CU/ANWB, Willy Bob, Antigua and Barbuda

CU/BBGH, Gun Hill, Barbados

CU/BCIP, Isla Barro Colorado, Panama

CU/GRGR, Grenville, Grenada

CU/GRTK, Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos Islands

CU/GTBY, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

CU/MTDJ, Mount Denham, Jamaica

CU/SDDR, Presa de Sabaneta, Dominican Republic

CU/TGUH, Tegucigalpa, Honduras

IC/BJT, Baijiatuan, Beijing, China

IC/ENH, Enshi, China

IC/HIA, Hailar, Neimenggu Province, China

IC/LSA, Lhasa, China

IC/MDJ, Mudanjiang, China

IC/QIZ, Qiongzhong, Guangduong Province, China

IU/ADK, Aleutian Islands, Alaska, USA

IU/AFI, Afiamalu, Samoa

IU/ANMO, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

IU/ANTO, Ankara, Turkey

IU/BBSR, Bermuda

IU/BILL, Bilibino, Russia

IU/CASY, Casey, Antarctica

IU/CCM, Cathedral Cave, Missouri, USA

IU/CHTO, Chiang Mai, Thailand

IU/COLA, College Outpost, Alaska, USA

IU/COR, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

IU/CTAO, Charters Towers, Australia

IU/DAV,Davao, Philippines

IU/DWPF,Disney Wilderness Preserve, Florida, USA

IU/FUNA,Funafuti, Tuvalu

IU/FURI, Mt. Furi, Ethiopia

IU/GNI, Garni, Armenia

IU/GRFO, Grafenberg, Germany

IU/GUMO, Guam, Mariana Islands

IU/HKT, Hockley, Texas, USA

IU/HNR, Honiara, Solomon Islands

IU/HRV, Adam Dziewonski Observatory (Oak Ridge), Massachusetts, USA

IU/INCN, Inchon, Republic of Korea

IU/JOHN, Johnston Island, Pacific Ocean

IU/KBS, Ny-Alesund, Spitzbergen, Norway

IU/KEV, Kevo, Finland

IU/KIEV, Kiev, Ukraine

IU/KIP, Kipapa, Hawaii, USA

IU/KMBO, Kilima Mbogo, Kenya

IU/KNTN, Kanton Island, Kiribati

IU/KONO, Kongsberg, Norway

IU/KOWA, Kowa, Mali

IU/LCO, Las Campanas Astronomical Observatory, Chile

IU/LSZ, Lusaka, Zambia

IU/LVC, Limon Verde, Chile

IU/MA2, Magadan, Russia

IU/MAJO, Matsushiro, Japan

IU/MAKZ,Makanchi, Kazakhstan

IU/MBWA, Marble Bar, Western Australia

IU/MIDW, Midway Island, Pacific Ocean, USA

IU/MSKU, Masuku, Gabon

IU/NWAO, Narrogin, Australia

IU/OTAV, Otavalo, Equador

IU/PAB, San Pablo, Spain

IU/PAYG Puerto Ayora, Galapagos Islands

IU/PET, Petropavlovsk, Russia

IU/PMG, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

IU/PMSA, Palmer Station, Antarctica

IU/POHA, Pohakaloa, Hawaii

IU/PTCN, Pitcairn Island, South Pacific

IU/PTGA, Pitinga, Brazil

IU/QSPA, South Pole, Antarctica

IU/RAO, Raoul, Kermandec Islands

IU/RAR, Rarotonga, Cook Islands

IU/RCBR, Riachuelo, Brazil

IU/RSSD, Black Hills, South Dakota, USA

IU/SAML, Samuel, Brazil

IU/SBA, Scott Base, Antarctica

IU/SDV, Santo Domingo, Venezuela

IU/SFJD, Sondre Stromfjord, Greenland

IU/SJG, San Juan, Puerto Rico

IU/SLBS, Sierra la Laguna Baja California Sur, Mexico

IU/SNZO, South Karori, New Zealand

IU/SSPA, Standing Stone, Pennsylvania USA

IU/TARA, Tarawa Island, Republic of Kiribati

IU/TATO, Taipei, Taiwan

IU/TEIG, Tepich, Yucatan, Mexico

IU/TIXI, Tiksi, Russia

IU/TRIS, Tristan da Cunha, Atlantic Ocean

IU/TRQA, Tornquist, Argentina

IU/TSUM, Tsumeb, Namibia

IU/TUC, Tucson, Arizona

IU/ULN, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

IU/WAKE, Wake Island, Pacific Ocean

IU/WCI, Wyandotte Cave, Indiana, USA

IU/WVT, Waverly, Tennessee, USA

IU/XMAS, Kiritimati Island, Republic of Kiribati

IU/YAK, Yakutsk, Russia

IU/YSS, Yuzhno Sakhalinsk, Russia

Guatemala City

As temperatures rise and droughts become more severe in the Southwest, trees are increasingly up against extremely stressful growing conditions, especially in low to middle elevations, University of Arizona researchers report in a study soon to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences.

Lead author Jeremy Weiss, a senior research specialist in the UA department of geosciences, said: “We know the climate in the Southwest is getting warmer, but we wanted to investigate how the higher temperatures might interact with the highly variable precipitation typical of the region.”

Weiss’ team used a growing season index computed from weather data to examine limits to plant growth during times of drought.

