ESA's biomass satellite goes ahead

A press release from the European Space Agency: Following the initial selection in 2013 for Biomass to become ESA’s seventh Earth Explorer mission and the completion of preparatory activities, ESA Member States yesterday gave the green light for its full implementation for launch in 2020.

The mission addresses one of the most fundamental components in the Earth system: the status and dynamics of tropical forests. Its primary scientific objectives are to determine the distribution of above-ground biomass in these forests and to measure annual changes in this stock over the period of the mission.

The amount of biomass and forest height will be measured at a resolution of 200 m, and forest disturbances such as clear-cutting at a resolution of 50 m, providing an important tool for sustainable forest management.

Studying the world’s tropical biomass is key to our understanding Earth’s climate. The mission will provide the first opportunity to explore Earth’s surface at the ‘P-band’ radar frequency from space. In addition to studying forests, the data are expected to be used for monitoring the ionosphere, glaciers and ice sheets, and for mapping subsurface geology in deserts and surface topography below dense vegetation.

Vines choke a forest's ability to capture carbon

Terra Daily via SPX: Tropical forests are a sometimes-underappreciated asset in the battle against climate change. They cover seven percent of land surface yet hold more than 30 percent of Earth's terrestrial carbon.

As abandoned agricultural land in the tropics is taken over by forests, scientists expect these new forests to mop up industrial quantities of atmospheric carbon. New research by Smithsonian scientists shows increasingly abundant vines could hamper this potential and may even cause tropical forests to lose carbon.

In the first study to experimentally demonstrate that competition between plants can result in ecosystem-wide losses of forest carbon, scientists working in Panama showed that lianas, or woody vines, can reduce net forest biomass accumulation by nearly 20 percent. Researchers called this estimate "conservative" in findings published this month in Ecology.

"This paper represents the first experimental quantification of the effects of lianas on biomass," said lead author Stefan Schnitzer, a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "As lianas increase in tropical forests, they will lower the capacity for tropical forests to accumulate carbon."

Previous research by Schnitzer and others demonstrated that lianas are increasing in tropical forests around the globe. No one knows why. Decreased rainfall is one suspect, but lianas, which are generally more drought-tolerant than trees, are increasing in abundance even in rainforests that have not experienced apparent changes in weather patterns....

Lianas in a forest in Kerala, India, shot by Shyamal, public domain 

Ocean food web key in global carbon cycle

Julie Cohen in the UC Santa Barbara Current: Nothing dies of old age in the ocean. Everything gets eaten and all that remains of anything is waste. But that waste is pure gold to oceanographer David Siegel, director of the Earth Research Institute at UC Santa Barbara.

In a study of the ocean’s role in the global carbon cycle, Siegel and his colleagues used those nuggets to their advantage. They incorporated the lifecycle of phytoplankton and zooplankton — small, often microscopic animals at the bottom of the food chain — into a novel mechanistic model for assessing the global ocean carbon export. Their findings appear online in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

The researchers used satellite observations including determinations of net primary production (NPP) — the net production of organic matter from aqueous carbon dioxide (CO2) by phytoplankton — to drive their food-web-based model. The scientists focused on the ocean’s biological pump, which exports organic carbon from the euphotic zone — the well-lit, upper ocean — through sinking particulate matter, largely from zooplankton feces and aggregates of algae. Once these leave the euphotic zone, sinking into the ocean depths, the carbon can be sequestered for a season or for centuries.

“What we’ve done here is create the first step toward monitoring the strength and efficiency of the biological pump using satellite observations,” said Siegel, who is also a professor of marine science in UCSB’s Department of Geography. “The approach is unique in that previous ways have been empirical without considering the dynamics of the ocean food web.” The space/time patterns created by those empirical approaches are inconsistent with how oceanographers think the oceans should work, he noted.

...“Quantifying this carbon flux is critical for predicting the atmosphere’s response to changing climates,” Siegel said. “By analyzing the scattering signals that we got from satellite measurements of the ocean’s color, we were able to develop techniques to calculate how much of the biomass occurs in very large or very small particles.”

