Clouds Closer to Earth

Chicken Licken was right, the sky really is falling. Nasa satellite data has shown that the Earth's cloud tops have been lowering over the last decade.

 Cloud-top height fell one percent on average between March 2000 and February 2010, according to measurements from the multi-angle imaging spectroradiometer mounted on Nasa's Terra satellite. That one percent means a reduction of 30 to 40 metres in the average maximum height of clouds, during the 00s.

While the short record means it's difficult to draw any strong conclusions from the data, it does hint towards a longer-term trend. Roger Davies, the lead researcher on the project, warns that it's something that should be monitored in the coming decades to determine how significant it is for global temperatures.

If there is indeed a consistent reduction in cloud height, and this isn't just natural variability, then Earth would begin cooling to space more efficiently, reducing the surface temperatures and slowing the effects of climate change. 

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"We don't know exactly what causes the cloud heights to lower," says Davies. "But it must be due to a change in the circulation patterns that give rise to cloud formation at high altitude." The Terra spacecraft, which launched in 1999 and records three-dimensional images of clouds around the globe, will continue gathering data in the coming years.

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Posted in: clouds,earth,temperature

A Huge Pipe, a Balloon and Water

It sounds barmy, audacious or sci-fi: a tethered balloon the size of Wembley stadium suspended 20km above Earth, linked to the ground by a giant garden hose pumping hundreds of tonnes of minute chemical particles a day into the thin stratospheric air to reflect sunlight and cool the planet.

But a team of British academics will next month formally announce the first step towards creating an artificial volcano by going ahead with the world's first major "geo-engineering" field-test in the next few months. The ultimate aim is to mimic the cooling effect that volcanoes have when they inject particles into the stratosphere that bounce some of the Sun's energy back into space, so preventing it from warming the Earth and mitigating the effects of man-made climate change.

 

Before the full-sized system can be deployed, the research team will test a scaled-down version of the balloon-and-hose design. Backed by a £1.6m government grant, the team will send a balloon to a height of 1km over an undisclosed location. It will pump nothing more than water into the air, but it will allow climate scientists and engineers to gauge the engineering feasibility of the plan. Ultimately, they aim to test the impact of sulphates and other aerosol particles if they are sprayed directly into the stratosphere.

If the technical problems posed by controlling a massive balloon at more than twice the cruising height of a commercial airliner are resolved, then the team from Cambridge, Oxford, Reading and Bristol universities expect to move to full-scale solar radiation tests.

The principal investigator, Matthew Watson, a former UK government scientific adviser on emergencies and now a Bristol University lecturer, says the experiment is inspired by volcanoes and the way they can affect the climate after eruptions.

"We will test pure water only, in sufficient quantity to test the engineering. Much more research is required," he said, in answer the question of what effect a planetary-scale deployment of the technology could have.

Other leaders of the government-funded Stratospheric particle injection for climate engineering (Spice) project have investigated using missiles, planes, tall chimneys and other ways to send thousands of tonnes of particles into the air but have concluded that a simple balloon and hosepipe system is the cheapest. 

The research is paid for by the government-funded Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

"The whole weight of this thing is going to be a few hundred tonnes. That's the weight of several double-decker buses. So imagine how big a helium balloon do you need to hold several double-decker buses – a big balloon. We're looking at a balloon which is possibly 100-200m in diameter. It's about the same size as Wembley stadium," said the Oxford engineering lecturer Hugh Hunt in an interview earlier this year.

"This hose would be just like a garden hose, 20km long and we pump stuff up the pipe. The nice thing about it is that we can really have a knob, if you like, which we can control to adjust the rate at which we inject these particles."

While the October experiment is expected to have no impact on the atmosphere, it could also be used to try out "low-level cloud whitening", a geo-engineering proposal backed financially by Microsoft chairman and philanthropist Bill Gates.

In this case, fine sea salt crystals would be pumped up and sprayed into the air to increase the number of droplets and the reflectivity in clouds. Together, many droplets are expected to diffuse sunlight and make a cloud whiter.