“The approach we took allows us to model and map potential plant responses to droughts under past, present and future conditions across the whole region,” explained Julio Betancourt, a senior scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey who co-authored the study along with Jonathan Overpeck, co-director of the UA Institute of the Environment. Betancourt holds adjunct appointments in the UA department of geosciences, the UA School of Geography and Development, the UA School of Natural Resources and the Environment and the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.

“Our study helps pinpoint how vegetation might respond to future droughts, assuming milder winters and hotter summers, across the complex and mountainous terrain of the Southwest,” Betancourt said.

For this study, the researchers used a growing season index that considers day length, cold temperature limits and a key metric called vapor pressure deficit to map and compare potential plant responses to major regional droughts during 1953-56 and 2000-03.

A key source of plant stress, vapor pressure deficit is defined as the difference between how much moisture the air can hold when it is saturated and the amount of moisture actually present in the air. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, and during droughts it acts like a sponge sucking up any available moisture from the ground surface, including from plants.

Both droughts – with the more recent one occurring in warmer times – led to widespread tree die-offs, and comparisons between them can help sort out how both warming and drying affected the degree of mortality in different areas.

Weiss pointed out that multiyear droughts with precipitation well below the long-term average are normal for the Southwest. He said the 1950s drought mainly affected the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and southern High Plains and happened before warming in the region started. The 2000s drought centered on the Four Corners area and occurred after regional warming began around 1980.

The actual causes of physiological plant stress and tree death during droughts are being investigated by various research teams using models and field and greenhouse experiments. One possibility is prolonged embolism, or the catastrophic disruption of the water column in wood vessels as trees struggle to pump moisture from the soil in the heat of summer.

The other is carbon starvation as leaves shut their openings, called stomates, to conserve leaf water, slowing the uptake of carbon dioxide needed for photosynthesis. Stomatal closure is triggered by deficits in the ambient vapor pressure, which controls the rate of evaporation for water and is very much influenced by temperature.

“When the air is hotter and drier, it becomes more difficult for plants to conserve water while taking up carbon dioxide,” Weiss explained. “As plants become starved of carbon, it also weakens their defenses and renders them more susceptible to insect pests.”

To make matters worse, Weiss said, the size of the “atmospheric sponge” grows faster during increasingly hotter summers like those over the last 30 years, absorbing even more moisture from soil and vegetation.

“When warmer temperatures combine with drought, relatively stressful growing conditions for a plant become even more stressful,” Weiss explained. “You could say drought makes that atmospheric sponge thirstier, and as the drought progresses, there is increasingly less moisture that can be evaporated from soil and vegetation to fill – and cool – the dry air.”

“In a sense, it’s a vicious circle. Warmer temperatures during droughts lead to even drier and hotter conditions.”

The researchers mapped relatively extreme values of vapor deficit pressure for areas of tree die-offs during the most recent drought determined from annual aerial surveys conducted by the U.S. Forest Service.

“Our study suggests that as regional warming continues, drought-related plant stress associated with higher vapor pressure deficits will intensify and spread from late spring through summer to earlier and later parts of the growing season, as well to higher elevations,” the authors write. This could lead to even more severe and widespread plant stress.

