Archive for the ‘Climatology’ Category
For a long time, scientists have debated the impact on global climate could have the water that evaporates from vegetation. In a new research has concluded that this water helps to cool the Earth as a whole not only locally.
The study was carried out by the team of George Ban-Weiss, who was formerly at the Carnegie Institution for Science in the U.S., and is now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the same country. The members of the team include Long Cao, Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira of the aforementioned Carnegie Institute, as well as Govindasamy Bala of the Indian Institute of science.
Evaporative cooling is the process by which a local surface cools due to loss of energy that is used in the evaporative process. This energy, not to have been consumed in evaporation, would have promoted an increase in temperature on the surface. Read the rest of this entry »
A meticulous examination of the first direct and detailed climate record of the continental shelves around Antarctica reveals the last bastion of vegetation existed on this continent for about 12 million years in the form of tundra on the Antarctic Peninsula.
This new study led by researchers at Rice University and Louisiana State University, provide, through the analysis of fossil pollen, more detailed reconstruction of the date of the climatic history of Antarctica, which has warmed significantly in recent decades.
The rapid decline of glaciers on the peninsula has led to extensive discussion in the scientific community about how to react to the rest of the ice on the continent to the global rise in temperatures. Read the rest of this entry »
It has been discovered a high concentration of bacteria in the hail core particles, suggesting that microorganism in the air at sufficient altitude to be involved in this and other meteorological phenomena.
Alexander Michaud’s team of Montana State University in Bozeman, and Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, analyzed the hail of more than 5 centimeters in diameter, collected on campus after a storm in June 2010. Hailstones were separated into 4 layers and allowed to melt for water testing of every layer. The number of cultural bacteria was found to be high on the inner cores of condensation of hail. Read the rest of this entry »
As temperatures rise in various parts of the world because of global warming, it is necessary to predict what will happen in many areas highly dependent on temperature, such as agriculture or energy. Within the latter, in recent years have raised concerns about how global warming will alter the wind patterns of wind power depends.
Wind turbines are installed on sites that are or seem more appropriate at the time, and energy infrastructure of a region or country adapts to the input wind. But what if an area traditionally was blown briskly suffers a considerable decrease in strength or frequency of this.
Two researchers from Indiana University in Bloomington have made a study on the potential disruption that global warming may have on wind patterns over harvested in the U.S. for wind energy. Both the wind power industry in this country and his government need more information on the long-term wind resource that is the source of energy, before deciding to extend its use. Read the rest of this entry »
In a scientific breakthrough that will have major implications for climate research, it was found that the action of icebergs adrift in the Weddell Sea raises the levels of chlorophyll in the water, which in turn can increase the absorption carbon dioxide in the Southern Ocean.
The results of the new research suggests that the movement of icebergs and melt water are spreading these have an important role in the distribution of phytoplankton in the Weddell Sea, which was quite unexpected.
The results obtained by the team of John J. Helly, director of the Laboratory of Environmental Sciences and Earth, which depends on the University of California at San Diego and Scripps Institute of Oceanography, indicate that the icebergs are very likely to influence the dynamics of phytoplankton in a region known as the Iceberg Alley area, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, the portion of the continent that stretches toward Chile. Read the rest of this entry »
The use of chemicals with polluting gases (chlorofluorocarbons) created, in the middle of the 20th century, the well-known ‘hole’ of the ozone layer. An international research demonstrates for the first time that this phenomenon may play an important role in climate change, at least in the southern hemisphere, and is responsible for the increase in rainfall from tropical summers.
“The ozone hole has been ignored on many occasions by climate change experts and our research shows it has great and far-reaching impact,” said SINC Sarah M. Kang, author of the study and researcher at the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University (USA).
According to the study, published in Science, the decrease in the ozone layer, between 1979 and 2000, is responsible for an increase in rainfall over the tropical summers, and an increase in the levels of greenhouse gases. Other studies have examined the impact of the hole in the ozone layer but changes in circulation of middle and high latitudes. Read the rest of this entry »
The ESA’s Envisat satellite has recorded a record low level of ozone on the Euro-Atlantic sector of the Northern Hemisphere during the month of March.
The record low is due to the presence of unusually strong winds in the region, known as the polar vortex, which isolated the atmospheric mass above the pole, avoid mixing with the main currents in the southern latitudes.
This situation has resulted in the planet’s north especially low temperatures and conditions similar to those observed over Antarctica during the austral winter.
As the March sun began to warm this cold air mass, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) dissolved in the atmosphere began to release chlorine and bromine radicals, catalysts for the dissociation of ozone molecules into oxygen molecules. This phenomenon occurs with particular intensity in the lower layers of the stratosphere, about 20 km above Earth’s surface. Read the rest of this entry »
Many Americans are skeptical about whether the global climate is changing, but apparently, the degree of skepticism varies systematically depending on how you call that change.
According to a study by the University of Michigan which is published in an upcoming issue of the journal Public Opinion Quarterly, more people believe in “climate change” in the “global warming.”
“Words matter,” said Jonathan Schuldt study’s lead author and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology at the UM.
Schultz conducted the study with the UM psychologists, Sara Konrath and Norbert Schwarz. For research conducted an experiment on the wording of the question in the American Life Panel, a RAND survey conducted via the Internet, with a nationwide sample of 2,267 U.S. adults. Participants were asked to report their level of certainty about whether global climate change was a serious problem. In the next question, half the participants heard a version and the other half read. Read the rest of this entry »