News – Page 18

NASA Awards ESS Professor Eric Rignot $2.6 Million to Continue Mapping Antarctic Ice Motion

Written on April 3, 2013.

Tatiana Arizaga, School of Physical Sciences Communications UC Irvine Earth system science professor Eric Rignot, along with associate project scientists Jeremie Mouginot and Bernd Scheuchl have been awarded $2.6 millionby NASA to continue mapping ice motion in Antarctica and to generate and distribute research data. “Our team is tremendously excited to be given by NASA the opportunity to continue our exploration of the Antarctic continent with satellite radar interferometry...

Ocean plankton sponge up nearly twice the carbon currently assumed

Written on March 18, 2013.

Janet Wilson, UC Irvine News Irvine, Calif. – Models of carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans need to be revised, according to new work by UC Irvine and other scientists published online Sunday in Nature Geoscience. Trillions of plankton near the surface of warm waters are far more carbon-rich than has long been thought, they found. Global marine temperature fluctuations could mean that tiny Prochlorococcus and other microbes digest double the carbon previously calculated. Carbon dioxide...

The Coming Water Wars?

Written on February 25, 2013.

Global Public Square Staff, CNN World Imagine a large body of water – about the size of the Dead Sea – simply disappearing. It sounds like a science fiction movie. But it’s not. It’s happening in real life – and we’ve only just found out. A pioneering study from NASA and the University of California Irvine shows how the Middle East is losing its fresh water reserves. As you can see from the satellite imagery in the video, we’re going from blues and greens, to yellows and reds: that’s...

NASA Finds Parts of Middle East Have Seen “Alarming Rate” of Water Loss in 7 Years

Written on February 12, 2013.

Associated Press, The Washington Post An amount of freshwater almost the size of the Dead Sea has been lost in parts of the Middle East due to poor management, increased demands for groundwater and the effects of a 2007 drought, according to a NASA study. The study, to be published Friday, February 15, 2013, in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, examined data over seven years from 2003 from a pair of gravity-measuring satellites which is part of NASA’s...

Central Valley Irrigation Intensifies Rainfall, Storms Across the Southwest

Written on January 28, 2013.

UCI study finds that doubling of moisture in air has positive, negative effects Janet Wilson, UCIrvine News Agricultural irrigation in California’s Central Valley doubles the amount of water vapor pumped into the atmosphere, ratcheting up rainfall and powerful monsoons across the interior Southwest, according to a new study by UC Irvine scientists. Moisture on the vast farm fields evaporates, is blown over the Sierra Nevada and dumps 15 percent more than average summer rain in numerous...

Watering Fields in California Boosts Rainfall in Southwest

Written on January 22, 2013.

Irrigation has downstream effects on climate and runoff to Colorado River Erin Wayman, Science News Farmers in California help make it rain in the American Southwest, a new computer simulation suggests. Water that evaporates from irrigated fields in California’s Central Valley travels to the Four Corners region, where it boosts summer rain and increases runoff to the Colorado River, researchers report online January 12 in Geophysical Research Letters. This climate link may be crucial...

W.M. Keck Foundation Grants UCI $1 Million for Deep-Ocean Power Science Lab

Written on January 18, 2013.

Researchers will explore use of marine conditions to produce clean energy Lori Brandt, UCIrvine News The W.M. Keck Foundation has granted $1 million to UC Irvine to build a campus laboratory in which researchers can explore the potential of using the deep ocean’s low-temperature and high-pressure conditions to generate carbon-free power from methane hydrates. Three-dimensional, ice-like structures with natural gas locked inside, methane hydrates are found under the Arctic permafrost...

Climate Study Highlights Wedge Issue

Written on January 11, 2013.

Eli Kintisch, Science Eight years ago, Steven Davis was a 26-year-old graduate student when he heard an energy scientist give an inspiring talk about tackling the global climate challenge. The speaker, Robert Socolow of Princeton University, had just co-authored a plan for “Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies,” as the title put it (Science, 13 August 2004, p. 968). Humanity could stabilize rapidly rising annual...

UC Irvine Scientist: Climate Change Policies Not Working Fast Enough

Written on January 10, 2013.

Molly Peterson, Southern California Public Radio A scientist at UC Irvine is calling for greater urgency in the effort to control greenhouse gases. In a study published in Environmental Research Letters, earth systems scientist Steven J. Davis and three co-authors said carbon emissions are growing faster than ever, prompting them to re-think a strategy on reversing climate change. “After eight years of mostly delay, the action now required is significantly greater,” the...

2012 Hottest Year on Record in Contiguous U.S., NOAA Says

Written on January 8, 2013.

Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post Temperatures in the contiguous United States last year were the hottest in more than a century of record-keeping, shattering the mark set in 1998 by a wide margin, the federal government announced Tuesday. The average temperature in 2012 was 55.3 degrees, one degree above the previous record and 3.2 degrees higher than the 20th-century average, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. They described the data as part of...