...The researchers are taking their model one step further by planning a major field program designed to better understand the states in which the biological pump operates. “Understanding the biological pump is critical,” Siegel concluded. “We need to understand where carbon goes, how much of it goes into the organic matter, how that affects the air-sea exchanges of CO2 and what happens to fossil fuel we have emitted from our tailpipes.”...

Shown are the links among the ocean’s biological pump and pelagic food web. Light blue waters are the euphotic zone, while the darker blue waters represent the twilight zone. Photo Credit: Courtesy of the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study

Greek economic crisis leads to air pollution crisis

Space Daily via SPX: In the midst of a winter cold snap, a study from researchers in the United States and Greece reveals an overlooked side effect of economic crisis - dangerous air quality caused by burning cheaper fuel for warmth.

The researchers, led by Constantinos Sioutas of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, show that the concentration of fine air particles in one of Greece's economically hardest hit areas has risen 30 percent since the financial crisis began, leading to potential long-term health effects.

These fine particles - measuring less than 2.5 microns in diameter (approximately 1/30th the diameter of a human hair) - are especially dangerous because they can lodge deep into the tissue of lungs, according to the EPA.

"People need to stay warm, but face decreasing employment and rising fuel costs," explained Sioutas, senior author of the study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology and Fred Champion Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the USC Viterbi School. "The problem is economic hardship has compelled residents to burn low quality fuel, such as wood and waste materials, that pollutes the air."...

A smoggy view from the Acropolis, photo by Karol M, retouched by Hekerui, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Researchers constrain the sources of climate- and health-afflicting air pollution from China

Stockholm University News: Particulate air pollution from incomplete combustion is affecting climate over East Asia more than carbon dioxide and cause premature deaths of over half a million annually in China alone, yet its sources have been poorly understood. In this week’s issue of Environmental Science and Technology (journal of the American Chemical Society) a research team from China, Sweden, USA and South Korea use a powerful carbon-14 method to show that four-fifths of the soot particle air pollution are from fossil fuel combustion such as household cooking with coal briquettes and city traffic, drastically changing the view on sources and guiding efforts to mitigate emissions.

The finding improves our understanding of the sources of black carbon (BC; soot) aerosols – a key constituent of air pollution in China – and the most important short-lived climate pollutant. The relative contribution from fossil fuel versus biomass combustion is important to constrain as fossil soot is a stronger climate forcer, penetrates deeper into the respiratory tract and accurate source apportionment is the underpinning of society’s mitigation actions.

Severe air pollution, covering large parts of South and East Asia as Atmospheric Brown Clouds (ABC), originate from incomplete combustion such as household burning of coal and wood fuel, agricultural residue burning, industrial processes and massive traffic. Previous studies, based on uncertain emission factors, spans a wide range but have all suggested a larger role for biomass combustion than what is shown by the now published source-diagnostic characterization of soot in the actual atmosphere over East Asia.

...The rewards of decreasing soot emissions from fossil fuel combustion in China, the world’s largest emitter, may be rapid and sizeable. Globally, soot accounts for roughly half the warming potential of carbon dioxide. Ke Du, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Science Institute of Urban Environment in Xiamen and co-leader of the study, says that while carbon dioxide is the key target for fighting climate change, its levels in the atmosphere respond on a sluggish 100-1000 yr timescale to reductions in emissions. “In contrast, Brown Cloud soot particles only reside in the atmosphere for days-weeks raising the hope for a rapid response of the climate system” explains Du....

Haze and pollution over the East China Sea, image from NASA

ESA's next Earth Explorer satellite will map the tropics

Space Daily via ESA: ESA's Earth Observation Programme Board has selected 'Biomass' to become the seventh Earth Explorer mission. The innovative satellite aims to map and monitor one of Earth's most precious resources. Following the review of three candidate concepts at the Board's meeting, the Biomass mission concept is set to become the next in a series of satellites developed to further our understanding of Earth.

The satellite will be designed to provide, for the first time from space, P-band radar measurements that are optimised to determine the amount of biomass and carbon stored in the world's forests with greater accuracy than ever before.