However, environment groups in Britain and the US said the government's experiment was a dangerous precedent for a full-scale deployment that could affect rainfall and food supplies. Even if the approach successfully cools the planet by bouncing some of the Sun's energy back into space, it would do nothing for the build up of CO₂ in the atmosphere, which leads to increased ocean acidity.

"What is being floated is not only a hose but the whole idea of geo-engineering the planet. This is a huge waste of time and money and shows the UK government's disregard for UN processes. It is the first step in readying the hardware to inject particles into the stratosphere. It has no other purpose and it should not be allowed to go ahead," said Pat Mooney, chair of ETC Group in Canada, an NGO that supports socially responsible development of technology.

Mike Childs, head of science, policy and research at Friends of the Earth UK, said: "We are going to have to look at new technologies which could suck CO₂ out of the air. But we don't need to do is invest in harebrained schemes to reflect sunlight into space when we have no idea at all what impact this may have on weather systems around the globe."

But the principle of large-scale geoengineering has been backed strongly by Sir Martin Rees, the former president of Royal Society, which in 2009 concluded in a report that it may be necessary to have a "plan B" if governments could not reduce emissions.

"Nothing should divert us from the main priority of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. But if such reductions achieve too little, too late, there will surely be pressure to consider a 'plan B' – to seek ways to counteract the climatic effects of greenhouse gas emissions by 'geoengineering'," said Rees.

Members of the British public who were consulted by researchers in advance of the Spice experiment were broadly sceptical.

"Overall almost all of our participants were willing to entertain the notion that the test-bed as an engineering test – a research opportunity – should be pursued. Equally, very few were fully comfortable with the notion of stratospheric aerosols as a response to climate change," the Cardiff University-based researchers concluded.

by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: air,balloon,clouds,environment,pipe,spray,water

Can We Count On Weather Machines?

An NAS workshop looks to offset the effects of global warming with intensive, large-scale engineering projects to intentionally alter the climate. Does anyone think this is a good idea?

Ever since prehistoric man first set fires to drive game towards hunters and cliffs, humans have altered their environment for their own gain. No more so than in the years since the Industrial Revolution, when carbon emissions began to drastically alter Earth's climate and atmosphere.

And now that we know definitively that humans can alter Earth's climate, some scientists have begun investigating ways to deliberately change the weather to offset the negative impact of a century of inadvertent human generated climate change.

 

The name for that deliberate, targeted climate change is geoengineering, and its on the mind of everyone from the National Academy of Sciences to Barack Obama's science adviser.

On Monday, the National Academy of Sciences held a workshop on geoengineering, following an interview where White House Science Adviser John Holdren recommended increased research into the subject. While the scientists at the workshop agreed that it was possible, there was disagreement about when to start testing the ideas, and whether or not the cure might be worse than the problem.

According to National Public Radio, one of the more popular ideas involves seeding the sky with sulfur particulate to reflect the rays of the sun and cool the Earth. This solution mimics the changes in climate that follow large volcanic eruptions. In a recent article, The Atlantic Monthly deemed this the "Blade Runner scenario," and listed some other possible geoengineering schemes, including pouring huge amounts of iron into the ocean to encourage carbon-absorbing algae blooms and using a fleet of 1,500 ships to churn up seawater to create more light reflecting clouds.

As Matt Springer at ScienceBlogs notes, no one is sure if any of these plans will work, if geoengineering is even legal, or what unintended nightmare consequences may result from wholesale disruption of the Earth's carefully balanced ecosystem.

The global warming that results from man-made carbon emissions has shown that we can profoundly alter the climate. But the scientists interviewed in all those articles seem torn by the question of whether or not more human generate change is the appropriate, cheapest, and safest way to address the climate problem.

by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: air. global warming,Can We Count On Weather Machines?,carbon emissions,climate,clouds,earth

CERN, Cosmic Rays and Climate Change

Not content with just stirring the pot in particle physics, CERN has embarked on an experiment aimed at addressing whether or not comic rays from deep space might be seeding clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, influencing climate change. The early findings are far from deciding the issue of whether climate change is man made or otherwise, but they have borne some interesting results. It turns out that cosmic rays could be influencing temperatures on Earth. Perhaps even more groundbreaking, it turns out they also might not. Welcome to climate science.

