KOLD Climate Community Blog

Dust Storm Bigger Than Arizona!

The above photo is of a dust storm in the Taklimakan Desert in the extreme western China.  It's China's largest, warmest, and driest desert.  It's 130,000 square miles.  Arizona is only about 114,000 square miles.  So if you thought our dust storms were bad...well...at least you don't live there!  Of course no one does.  The desert cannot support humans, although some wild camels do live there. 

EARTH HOUR 8:30 TO 9:30 SATURDAY

    Earth Hour is an international effort to raise awareness of climate change and bright night skies.  Basically the idea is to turn off all of your lights for one hour to conserve energy.  Earth Hour wants people to think more about how they use electricity in their everyday lives and how people can cut-back with simple actions like turning off lights in unoccupied rooms. 

    The other idea that came out of Earth Hour is the issue with bright night skies due to light pollution.  Bright lights shining into the night sky wash out the stars, making star-gazing virtually impossible. 

    There are many events going on in southern Arizona on Saturday night to honor Earth Hour. Below is a list of ones I know about.  Do you have an event in your area?  Leave a comment with event details on this blog entry.  Thanks! - First Alert Meteorologist Erin Jordan

(All events take place between 8:30 and 9:30 PM unless otherwise stated.)

Loews Ventana Canyon Resort will turn off the lights in their lounge and offer $1 biodynamic wines and a $1 organic cocktail. 

The JW Marriot Starr Pass Resort will go dark. 

The historic Courthouse dome, the County Administration Building, Superior Court, Health and Welfare Building, City Hall, and the marquee at Fox Theatre will turn off their lights. 

There is free music from 7 PM to 10 PM at the Winset Outdoor Performance Center on 4th Ave.  Bison Witches is offering drink specials and Delectables Restaurant will offer food specials. 

Enjoy a Star Party on the University of Arizona Mall.  There will be telescopes, live entertainment, games, and arts & crafts for children.  This is a free event.

Sabino Canyon will also host a Star Party from 7:30 to 9:30 PM.  There will be telescopes at the canyon as well. 

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory at Kitt Peak needs you help during Earth Hour. They want you to make note of the sky before, during, and after Earth Hour.  This will help them see how bad light pollution is in your area.  For detailed instructions check out GLOBE at Night.

NASA is Hoping to Launch the Shuttle on Sunday

NASA is fixing the hydrogen lean on the shuttle fueling system and hopes to get the green light for a 7:43 PM launch on Sunday.  For updates click here.  If the launch takes place, it will stream live right here on KOLD.com. 

Space Shuttle Launch Scrubbed

NASA scrubbed Wednesday's shuttle launch because of a hydrogen leak found during the fueling process.  Officials hope to schedule another launch for Sunday afternoon.  Click here for the NASA Shuttle Discovery Mission Page. 

New Satellite Crashes Into Ocean

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite is now lost forever.  The rocket carrying the satellite lifted off from Vandenburg Air Force Base early this morning.  A malfunction caused the satellite to stay on-board instead of being ejected into the space where it would go into orbit around the earth.  The rocket crashed into the ocean near Antarctica.  Check out the latest details at NASA.gov.

Texas Fireball!

From spaceweather.com:

Runners in Sunday's Austin marathon were astonished when a brilliant fireball raced across the Texas sky in broad daylight. The extremely-bright meteor descended at 11 AM (10 AM Arizona time) on February 15th, less than a day after the FAA reportedly warned U.S. pilots to watch for "falling space debris" from the recent satellite collision between Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251. However, the fireball was NOT space debris. 

The high speed of the fireball in the video is typical of a natural meteoroid hitting Earth's atmosphere. Orbital debris, on the other hand, should crawl across the sky at a fraction of that speed. Astronomer Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office has analyzed the video and confirms "it's a natural meteor", definitely." According to Cooke's analysis, the source of the fireball was a meter-class asteroid traveling at about 20 km/s.

Fireball mania started on Friday the 13th, around 10 pm EST, when people in central Kentucky heard loud booms, felt their houses shake, and saw a fireball streaking through the sky. "The world appeared to explode--in green!" said one eyewitness. Once again, this appears to be a naturll event caused by a meteoroid. Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 collided at a speed of about 10 km/s or 22,000 mph. None of the surviving fragments should have been big enough to shake houses in Kentucky. Furthermore, U.S. Space Command, which monitors objects in Earth orbit, has not announced a reentry over Kentucky on Feb. 13th.