This information, which is poorly known in the tropics, is essential to our understanding of the role of forests in Earth's carbon cycle and in climate change. Reliable knowledge of tropical forest biomass also underpins the implementation of the UN Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) initiative - an international effort to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and land degradation in developing countries.

In addition, the measurements made by Biomass offer the opportunity to map the elevation of Earth's terrain under dense vegetation, yielding information on subsurface geology and allowing the estimation of glacier and ice-sheet velocities, critical to our understanding of ice-sheet mass loss in a warming Earth....

CO2 removal can lower costs of climate protection

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research: Directly removing CO2 from the air has the potential to alter the costs of climate change mitigation. It could allow prolonging greenhouse-gas emissions from sectors like transport that are difficult, thus expensive, to turn away from using fossil fuels. And it may help to constrain the financial burden on future generations, a study now published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) shows. It focuses on the use of biomass for energy generation, combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS). According to the analysis, carbon dioxide removal could be used under certain requirements to alleviate the most costly components of mitigation, but it would not replace the bulk of actual emissions reductions.

 “Carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere allows to separate emissions control from the time and location of the actual emissions. This flexibility can be important for climate protection,” says lead-author Elmar Kriegler. “You don’t have to prevent emissions in every factory or truck, but could for instance plant grasses that suck CO2 out of the air to grow – and later get processed in bioenergy plants where the CO2 gets stored underground.“

In economic terms, this flexibility allows to lower costs by compensating for emissions which would be most costly to eliminate. “This means that a phase-out of global emissions by the end of the century - that we would need to hold the 2 degree line adopted by the international community - does not necessarily require to eliminate each and every source of emissions,” says Kriegler. “Decisions whether and how to protect future generations from the risks of climate change have to be made today, but the burden of achieving these targets will increase over time. The costs for future generations can be substantially reduced if carbon dioxide removal technologies become available in the long run.”

The study now published is the first to quantify this. If bioenergy plus CCS is available, aggregate mitigation costs over the 21st century might be halved. In the absence of such a carbon dioxide removal strategy, costs for future generations rise significantly, up to a quadrupling of mitigation costs in the period of 2070 to 2090. The calculation was carried out using a computer simulation of the economic system, energy markets, and climate, covering a range of scenarios.

Options for carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere include afforestation and chemical approaches like direct air capture of CO2 from the atmosphere or reactions of CO2 with minerals to form carbonates. But the use of biomass for energy generation combined with carbon capture and storage is less costly than chemical options, as long as sufficient biomass feedstock is available, the scientists point out...

An aerial view of London, Ontario, shot by Adam Colvin, Wikimedia Commons, according to terms of the Free Art License. You will find a specimen of this license on the Copyleft Attitude site as well as on other sites.

New Fischer-Tropsch catalyst invented in Amsterdam

University of Amsterdam News: Inspired by patents from the 1960’s audio cassette recording industry, UvA chemists now developed a new Fischer-Tropsch catalyst. It can be used for the making of synthetic fuels from natural gas and biomass. This week the research on the new nanocobalt-ironoxide catalyst was published as a VIP article in Angewandte Chemie. The catalyst was patented by the Total S.A. oil and gas company.

Roberto Calderone, Raveendran Shiju and Gadi Rothenberg from the Heterogeneous Catalysis and Sustainable Chemistry group (Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences) succeeded in growing nanometer-thin cobalt shells on iron oxide particles. These new materials are excellent Fischer-Tropsch (F-T) catalysts, giving good diesel fractions.

The Fischer-Tropsch process is used for producing fuels from synthesis gas, which in turn is made from natural gas, biomass or coal. The large reserves of shale gas and natural gas currently changing the world energy market have raised interest in F-T technology. But there is a catch: F-T reactors are huge, and typically use hundreds of tons of catalyst.

Cobalt-based catalysts are the optimal choice for synthesizing middle distillate fuels such as diesel and kerosene with F-T technology. But cobalt is also expensive. In 2009 the Total Gaz & Power company contacted Rothenberg’s group to develop a new F-T catalyst together. The UvA researchers took up the challenge to design a cheaper catalyst that can be prepared on a very large scale, yet performs at least as well as pure cobalt.