The results are in line with other trends of warming-related impacts in the Southwest over the past 30 years, including earlier leafout and flowering, more extensive insect and disease outbreaks, and an increase in large wildfires.

“We’re seeing climatic growing conditions already at an extreme level with just the relatively little warming we have seen in the region so far,” Weiss said. “Our concern is that vegetation will experience even more extreme growing conditions as anticipated further warming exacerbates the impacts of future droughts.”

Weiss added: “We also know that part of the regional warming is linked to human-caused climate change. Seeing vapor-pressure deficits at such extreme levels points to the conclusion that the warmer temperatures linked to human-caused climate change are playing a role in drying out the region.”

Betancourt said: “We have few ways of knowing how this is going to affect plants across an entire landscape, except by modeling it. There is not much we can do to avert drought-related tree mortality, whether it is due to climate variability or climate change.”

Instead, Betancourt suggested, land managers should focus on how to manage the regrowth of vegetation in the aftermath of increased large-scale ecological disturbances, including wildfires and drought-related tree die-offs.

“Models like the one we developed can provide us with a roadmap of areas sensitive to future disturbances,” Betancourt said. “The next step will be to start planning, determine the scale of intervention and figure out what can be done to direct or engineer the outcomes of vegetation change in a warmer world.”

NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over Super Typhoon Sanba on Sept. 13 at 12:47 a.m. EDT. AIRS infrared data found an eye (the yellow dot in the middle of the purple area) about 20 nautical miles wide, surrounded by a thick area of strong thunderstorms (purple) with very cold cloud temperatures. Credit: Ed Olsen, NASA/JPL Tropical Storm Sanba exploded in intensity between Sept. 12 and 13, becoming a major Category 4 Typhoon on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. NASA’s Aqua satellite captured infrared data that showed a large area of powerful thunderstorms around the center of circulation, dropping heavy rain over the western North Pacific Ocean.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-nasa-sanba-super-typhoon.html#jCp

NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over Super Typhoon Sanba on Sept. 13 at 0447 UTC (12:47 a.m. EDT). The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured an infrared image of Sanba and found an eye about 20 nautical miles (23 miles/37 km) wide, surrounded by a thick area of strong convection (rising air that forms the thunderstorms that make up the storm) and strong thunderstorms. Forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning center noted that the AIRS imagery showed that there was “no banding outside of this ring, consistent with an annular typhoon.” On Sept. 13 at 1500 UTC (11 a.m. EDT), Sanba’s maximum sustained winds were near 135 knots (155 mph/250 kmh). Sanba had higher gusts into the Category 5 typhoon category. The Saffir-Simpson scale was slightly revised earlier in 2012, so a Category 4 typhoon/hurricane has maximum sustained winds from 113 to 136 knots (130 to 156 mph /209 to 251 kmh). A Category 5 typhoon’s maximum sustained winds begin at 137 knots (157 mph /252 kmh). Sanba was located about 600 nautical miles (690 miles/1,111 km) south of Kadena Air Base, near 16.8 North latitude and 129.5 East longitude. It was moving to the north at 9 knots (10.3 mph/16.6 kmh) and generating wave heights of 40 feet. Sanba is expected to continue on a north-northwesterly track through the western North Pacific and move through the East China Sea, passing close to Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan on Sept. 15. Provided by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center search and more info website

As Isaac Swept Ashore, Miss. River Flowed Backwards

Terrell Johnson   weather.com

Rare Reversal Last Occurred with Hurricane Katrina

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/GettyImages

People brave the rain and strong winds for a walk along the banks of the Mississippi River in New Orleans early in the day on August 28, 2012 in Louisiana, where Hurricane Isaac made landfall. Starting in the late afternoon, the river reversed course and began flowing away from the Gulf of Mexico.

Most of the time, rivers large and small are as consistent as the tides, flowing from their headwaters to their mouths, where they empty into oceans, lakes, seas and valleys. For nearly 24 hours during Hurricane Isaac, however, exactly the opposite happened in the mighty Mississippi River.

The category 1 storm’s intense winds and storm surge, which came ashore near New Orleans on Aug. 28, pushed salt water from the Gulf of Mexico up the fresh water river as far north as Baton Rouge, more than 200 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi, surging the river there more than 8 feet over its previous height.