Click here for the full story, updates, and video of the fireball. 

Flowers Head To Higher Ground

By Megan Levardo, NASA Space Grant Intern

Plants are flowering at higher elevations in Arizona's Santa Catalina Mountains as summer temperatures rise, according to new research from The University of Arizona.

The flowering ranges of 93 plant species moved uphill during 1994 to 2003, compared with where the same species flowered the previous 10 years. During the 20-year study period, summer temperatures in the region increased about 1.8 degree Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius).

“For years, probably decades now, scientists have been trying to understand how species are going to respond to the anticipated global changes and global warming,” said Theresa Crimmins, research specialist for the UA's Arid Lands Information Center and the network liaison for the USA National Phenology Network.

To better understand how plants respond to climate change, Crimmins and her husband, UA climatologist Michael Crimmins, teamed up with naturalist Dave Bertelsen. He's been hiking the Finger Rock trail about one to two times a week since 1983 and recording what plants were in flower.

The five-mile hike starts in desert scrub vegetation and climbs 4158 feet (1,200 meters), ending in pine forest. Bertelsen has completed 1,206 round-trip hikes and recorded data along the trail for nearly 600 plant species, he said in an e-mail.

Theresa Crimmins, the lead author on a paper on the subject, said Bertelsen's data shows that some species flowered farther upslope than before, others stopped flowering at lower elevations, and some species did both.

Because some plant species are moving and others staying put, she said the changes may divide plant communities, increase the growth of invasive species and even cause local extinctions by affecting the food sources of local insects and animals.

“I think we can be confident that things are going to continue to change and we don’t necessarily know the ripple effects of all these changes in flowering ranges,” Crimmins said.

Theresa Crimmins, Bertelsen and Michael Crimmins, assistant professor and climate science extension specialist for the UA's department of soil, water, and environmental science, have published their paper, “Flowering range changes across an elevation gradient in response to warming summer temperatures,” in the online Early View of the journal Global Change Biology. The U.S. National Park Service provided data management support for the project.

Many scientists have wanted to study the movement of flowering ranges, but lack the years of detailed data required for this research, Theresa Crimmins said.

At a meeting about monitoring plant species held by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in 2005, Michael Crimmins discussed his need for data to study the effect of climate change on ecosystems over time.

Bertelsen was at the meeting and told Crimmins about the extensive data he had collected during his many years hiking Finger Rock trail. Bertelsen had the sense some plants were flowering farther uphill and had observed many changes he attributed to drought.

Bertelsen had begun hiking the trail in 1981 and fell in love with the flora and fauna. He had just taken up macrophotography and took close-up pictures of all types of plants and animals while recording his observations in a journal.

“Somebody once said that I have this compulsion. I don’t feel driven at all, it’s drawn. If I miss a week, I miss it. I just feel that I’m really part of that canyon and it’s a part of what I am. It’s just good old human curiosity,” Bertelsen said. “There’s always something different. It’s just absolutely amazing.”

In 1983 he developed a checklist to document each species in bloom along each of five one-mile long trail segments. Thus, on a single day, if a particular plant was seen in bloom in three segments, there would be three different records. Bertelsen collected flowering data from 1984 to 2003.

To see whether the plants had shifted their flowering, the Crimminses compared Bertelsen's location records from 1984 to 1993 for 363 plant species with his records from 1994 to 2003 for the same species.

The Crimminses used climate data from six National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Network stations surrounding the trail to see how the temperature varied during the 20-year study period.

The Crimminses' collaboration with Bertelsen is a great example of how scientists and amateur naturalists can work together, Theresa Crimmins said. As part of its mission, the USA National Phenology Network encourages such collaborations to document events in the life cycles of plants and other organisms.

Theresa and Michael Crimmins plan to do additional analyses of the data to determine whether climate change is also causing flowers to bloom earlier in the year.