The UvA team sought to meet these restraints with the so-called surface nucleation of a cobalt phase onto iron oxide colloids. They were inspired by the method that companies such as TDK used in the 1960s for producing magnetic tapes for audio cassettes. The standard recording materials in these cassettes were polymer-based tapes containing cigar-shaped cobalt-doped iron oxide particles.

After two years of hard work they achieved a cheap, reliable, efficient and, most importantly, scalable method for synthesizing spherical core-shell catalyst particles. The particles have an average diameter of 10 nanometer (nm) and consist of a 8 nm magnetite (iron oxide) core with a cobalt oxide shell of only 1 nm. The new catalysts were then tested in collaboration with research groups of Andreas Jess in Bayreuth and Andrei Khodakov in Lille. They proved to be excellent Fischer-Tropsch catalysts, giving good diesel fractions....

Severe drought has lasting effects on Amazon

Hannah Hoag in Nature: A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences sheds light on the long-term effects of drought on the Amazon rainforest — giving clues about how the rainforest might be affected by global warming in the future. The researchers report that the severe drought that hit the rainforest in 2005 had lasting effects on the forest canopy, such that it remained damaged at least four years later.

The effects of the 2005 drought have been debated since 2007, when researchers reported in Science that photosynthesis within the canopy had increased, leading the Amazon basin to ‘green up’ during the dry period. But in 2010 another group reported that they were unable to reproduce the results using the same data3.

“The ‘green-up’ is a short-term response and a bit of a red herring,” says Oliver Phillips, a tropical ecologist at the University of Leeds, UK. But the latest study “transcends that debate”, he says. “The question of the underlying health of the forest is much deeper than the instantaneous response.”

A drawback of the method used in the earlier studies — which used satellite measurements to estimate forest greenness using reflected solar radiation — is that the data can be muddied by clouds and atmospheric aerosols. So for the latest study, Sassan Saatchi, a remote-sensing expert at the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, studied the forest’s microwave ‘silhouette’, showing its contours instead of its greenness. To look at canopy structure, he and his colleagues used microwave satellite data, which are unaffected by clouds, from a NASA probe. When it passed over lush canopy, the satellite sensor recorded a smooth signal. Bare branches, thinned leaves and missing trees showed more roughness.

The researchers found that more than 70 million hectares of rainforest in the western Amazon — an area nearly twice the size of California — were hit by the drought. And the canopy’s recovery dragged on long after the drought ended, with its biomass and fullness still below pre-drought levels in 2009 when the satellite suffered a mechanical failure. In 2010, an even stronger drought hit a larger swathe of the Amazon....

Aerial view of the Amazon, shot by lubasi, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Fertile soil doesn't fall from the sky: The contribution of bacterial remnants to soil fertility has been underestimated until now

Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research: Remains of dead bacteria have far greater meaning for soils than previously assumed. Around 40 per cent of the microbial biomass is converted to organic soil components, write researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the Technische Universität Dresden (Technical University of Dresden) , the University of Stockholm, the Max-Planck-Institut für Entwicklungsbiologie (Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology) and the Leibniz-Universität Hannover (Leibniz University Hannover) in the professional journal Biogeochemistry.

Until now It was assumed that the organic components of the soil were comprised mostly of decomposed plant material which is directly converted to humic substances. In a laboratory experiment and in field testing the researchers have now refuted this thesis. Evidently the easily biologically degradable plant material is initially converted to microbial biomass which then provides the source material to soil organic matter.

Soil organic matter represent the largest fraction of terrestrially bound carbon in the biosphere. The compounds therefore play an important role not only for soil fertility and agricultural yields. They are also one of the key factors controlling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Climatic change can therefore be slowed down or accelerated, according to the management of the soil resource.

In laboratory incubation experiment, the researchers initially labelled model bacteria with the stable isotope 13C and introduced the bacteria to soil deriving from the long-term cultivation experiment "Ewiger Roggenbau" in Halle/Saale. Following the incubation time of 224 days the fate of the carbon of bacterial origin was determined. "As a result we found fragments of bacterial cell walls in sizes of up to 500 x 500 nanometres throughout our soil samples. Such fragments have also been observed in other studies, but have never been identified or quantified", declares Professor Matthias Kästner of the UFZ.