During the night in Belle Chase, La., just south of New Orleans, the U.S. Geological Survey’s stream gage measured the river flowing backwards at 182,000 cubic feet per second. Normally, the river flows at about 125,000 cubic feet per second toward the Gulf of Mexico.

“One of the unique things about Isaac was that, unlike most storms that tend to blow on through, Isaac ended up hanging around for a while,” said USGS Public Affairs Officer Alex Demas. “Because it hung around for a while, the storm surge built up enough momentum that it was able to push the river back up its channel.”

The Mississippi last flowed backward during 2005’s devastating Hurricane Katrina, when it crested at 13 feet above its previous level. At its highest point during Isaac, the river crested at 12.4 feet above its previous level.

(MORE: Photos of Isaac’s Impact, Aftermath)

“We saw an impact as far as 300 miles upstream from the mouth,” from Isaac’s surge up the river, said Greg Arcement, the director of the USGS Louisiana Water Science Center in Baton Rouge. “It had actually quite an impact when you think about it.”

What had officials concerned wasn’t just the impacts from storm surge, however. By the time Isaac arrived, severe drought throughout the Midwest had left the Mississippi several feet below its normal levels, which meant that salt water moving upstream from the ocean might easily overpower the depleted fresh water in the river.

Keeping Salt Water from Moving Up

Salt water is heavier than fresh water. When surging salt water meets fresh water that’s been laid low by a months-long drought, the salt water can travel upstream to places it normally doesn’t, explains Suzanne Van Cooten, Ph.D., a hydrologist with the National Weather Service’s Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center.

“It’s very similar to how a cold front and a warm front work,” she said. “It basically works like a wedge — as the column of fresh water gets shallower because we’re in low flow, it has less weight. So the salt water is able to push underneath the fresh water and just move on up, because it doesn’t have as much weight to displace.”

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Denser salt water flows upstream along the bottom of the Mississippi River, underneath the less dense fresh river water.

That creates what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers calls a “salt water wedge.” If it moves up far enough along the Mississippi, the wedge can threaten cities and towns that rely on the river for their drinking water as well as industrial water supplies.

To prevent that, the Corps periodically builds a saltwater barrier sill, a kind of underwater levee, made from earth along the banks of the river and sandbars exposed by the drought. The sill stops the toe of the wedge from moving forward.

“It’s basically a speed bump at the bottom of the river, to prevent the salt water from moving upstream,” explains Dave Ramirez, the lead hydraulic engineer with the Corps’ New Orleans District.

The Corps builds these sills about every 7 to 8 years, and they work well in normal conditions. Fears rose sharply that Isaac would destroy this one when the storm approached, however.

“The toe of the wedge was about up to river mile 89 [before the storm], which is about the limit of where we want to see it,” said Ramirez, explaining that the wedge was about 89 miles up the river from the mouth of the Mississippi. “We didn’t really know if the sill would hold, because we’ve never had a salt water wedge during a hurricane.”

Thankfully, Isaac left the sill undisturbed. After the storm passed, Ramirez and his team inspected the salt water wedge and determined that it had actually regressed 20 miles back downstream, where he said it was expected to remain for the next few weeks.

13.09.2012

Flash Flood

Pakistan

State of Balochistan, [Balochistan-wide]

Between early July and early September 2012, flooding claimed an estimated 137 lives in Nigeria and forced thousands more to relocate, according to Reuters. In addition to the challenges posed by heavy rains, Nigerians had to cope with the release of water from the Lagdo Dam in neighboring Cameroon, which further swelled the Benue River. Flooding from the dam release was blamed for 30 deaths in Nigeria, Agence France-Presse reported.

These images show a stretch of the Benue River in eastern Nigeria, around the city of Lau. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured the top image on September 8, 2012. For comparison, the bottom image shows the same area nearly three years earlier, on September 23, 2009. These images use a combination of visible and infrared light to better distinguish between water and land. Water varies from electric blue to navy, vegetation is bright green, and clouds range in color from nearly white to pale blue-green.

In 2009, the Benue River was a relatively thin river bordered by small, isolated water bodies. Three years later, the river had spilled over its banks, engulfing the small lakes on either side. Flood waters often carry heavy loads of sediment, and such sediment might account for the relatively light shades of blue along part of the river.