“The changes are happening fast enough now that more eyes on the ground are going to be much more useful as the human species tries to understand how these other systems, that we rely upon so dearly, are going to change,” Theresa Crimmins said.

“We can really start to think about what the true impacts of those changes are and how can we mitigate these impacts.”

HEAD ON COLLISION IN SPACE

Click here for spaceweather.com.  There is an animation of the collision. 

From REUTERS and InformationWeek.com 

Space officials in Russia and the United States are tracking hundreds of pieces of debris that were spewed into space when a U.S. satellite collided with a defunct Russian military satellite.

The crash, which Russian officials said took place on Tuesday at about 1700 GMT (10 AM Arizona time) above northern Siberia, is the first publicly known satellite collision and has raised concerns about the safety of the manned International Space Station.

"We believe it's the first time that two satellites have collided in orbit," said Air Force Colonel Les Kodlick of the U.S. Strategic Command.

He said the debris from the collision between a spacecraft operated by the Iridium Satellite LLC and a Russian Cosmos-2251 military satellite was potentially a problem that could require more debris-avoidance manoeuvres among space-faring nations.

The crash occurred 485 miles (780 km) above the frozen wastes of the Russian Arctic, an altitude used by satellites that monitor weather, relay communications and perform scientific observations.

"It's a very important orbit for a lot of satellites," Kodlick said.

The U.S. Joint Space Operations Center was tracking 500 to 600 new bits of debris, some as small as 4 inches (10 cm) across, in addition to the 18,000 or so other man-made objects it previously catalogued in space, he said.

Russian Space Forces said it was monitoring debris that was spread over altitudes between 500 km and 1300 km above earth.

The priority is guarding the International Space Station, which orbits at 220 miles (350 km), substantially below the collision altitude.

The orbit of the ISS can be changed by controllers from Earth but even a tiny piece of debris can cause significant damage to the space station as it travels at 8 km per second.

"If there is any threat to the ISS then there will be an announcement," one Russian space official said. Another said there was little immediate threat to the station.

The crash has underlined concerns about how crowded the orbit paths around the planet have become in recent decades.

Nicholas Johnson, an orbital expert at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said it was uncertain how much new debris had been created by the crash.

"It takes a while for the debris to spread out and for us to get an accurate head count," he said. NASA receives orbital tracking services from the Defense Department and regularly manoeuvres its spacecraft to avoid debris.

Among the 18,000-plus objects being tracked in space by the U.S. Strategic Command are operational and defunct satellites, spent rocket boosters and debris.

Bethesda, Maryland-based Iridium said the U.S. satellite was shaped like a box with wings and weighed about 1,300 pounds (600 kg). The Russian craft, a barrel-shaped cylinder with a mass of 1,800 to 1,900 pounds (800 to 850 kg), was launched in June 1993 and stopped working in 1995, Russian Space Forces said.

Iridium operates the world's largest commercial satellite constellation made up of some 66 cross-linked satellites plus orbiting spares. It provides voice and data services for areas not served by ground-based communications networks.

The operation remained healthy, though some customers may experience brief outages pending a temporary fix expected to be in place by Friday, said Liz DeCastro, an Iridium spokeswoman.

She said Iridium planned to move one of its in-orbit spare satellites into the constellation to replace the lost craft within 30 days. (Additional reporting by Tatiana Ustinova in Moscow and Jim Wolf, Irene Klotz and Andrea Shalal-Esa in Washington; editing by Diana Abdallah)

Inauguration Day Crowds...As Seen From Space!

Check out this photo take from space!  This was the scene in Washington D.C. on Tuesday January 20th, Inauguration Day.  After a winter storm over the weekend, the skies cleared out, enabling NASA to snap this image.  It was near freezing but at least the sun was out.  More than a million people attended the ceremony and as you can see they were scattered all across the lawn of the Capitol Building and the National Mall.  Check out the full NASA article by clicking here. 

The Heat Is On In The Coldest Place On Earth

New research shows the Antarctic had been warming for the past 50 years.  The warming in the west Antarctic is more pronounced than the east Antarctic which has experienced some cooling in recent years.  Check out the NASA article by clicking here.  And check out RealClimate.org.  One of the researchers wrote a blog entry about the data.  He breaks down some of the questions and concerns behind his research.