...."This new approach explains many properties of organic soil components which were previously viewed as contradictory", says Matthias Kästner....

A canyon formed in the soft loess soil by a small stream that flows from the west into the Daxia He River, in the northeastern part of Linxia County (probably, Xihe Township), in western China. Shot by Vmenkov, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Analysis raises atmospheric, economic doubts about forest bioenergy

Oregon State University: A large, global move to produce more energy from forest biomass may be possible and already is beginning in some places, but scientists say in a new analysis that such large-scale bioenergy production from forest biomass is unsustainable and will increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Early suggestions that such a forest biofuel industry would be greenhouse “neutral” or even reduce greenhouse emissions “are based on erroneous assumptions,” a group of international researchers said in an invited analysis in Global Change Biology/Bioenergy, a professional journal.

A major increase in this industry, they concluded, would also result in shorter tree rotations, younger forests, depleted soil nutrients, increased risk of erosion, loss of forest biodiversity and function, higher costs for bioenergy than are now being anticipated, and increased use of fertilizers – also a source of greenhouse emissions.

“The main objective of bioenergy production from forest harvest is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the strategy is likely to miss the mark,” said Beverly Law, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University and one of the co-authors.

This report was led by the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany, OSU, and other universities in Switzerland, Austria and France. The work was supported by several agencies in Europe and the U.S. Department of Energy.

“The article raises important issues for bioenergy policies,” said co-author Helmut Haberl, who is also an author of the climate mitigation chapter of the fifth assessment that is under way by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change....

Light on leaves in Muir Forest, shot by Intothewoods29 at en.wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Glaciers provide a window into human impact on the global carbon cycle

Science Daily: New clues as to how Earth's remote ecosystems have been influenced by the industrial revolution are locked, frozen in the ice of glaciers. That is the finding of a group of scientists, including Robert Spencer of the Woods Hole Research Center. The research will be published in the March 2012 issue of Nature Geoscience.

Globally, glacier ice loss is accelerating, driven in part by the deposition of carbon in the form of soot or "black carbon," which darkens glacier surfaces and increases their absorption of light and heat. The burning of biomass -- trees, leaves and other vegetation around the globe, often in fires associated with deforestation -- and fossil fuel combustion, are the major sources of black carbon.

Spencer and his fellow scientists have conducted much of their research at the Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, Alaska. Mendenhall and other glaciers that end their journey in the Gulf of Alaska receive a high rate of precipitation, which exacerbates the deposition of soot, but also makes for a good research site.

"We are finding this human derived signature in a corner of the U.S. that is traditionally viewed as being exceptionally pristine," Spencer notes. "The burning of biomass and fossil fuels has an impact we can witness in these glacier systems although they are distant from industrial centers, and it highlights that the surface biogeochemical cycles of today are universally post-industrial in a way we do not fully appreciate."

The key to the process is carbon-containing dissolved organic matter (DOM) in the glacial ice. Glaciers provide a great deal of carbon to downstream ecosystems. Many scientists believe the source of this carbon is the ancient forests and peatlands overrun by the glaciers. However, thanks to new evidence from radiocarbon dating and ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry, Spencer and his colleagues believe that the carbon comes mainly from the burning of fossil fuels and contemporary biomass. Once the organic matter that contains black carbon is deposited on the glacier surface by snow and rain, the resultant DOM moves with the glacier and is eventually delivered downstream in meltwaters where it provides food for microorganisms at the base of the aquatic food web....

The Mendenhall Glacier in 2006, shot by Stephen Kellam, public domain

NASA map sees earth's trees in a new light

NASA: A NASA-led science team has created an accurate, high-resolution map of the height of Earth's forests. The map will help scientists better understand the role forests play in climate change and how their heights influence wildlife habitats within them, while also helping them quantify the carbon stored in Earth's vegetation.

Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; the University of Maryland, College Park; and Woods Hole Research Center, Falmouth, Mass., created the map using 2.5 million carefully screened, globally distributed laser pulse measurements from space. The light detection and ranging (lidar) data were collected in 2005 by the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System instrument on NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat).

"Knowing the height of Earth's forests is critical to estimating their biomass, or the amount of carbon they contain," said lead researcher Marc Simard of JPL. "Our map can be used to improve global efforts to monitor carbon. In addition, forest height is an integral characteristic of Earth's habitats, yet is poorly measured globally, so our results will also benefit studies of the varieties of life that are found in particular parts of the forest or habitats."

...The researchers found that, in general, forest heights decrease at higher elevations and are highest at low latitudes, decreasing in height the farther they are from the tropics. A major exception was found at around 40 degrees south latitude in southern tropical forests in Australia and New Zealand, where stands of eucalyptus, one of the world's tallest flowering plants, tower much higher than 130 feet (40 meters)....

Global map of forest height produced from NASA's ICESAT/GLAS, MODIS and TRMM sensors. The map will advance our understanding of Earth's forest habitats and their role in Earth's carbon cycle. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Wood smoke from cooking fires linked to pneumonia, cognitive impacts

Sarah Yang in the University California at Berkeley News Center: Two new studies led by University of California, Berkeley, researchers spotlight the human health effects of exposure to smoke from open fires and dirty cookstoves, the primary source of cooking and heating for 43 percent, or some 3 billion members, of the world’s population. Women and young children in poverty are particularly vulnerable.

In the first study, the researchers found a dramatic one-third reduction in severe pneumonia diagnoses among children in homes with smoke-reducing chimneys on their cookstoves. The second study uncovered a surprising link between prenatal maternal exposure to woodsmoke and poorer performance in markers for IQ among school-aged children.

The findings on pneumonia, the chief cause of death for children five and under, will be published in the journal The Lancet on Thursday, Nov. 10, two days before World Pneumonia Day. While previous research has linked exposure to household cooking smoke to respiratory infections, the latest results come from the first-ever randomized controlled trial – the gold standard of scientific experiments – on air pollution.

“This study is critically important because it provides compelling evidence that reducing household woodsmoke exposure is a public health intervention that is likely on a par with vaccinations and nutrition supplements for reducing severe pneumonia, and is worth investing in,” said Kirk Smith, professor of global environmental health at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and principal investigator of the RESPIRE (Randomized Exposure Study of Pollution Indoors and Respiratory Effects) study.

“There is a huge burden of disease and death due to child pneumonia, and there aren’t a lot of good interventions out there,” added Dr. Arthur Reingold, a UC Berkeley professor of epidemiology and an internationally recognized expert on infectious diseases, who was not part of the RESPIRE trial. “Randomized controlled trials are frequently demanded by funding agencies and decision makers before they are willing to make substantial investments in new technologies or strategies, and this study provides the needed evidence of an intervention that works.”...

Cooking over an open fire in Khyrgyzstan, shot by Firespeaker, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Fire to become increasingly important driver of atmospheric change in warming world

Science Daily: How the frequency and intensity of wildfires and intentional biomass burning will change in a future climate requires closer scientific attention, according to CSIRO's Dr Melita Keywood. Dr Keywood said it is likely that fire -- one of nature's primary carbon-cycling mechanisms -- will become an increasingly important driver of atmospheric change as the world warms.

"Understanding changes in the occurrence and magnitude of fires will be an important challenge for which there needs to be a clear focus on the tools and methodologies available to scientists to predict fire occurrence in a changing climate."

She said the link between long-term climate change and short-term variability in fire activity is complex, with multiple and potentially unknown feedbacks. "Fires require fuel to burn and climate strongly affects the type, quantity and quality of fuel. Periods of high rainfall or high atmospheric carbon dioside levels may result in increased biomass growth so that fuel loads may be enhanced in future fire seasons.

"Reduced water availability associated with drought may also result in drier biomass that is more readily burned in possibly more intense fires, while higher temperatures and other extreme weather may lengthen fire seasons and result in increased likelihood of fire ignitions and longer burning periods. Vegetation types are also altered in a changing climate.