Despite thousands of displaced residents, no major damage to agriculture and industry had yet been reported, Reuters stated.

1. References

2. Agence France-Presse. (2012, September 9) Thirty dead in Nigeria flood, 120,000 displaced. Accessed September 10, 2012.
3. Reuters. (2012, September 9) Nigeria floods kill 17, displace thousands. Accessed September 10, 2012.

NASA image courtesy LANCE MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Caption by Michon Scott.

Instrument: 

Terra – MODIS

Ebola outbreak out of control in Congo: WHO

An Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo risks spreading to major towns if not brought under control soon, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday.

The death toll has more than doubled since last week to 31, including five health workers dying from the contagious virus for which there is no known treatment. Ebola causes massive bleeding and kills up to 90 percent of its victims.

“The epidemic is not under control. On the contrary the situation is very, very serious,” Eugene Kabambi, a WHO spokesman in Congo’s capital Kinshasa told Reuters by telephone.

“If nothing is done now, the disease will reach other places, and even major towns will be threatened,” he said.

The disease has so far struck in the towns of Isiro and Viadana in Orientale province in the north east.

In August, 16 people in neighboring Uganda died of the disease, although health experts said the two epidemics are not connected and have blamed the Congolese outbreak on villagers eating contaminated meat in the forests which cover the region.

(Reporting by Jonny Hogg; Writing by Richard Valdmanis; Editing by David Lewis and Robin Pomeroy)

Yellowstone Wolves Hit by Disease

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The gray wolf (Canis lupus) CREDIT: Kramer, Gary | U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service View full size image

Less than two decades after wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, viral diseases like mange threaten the stability of the new population.

Humans had killed off gray wolves in the region by the 1930s, but in 1995, U.S. wildlife officials tried to restore the native population by bringing 31 wolves captured from Canada into the national park.

The new wolf community initially expanded rapidly, climbing to more than 170 at its peak. But researchers from Penn State University say that the most recent data show the number of animals has dipped below 100.

“We’re down to extremely low levels of wolves right now,” researcher Emily S. Almberg, a graduate student in ecology, said in a statement. “We’re down to [similar numbers as] the early years of reintroduction. So it doesn’t look like it’s going to be as large and as a stable a population as was maybe initially thought.”

The researchers point to pathogens as the culprit in the population’s instability. By 1997, all of the new wolves at the park that were tested for disease had at least one infection, including canine distemper, canine parvovirus and canine herpesvirus. Starting in 2007, wolves inside the park were testing positive for mange — an infection in which mites burrow under the skin causing insatiable scratching and so much hair loss that infected wolves often freeze to death in the winter.

A group of wolves known as Mollie’s pack was the first in Yellowstone to show signs of mange, in January 2007, but they recovered from the disease by March 2011. Meanwhile, another group, called the Druid pack — once one of the park’s most stable new packs — was decimated by the end of winter 2010 after showing signs of mange just half a year earlier, the researchers said.

“It was in a very short amount of time that the majority of the animals [in Druid] became severely infected,” Almberg said in a statement. “The majority of their hair was missing from their bodies and it hit them right in the middle of winter. The summer before it got really bad, we saw that many of the pups had mange.”

The Penn State researchers found that distance made a difference in the spread of the disease. For every six miles between a pack of mangy wolves and an uninfected pack, there was a 66 percent drop in risk of disease for the healthy pack, the researchers said. Thus the high wolf densities afforded by protection within Yellowstone may come at the cost of some population stability, the researchers wrote in their paper in the current issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Mange was introduced into the Yellowstone ecosystem in 1905 in an attempt to accelerate wolf eradication during an era when wildlife officials tried to cut down predator populations. When the wolves were gone, the disease likely persisted among regional carnivores, like coyotes and foxes, the researchers said.

“Many invasive species flourish because they lack their native predators and pathogens, but in Yellowstone we restored a native predator to an ecosystem that had other canids (animals in the dog family) present that were capable of sustaining a lot of infections in their absence,” said Almberg. “It’s not terribly surprising that we were able to witness and confirm that there was a relatively short window in which the reintroduced wolves stayed disease-free.”

• My, What Big Teeth: Wolves Gallery
• Endangered and Threatened Wildlife
• Gallery: Brand-New Baby Wolves

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