The notion is this: Cosmic rays that we know are bombarding our planet from the far reaches of space are pelting the atmosphere with protons, and those protons can ionize some compounds that in turn condense into aerosols, basically droplets in the atmosphere. Clouds might in turn build around those droplets, and those clouds shield the Earth, reducing temperatures.

But our dosing of cosmic rays is dependent on the sun. When the sun is emitting lots of radiation during high points in the solar cycle, its magnetic field shields us from some of those cosmic rays. An active sun spells fewer rays spells fewer clouds, and hence warming temperatures on Earth.

So, are cosmic rays (or the lack thereof) to blame for our current spate of rising temperatures? Of course/not/maybe.

The experiment at CERN is fabricating the upper atmosphere in the lab by trapping ultra-pure air and things like water vapor, ozone, ammonia, and sulphur dioxide in a chamber. They are then bombarding that air with protons from the same generator that supplies the Large Hadron Collider. Preliminary results show that these faux cosmic rays indeed have an effect on the atmosphere: When high energy protons stream in, production of nanometer-sized particles in the atmosphere increases by more than ten times.

Case closed. But not really. Those particles that are forming are far too small to actually seed a cloud. So while CERN has proven that cosmic rays are definitely influencing the upper atmosphere, the connection between warming and cosmic rays is far from firmly established.

Naturally, different scientists are reaching different conclusions, but all seem to think this experiment is a worthwhile idea, even if it basically asks more questions than it answers. So, just to recap, the whole climate change argument has not been put to rest. 

 by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: cern,clouds,Cosmic Rays and Climate Change,earth,environment,particle,physics,temperature

Clouds Can Make Warming Worse

Researchers are making headway against one of the most deceptively difficult problems in climate science: What happens to clouds in a warming world? Are there more, or fewer, and do they make matters better or worse?

A team of University of Hawaii-Manoa researchers from the U.S. and Japan report that a regional atmospheric model has achieved a breakthrough in the depiction of the impact of warming temperatures on cloudiness in the eastern Pacific Ocean, something that large global climate models have failed to accomplish.

It doesn't qualify as a dramatic Eureka! moment, but in climate science, progress on this front is a big deal, because this failure of the large, supercomputer-driven global climate models to accurately capture the role of clouds in our changing climate is a major source of uncertainty in their forecasts.

"All the global climate models we analyzed have serious deficiencies in simulating the properties of clouds in present-day climate," said lead author Axel Lauer in a statement released by UHM. "It is unfortunate that the global models' greatest weakness may be in the one aspect that is most critical for predicting the magnitude of global warming."

Unfortunately, the news from the University of Hawaii team, reporting in the Journal of Climate, apparently confirms earlier estimates that the response of clouds to rising sea surface temperatures amplifies the warming trend, leading scientists to suggest that our future lies at the warmer high end of the spread of model uncertainty rather than the cooler low end.

Higher sea surface temperatures cause low-level marine clouds to dissipate, the thinking goes, allowing more of the sun's warming rays to break through, causing a further rise in ocean temperatures. . . and so on.

In the same stretch of the eastern North Pacific, similar "positive feedback" results were reported last summer by a team led by Amy Clement of the University of Miami, who compared observations made by sailors with measurements taken by satellite-borne instruments, but is the first report of a model successfully capturing the effect.

"If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate, then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see," said co-author Kevin Hamilton.

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Posted in: air. global warming,climate,clouds,surface

Future Mars Colonists Terraforming By Studying Darwin's Methods

Ascension Island Charles Darwin's artificial forest captures moisture from clouds that drift over the volcanic peaks on Ascension Island. Google Earth. The father of evolution apparently played God with a tropical ecosystem 160 years ago, and the results could inform future experiments to terraform Mars, botanists say. 