"In turn, fires influence climate by the emissions to the atmosphere of aerosols and GHG, and by affecting the ability of terrestrial ecosystems to sequester carbon." Dr Keywood said there is some evidence that fire activity may already be increasing in Western US forests and recent exceptionally intense fire events -- such as the Australian Black Saturday fires in 2009 and Russian fires in 2010 -- highlight the devastation resulting from fires associated with extreme weather.

"The impacts of emissions from fires on global atmospheric chemistry, and on the atmospheric burden of greenhouse gases and aerosols, are recognised but gaps remain in our scientific understanding of the processes involved and the environmental consequences of fires....

A 2010 Russian wildfire in the south part of the Ivanovo Oblast, not far from Yuzha. Shot by Elena Sharova (Елена Шарова), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

High concentration of bacteria in center of hailstones

Science Daily: Researchers have discovered a high concentration of bacteria in the center of hailstones, suggesting that airborne microorganisms may be responsible for that and other weather events…. "Bacteria have been found within the embryo, the first part of a hailstone to develop. The embryo is a snapshot of what was involved with the event that initiated growth of the hailstone," says Alexander Michaud of Montana State University in Bozeman, who presented the research.

Michaud and his colleagues analyzed hailstones over 5 centimeters in diameter that were collected on the University campus after a storm in June 2010. The large hailstones were seperated into 4 layers and the meltwater from each layer was analyzed. The number of culturable bacteria was found to be highest in the inner cores of the hailstone.

"In order for precipitation to occur, a nucleating particle must be present to allow for aggregation of water molecules," says Michaud. "There is growing evidence that these nuclei can be bacteria or other biological particles."

Michaud's research is part of a growing field of study focusing on bioprecipitation, a concept where bacteria may initiate rainfall and other forms of precipitation including snow and hail. The formation of ice in clouds, which is necessary for snow and most rainfall events, requires ice nuclei (IN), particles that the ice crystals can grow around….

A field of hailstones shot by Soon Chun Siong, uploaded by Nerdybeng at en.wikipedia

How hard are we pushing the land?

NASA: We may be becoming an ever more technologically advanced society, but we remain as dependent as ever -- if not more and more so -- on the natural world that surrounds us. That is one takeaway from new NASA research that has found humans are using an increasing amount of the Earth's total land plant production each year for food, fiber, building and packaging materials and biofuels.

This remains a young data record, as one of the first global measurements tied to satellite data was published in 2004. That baseline-setting measurement was for the year 1995, when humans needed 20 percent of all plant growth for our various products. But the early returns are in, and despite uncertainties in the measurement, the signal is headed in a clear direction: up. From 1995 to 2005, global annual plant consumption rose from 20 percent to 25 percent of all plant production in those years.

As the human population continues to grow and more societies develop modern economies, this rate of consumption is increasing both as a whole and on a per capita basis globally, a NASA research group led by Marc Imhoff at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., has found.

The group has also used NASA satellite data to produce a multi-decadal record of plant production (from 1982 to 2007) that establishes a baseline of the Earth's productivity. But it is the consumption data, estimated from UN Food and Agriculture Organization country profiles, that reveals a snapshot of how much pressure human consumption is putting on the landscape. These new findings are being presented at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting.

The first data point that jumps out from the research is the increase in demand for plants, from '95 to '05, from 20 percent to 25 percent. Imhoff said that scientists think this is a significant rise for that period of time, but that part of the challenge of this research is determining the limits of ecosystems' production and the impacts of a rising consumption rate.

"The question is, 'How hard are we pushing the land?'" Imhoff said. "People are wary about that percentage creeping up. Most people consider that a high number, although we're still doing research."…

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Seven Deadly Sins or the Seven Vices - Gluttony

Dust beats biology for cloud ice formation

Liz Kalaugher in Environmental Research Web: Biological particles have been touted as potential key players in the nucleation of ice particles in clouds, as they are able to help ice form at warmer temperatures than many other aerosols. But new modelling work in Norway and Germany indicates that biological particles are not that important for cloud ice formation after all.

