations from a consortium of international satellites.



"This is like seeing a map of all the oceans' currents for the first time. It's a game changer for glaciology," said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California (UC), Irvine. Rignot is lead author of a paper about the ice flow published online Thursday in Science Express. "We are seeing amazing flows from the heart of the continent that had never been described before."



Rignot and UC Irvine scientists Jeremie Mouginot and Bernd Scheuchl used billions of data points captured by European, Japanese and Canadian satellites to weed out cloud cover, solar glare and land features masking the glaciers. With the aid of NASA technology, the team painstakingly pieced together the shape and velocity of glacial formations, including the previously uncharted East Antarctica, which comprises 77 percent of the continent.



Like viewers of a completed jigsaw puzzle, the scientists were surprised when they stood back and took in the full picture. They discovered a new ridge splitting the 5.4 million-square-mile (14 million-square-kilometer) landmass from east to west.



The team also found unnamed formations moving up to 800 feet (244 meters) annually across immense plains sloping toward the Antarctic Ocean and in a different manner than past models of ice migration.



"The map points out something fundamentally new: that ice moves by slipping along the ground it rests on," said Thomas Wagner, NASA's cryospheric program scientist in Washington. "That's critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise. It means that if we lose ice at the coasts from the warming ocean, we open the tap to massive amounts of ice in the interior."...



First complete map of the speed and direction of ice flow in Antarctica, derived from radar interferometric data from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's ALOS PALSAR, the European Space Agency's Envisat ASAR and ERS-1/2, and the Canadian Space Agency's RADARSAT-2 spacecraft. The color-coded satellite data are overlaid on a mosaic of Antarctica created with data from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft. Pixel spacing is 984 feet (300 meters). The thick black lines delineate major ice divides. Subglacial lakes in Antarctica's interior are also outlined in black. Thick black lines along the coast indicate ice sheet grounding lines.

Fudging in greenhouse gas stats?

EMPA, which is part of ETH (Switzerland): Fluorinated hydrocarbons are potent greenhouse gases, emission of which must be reduced under the Kyoto Protocol. If you rely on the official reports of the participating countries, the output of trifluoromethane (HFC-23) in Western Europe is indeed significantly decreasing. However, pollutant measurements carried out by Empa now reveal that several countries under-report their emissions. For instance, Italy emits 10 to 20 times more HFC-23 than it officially reports.



International agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) basically have one snag: it is almost impossible to independently verify whether participating countries abide by the agreement. Thus the evaluation of whether or not the countries have achieved their reduction targets is based on the official reports by the countries that are signatories to the UNFCCC (‘United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’). If they report reduced emissions they're sitting pretty; if not, they are pilloried.



This could change soon. Pollutant analyses by Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, – at the Jungfraujoch research station at 3580 metres above sea level, among others – using a special gas chromatograph mass spectrometer called ‘MEDUSA’ not only enables the emission levels of more than 50 halogenated GHG to be quickly and precisely evaluated; they also make it possible to identify the emission sources regionally, thanks to atmospheric and meteorological computer models. The sobering result: Western Europe emits around twice as much HFC-23 as officially reported. A corresponding study was recently published in the journal ‘Geophysical Research Letters’.



“Our results show that these types of measurements really are suitable for checking compliance with international agreements on air pollution control”, says Empa researcher Stefan Reimann from the ‘Air Pollution/Environmental Technology’ laboratory. It is true that the Kyoto Protocol did not specify any independent control mechanisms; this could, however, be of central importance in subsequent agreements with binding emission targets...



The Jungfrau in the Swiss Alps, where the atmospheric measurements in this study were taken, shot by Peter Alder, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Scientists pinpoint river flow associated with cholera outbreaks, not just factors related to global warming

American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene: An examination of the world’s largest river basins found nutrient-rich and powerful river discharges led to spikes in the blooms of plankton associated with cholera outbreaks. These increased discharges often occur at times of increased temperature in coastal water, suggesting that predicting global warming's potential temperature effect on cholera will be more complicated than first thought, according to a new study published today in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.



The findings by the authors will help give public health authorities another critical clue toward predicting future outbreaks of cholera based on climatic and environmental models in the hopes of preventing the spread of the deadly and highly infectious disease that currently plagues Haiti and several other countries.



The study began in the Bay of Bengal where researchers aimed to solve a mystery: When sea temperatures rise, phytoplankton—microscopic plants that live in the ocean and provide a food source for zooplankton, with which cholera bacteria are associated—decrease. So why had past studies found sea temperatures rising and numbers of phytoplankton also increasing? The authors analyzed twelve years of data, including images from NASA satellites, and pinpointed the large flows from the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers, carrying nutrients from soil, as the cause of a bloom of phytoplankton. This is followed by zooplankton blooms and thus contributes to outbreaks of cholera.



“We weren’t satisfied with just this result, so we then went to test this finding in other places—the Orinoco (in South America), the Congo, and the Amazon river basins, and we found the same thing: The positive relationship between phytoplankton blooms and ocean temperature is related to large river discharges,” said Shafiqul Islam, PhD, the lead investigator of the study and a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. “The main significance is that finding an association between sea surface temperatures and cholera outbreaks should not lead us to conclude that with global warming, cholera will definitely go up.”



But Islam said that global warming may play a role in other ways in outbreaks of cholera, including contributing to droughts and high salinity intrusion in the dry season and floods in the wet season. Both of those conditions have been found also to contribute to cholera epidemics, as published recently in the journal Water Resources Research. “If river flows are more turbulent, if droughts are more severe, if flood is more severe, cholera is more severe,” he said. “But cholera may not have direct linkage with rising sea surface temperatures.”...



Scanning electron microscope image of Vibrio cholerae bacteria, which infect the digestive system. Shot with a Zeiss DSM 962 SEM (for you gearheads out there), from T.J. Kirn, M.J. Lafferty, C.M.P Sandoe and R.K. Taylor, 2000, "Delineation of pilin domains required for bacterial association into microcolonies and intestinal colonization", Molecular Microbiology, Vol. 35(4):896-910. The Source: http://remf.dartmouth.edu/images/bacteriaSEM/source/1.html. To renew your faith in humanity, the license information at http://remf.dartmouth.edu/imagesindex.html strikes the following Whitmanesque pose: "These images are in the public domain. Do with them what you will."