 

The BBC recounts how Charles Darwin helped build an artificial forest on Ascension Island, one of his subjects of study from his trips on the HMS Beagle. Today, the island is home to species of plants that would not naturally co-exist. Darwin and his friends put them there, and nearly two centuries later, their grand experiment is living proof that we can transform natural environments.

Originally used as an outpost to keep an eye on Napoleon in exile, Ascension Island, between South America and Africa, was a busy Atlantic waystation in Darwin’s day. It had meager fresh water supplies, however, so Darwin and his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker, set out to change things.

The BBC interviews Darwin biographer David Catling, a professor at the University of Washington-Seattle, who says he believes Darwin decided to build a lush “Little England” on the volcanic island after visiting it in 1836.

Darwin’s friend Hooker explored Ascension a few years later, and in 1847, Darwin convinced Hooker to get his father -- director of the Kew Gardens -- to send trees, hoping they would capture rain, prevent erosion and reduce evaporation.

Beginning in 1850 and continuing each year, ships brought an assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina, the BBC says. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had taken hold.

Today, Ascension is home to a cloud forest that would have taken millions of years to evolve naturally, according to Dave Wilkinson, an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.

It’s proof that humans can build a fully functioning ecosystem simply through trial and error, he said. As the BBC reports, the same principle could be used in future Mars colonies: “Rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it find its own way.”
Intelligent design, indeed.

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Posted in: BBC,clouds,darwin,ecosystem,island,terraform,water

Night-shining Clouds

The wispy, weaving trails of nigh-shining clouds – those high enough in the atmosphere that they can still reflect the sun’s rays even after sunset – are shining brighter in recent decades. Usually a polar event, these clouds are also appearing closer to the equator – dumbfounding atmospheric scientists.

The clouds first caused a scene back in 1885, when both Thomas William Blackhouse and Robert Leslie independently identified the noctilucent (night-shining) clouds as a special atmospheric phenomenon. Appearing 50 miles above the ground in the mesosphere – the clouds are high enough for the sun’s rays to illuminate them from beyond the visible horizon.

Scientists don’t know for sure why they form; what their link is to the solar cycle, a period of 11 years in which solar activity rises and falls; or, most importantly, why they seem to have been getting brighter and more frequent in recent decades, especially in lower latitudes.

Where historically the glowing dusk vapors were only seen from the ground between 50 and 65 degrees latitude, giving them the name Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMCs), in the last 10 to 15 years ground observations have spotted the clouds from as far as 40 degrees latitude.

Atmosphere scientist Matthew DeLand, of Science Systems and Applications, Inc., and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says that “seeing the clouds at lower latitudes leads to the question of whether the atmosphere is getting colder at those latitudes.”

The noctilucent clouds start forming around minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit when water vapor condenses onto particles of cosmic dust floating in the upper atmosphere. Covered in ice crystals, the dust, remnants of burned up meteorites, catch the sun and glow bright again. The mesosphere is cooler when the lower atmosphere is at its warmest. The change in temperature causes a pressure differentiation that sends winds rapidly into the upper atmosphere.

“The interesting part of our work has been the question of whether the changes in the clouds that we see are an example of what global warming would be doing,” DeLand

The night clouds only form in the summer, when the mesosphere is at its coldest. But global warming causes changes in atmospheric weather that block the necessary upward motion of air that cools the mesosphere and can delay the clouds’ seasonal formation.

Based on data collected by NASA’s Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesophere, or AIM, satellite mission launched in 2007, it seems that the direct effect of global warming on the clouds ends there.

“We’ve been thinking for years that the lower mesosphere has cooled because of carbon dioxide, which radiated energy into space, and that the clouds themselves would respond to this, but it appears now that the cloud region doesn’t seem to respond much to the carbon dioxide itself,” said Gary Thomas, a co-investigator for AIM.

 

With global warming-caused carbon dioxide looking less likely as the culprit behind the clouds’ long-term behavior changes, Thomas is turning his attention to increased water vapor in the upper atmosphere, linked to a rise in methane in the lower atmosphere. Solar radiation in the upper atmosphere oxidizes methane and breaks it down into two water molecules.