"We are confident now that on a global scale, biological particle concentrations are too low to play a significant role in cloud ice formation, and that instead mineral dust is the major component," Corinna Hoose from the University of Oslo, Norway and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany told environmentalresearchweb. "This is in agreement with many measurements of ice crystal residuals."

Together with colleagues from Oslo and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Germany, Hoose calculated that biological particles contributed a maximum of 0.6% to the global average ice nucleation rate. The team used the CAM–Oslo aerosol climate model and newly available estimates and laboratory measurements to come up with their results.

…Ice nucleation in clouds is of particular interest as it is the first step in the creation of snow and most types of rain. Previously, high concentrations of biological ice nuclei have been found in a wave cloud over Wyoming and in the Amazon basin, and the particles have been found to be ubiquitous in precipitation on different continents. "[Our study] means that living or dead micro-organisms are less involved in cloud ice and precipitation formation than has been speculated, and that the observed cases with high biological ice nucleus concentrations are not representative of average atmospheric conditions," said Hoose....

Cumulus clouds just floating along, shot by Michael Jastremski., Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Saving the soil and maintaining corn yields

Seed Daily: Two years into a study looking at methods of combining a living cover crop between corn rows shows that yield can be maintained at high levels using environmentally friendly practices. Researchers are testing between-row cover grasses as part of research looking at ways to reduce soil runoff and keep vital nutrients in the soils while crop residue, called stover, is removed from farm fields to produce biofuels.

With U.S. government targets requiring a 30 percent displacement of petroleum consumption with fuels made from biomass by the year 2030, agronomy researchers are studying methods of harvesting more and more stover, which previously was left on the field.

Targets will require removing 75 percent of stover to use as biomass in the production of biofuels. Removing stover can cause more water runoff and deplete soil of the organic material needed to remain productive.

One method of keeping the soil in place and replenished with organic matter is to plant grasses between the corn rows that would stay on the field year round. "We are looking at trying to grow corn in a perennial sod, so that we can protect the soil and provide these other environmental services at the same time," said Ken Moore, professor of agronomy…

Corn stover in the foreground, Calumet County, Wisconsin, shot by Royalbroil, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

New boreal forest biomass maps produced from radar satellite data

Science Daily: Having a large-scale boreal forest biomass inventory would allow scientists to understand better the carbon cycle and to predict more accurately Earth's future climate. However, obtaining these maps has been wrought with difficulty -- until now. A new processing algorithm has been developed using stacks of images from the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) on ESA's Envisat satellite that allows for the retrieval of boreal forest biomass well beyond the levels that have been previously reported.

…Boreal forests and woodlands are estimated to cover approximately 14.5% of Earth's land surface, comprising an area of nearly 16 million sq km (about the size of the contiguous 48 states of the US). The boreal forest ecosystem, which spans Russia, northern Europe, Canada and Alaska, comprises interrelated habitats made up of forests, lakes, wetlands, rivers and tundra.

…"Biomass, one of the most essential climate variables defining the functions of the Earth system, is the big unknown factor in the carbon cycle. Since no biomass maps exist with a high level of accuracy, we do not know how much is changing and cannot do calculations with any certainty. With this new algorithm, it is the first time that we have something in hand that may be a first step to a global biomass map," said Prof. Christiane Schmullius with the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

The BIOMASAR project, sponsored by ESA's Support to Science Element (STSE), has fully validated the algorithm using ASAR data, which is capable of acquiring images regardless of darkness and cloud cover, with existing in-situ information. To validate the algorithm, several test sites were chosen in Scandinavia, Siberia and Canada, where both extensive datasets of ASAR images, acquired in ScanSAR mode at mid-resolution, and in-situ measurements were available…..

Forest growing stock volume (GSV) map of Central Siberia, obtained with the BIOMASAR algorithm using one-year of Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) Global Monitoring mode images acquired in 2005. GSV is represented in shades of green between 0--500 cubic metres per hectare. The GlobCover Land Cover map was used as the background for non-forested areas. Map projection: Albers (standard parallels 56 and 73 degree N). (Credit: ESA, Gamma Remote Sensing, Friedrich-Schiller University Jena)