But he is not yet declaring a guilty verdict. Some satellite data from AIMS ties the phenomena to fluctuations in the ozone hole. “What’s causing the long term changes,” asks Thomas. “Is it temperature, is it water, is it a combination, or is it none of the above?”

In a surprise development, it seems that the Earth’s atmospheric wind cells, which move in opposite directions on either side of the equator are so strongly linked that warming events in the north are reflected in day-to-day cloud variability in the south. Whether the solar cycle has a role in this is under investigation but the amount of data needed to help resolve the answer is trickling in slowly.

 “Over the last 27 years we’ve seen an increase in frequency and brightness,” says James Russell III, the principal investigator for the AIM mission. But “there’s no known natural phenomenon that we can conceive of and no one phenomenon has ever been proposed that says a natural thing will cause this to happen” he says. Leaving night-shining clouds as much a mystery now as they were 126 years ago.

by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: atmosphere,clouds,low ozone,noctilucent

Cloudy Days Can Still Burn Us

One of the most complicated problems in climate science is slowly but surely becoming a little better understood. The influence of a warming climate on clouds -- and the impact of clouds on climate -- is one of those puzzles that has had climate modelers scratching their heads for years.

             There are different daytime and nighttime responses to clouds as the Earth heats up and then cools down. There are different inputs from different cloud types, based on their height and structure in the atmosphere. There are global net effects and different local and regional ones as well. But the truth is, because clouds are often relatively small and ephemeral features, the big global models are almost blind to their existence.

             Led by atmospheric scientist Evgueni Kassianov, a research team from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory took a bunch of ordinary summer days in the flat landscape of Oklahoma and some everyday white billowy cumulus clouds and examined in unprecedented detail the sunlight they were casting about.

            The clouds cast cooling shadows irregularly over the land, of course, and their bright white surfaces reflected some sunlight back into space, another cooling effect. But their water droplets and aerosols scattered sunlight between their irregular surfaces and down across other clouds' shadows -- causing a significant warming effect.

            Sunlight scattered from cumulus clouds accounted for roughly 15-20 percent of the sun's heat reaching the ground on a cloudy day.

            While the net effect of clouds on sunlight reaching the ground is usually negative on cloudy days, Kassionov said the study "demonstrated that for days with cumulus clouds there are many cases (about 20 percent of total population) with positive cloud effect. And this effect is associated with cloud-scattered sunlight."

"We all know that we can still get sunburned on cloudy days," said Kassianov. "This explains why."

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Posted in: clouds,sunlight,surfaces

Seawater ejected into atmosphere! A way to reduce global warming!

        

                 Climate experts say a fleet of wind-powered ships could be one of the more feasible solutions of climate engineering to reduce global warming. The Copenhagen Consensus on Climate has released an analysis paper that addresses a variety of proposed climate engineering options.

                 The paper was written to address the question: “If the global community wants to spend up to, say $250 billion per year over the next 10 years to diminish the adverse effects of climate changes, and to do most good for the world, which solutions would yield the greatest net benefits? – i.e. what are the costs and benefits of different viable climate interventions…given some reasonable assumptions about sensible policies for the rest of 21st century?”

                 One of the most popular options among experts would be to deploy a fleet of 1,900 wind-powered ships that would draw water from the ocean to produce plumes of seawater mist that would create white clouds. Scientists predict that the clouds would be able to reflect about 1 to 2 percent of sunlight that would otherwise be fixed on the ocean, adding to its temperature.

                 The concept has been largely embraced due to its estimated cost not to exceed $9 billion, which pales in comparison to the $250 billion to be spent by leading nations each year in order to reduce carbon emissions. The project is also much cheaper that another engineering option that would send mirrors into space to deflect the sun’s rays. Additionally the cloud ship fleet would be ready to begin within 25 years. The Copenhagen Consensus Center is an organization that grants advice to government regulators on which areas to spend financial aid.

          To understand better, cast your eyes on the video below.

       

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Posted in: clouds,environment,global warming,wind powered