Tag: water

bookmark_borderCalifornia Running Dry

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CALIFORNIA — Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said, “As our ‘wet’ season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We’re not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we’re losing the creek too.

As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.”

bookmark_borderThe Costs of Solar Energy

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A lot of the environmental costs of solar depend on how the panels and batteries are produced, transported and disposed of… and most importantly how the energy is stored. As renewable energy grows, storage will become a greater problem. In general, we would be better off producing energy like the sun (fusion) than trying to capture the sun’s energy. http://news.stanford.edu/…/store-electric-grid-030513.html

The fossil fuel required to build grid-scale batteries…
  • Fusion does not produce any toxic waste, either — http://news.yahoo.com/solar-industry-grapples-hazardous…

    SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Homeowners on the hunt…
    news.yahoo.com|By JASON DEAREN
  • One of my main concerns with solar is the cost to the environment if they are not put on already existing impervious surfaces. Solar panel farms have many negative impacts on plants and wildlife, not to mention, robbing the Earth’s surface of the energy being harvested by the panels.

Other than fusion, the only other method to create clean energy has to do with solar and turning water into electricity — The Economics of Turning Water into Electricity.

bookmark_borderColorado Water Rights

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Colorado is one of the states with the most restrictive water rights. Similar to how mineral rights can be sold separately then the other property rights, water rights in Colorado are often owned by someone other than the property owner. This means it is illegal to even capture rain water. Colorado has it’s own government department devoted to water rights.

The Colorado Division of Water Resources strives to be a leader in the water community of Colorado and the western United States. This is accomplished by focusing on the following areas: people, water and stewardship. People, because we recognize that the business of water involves our employees and the public. Water, because the administration, safety and use of the State of Colorado’s water resources is something we are committed to and care deeply about. Stewardship, because we understand and accept our obligation to the taxpayers and ourselves, in using and protecting the resources in the most effective manner possible.

Our Mission is:

  • To provide competent and dependable distribution of water in accordance with statutes, decrees and interstate compacts.
  • To ensure public safety through safe dams and properly permitted and constructed water wells.
  • To maintain and provide accurate and timely information concerning water.
  • To promote stewardship of all human, fiscal and natural resources.
  • To serve the public through the generation of creative solutions to problems.
  • To help the public understand complex water issues.
  • To promote stability in the use of the state’s limited water resources.
  • To apply modern technology to its greatest advantage.

These Principle statements will guide our actions:

  • Treating each other and the public with dignity, respect, honesty and fairness.
  • Assuming personal responsibility for individual and organizational actions.
  • Fostering continuous improvement, innovative thought, learning and shared leadership.
  • Promoting an open and honest communication environment that builds trust, respect and loyalty among ourselves and the diverse community in which we live and work.
  • Recognizing our employees and the water community for the professional, competent services they provide.

bookmark_borderCalifornia Zero Water Allocation

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Though much of the United States has been experiencing a cold, high precipitation winter, California has had extreme drought and fire conditions. The State Water Project announced the state reservoir will “effectively be closed for business.”

“This is the most serious drought we’ve faced in modern times,” Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board said. “We need to conserve what little we have to use later in the year, or even in future years.”

“Today’s action is a stark reminder that California’s drought is real,” said Gov. Jerry Brown. “We’re taking every possible step to prepare the state for the continuing dry conditions we face.”

“The exceptional drought extends from north to south across parts of 11 counties including, southeast Santa Cruz, far southern Santa Clara, San Benito, Merced, western Fresno, eastern Monterey, eastern San Luis Obispo, western Kern, western Madera, Kings and southwest Tulare,” notes weather.com meteorologist Chris Dolce.

“Truly staggering was the fact that some locations picked up less than half the precipitation in 2013 of their previous record dry year, including Santa Cruz, Calif. (4.78″ vs. old record of 11.85″ in 1929) and the north San Francisco Bay suburb of Kentfield (7.80″ vs. old record of 20.30″ in 1939),” writes weather.com meteorologist Jon Erdman.

bookmark_borderAdrift at Sea for 16 Months

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EBON ATOLL — A Mexican man was found washed ashore in his small fiberglass boat on a remote Pacific Ocean island. Since he only speaks Spanish, he has been communicating by drawing pictures. It appears he left Mexico in September of 2012 with a companion on a trip to El Salvador. His companion died several months ago.

His name is Jose Ivan. He survived by eating fish, birds and turtles. When there was not enough rain for drinking water, he would drink turtle blood. All Jose was wearing was a tattered pair of underwear. He had long hair and beard. At first, he could not walk on his own, but the locals fed and cared for him. Now, he is drinking coffee, walking around, and even making jokes.

bookmark_borderUnderwater Robotics Competition

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Annual competition, sponsored by Marine Advanced Technological Education Center, gives competitors a taste of the real-life capabilities needed to maintain an ocean observing system
by NSF.gov

The Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center hosted its 12th annual student underwater robotics competition earlier this summer in Federal Way, Wash. The Center is a national partnership of organizations working to improve marine technical education and help prepare the future workforce for ocean occupations.

Headquartered at Monterey Peninsula College, a community college in Monterey, Calif., the MATE Center has been funded as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Center of Excellence since 1997.

The student underwater robotics competition challenged this year’s participants to design and build a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) for tasks related to operating and maintaining an ocean observing system, a collection of high-tech instruments above and below the waves that provide around-the-clock information about what’s happening in the ocean.

The challenge was based on work being done at the University of Washington, where researchers are designing an observatory for the ocean floor. The missions assigned to this year’s competitors were designed to simulate many of the things that will have to be done by ROVs during the installation and maintenance of the observatory.

“This was a very challenging mission,” said Jill Zande, associate director and competition coordinator at the MATE Center. “And we found that a number of the students did really well.”

Participants included more than 50 student teams representing middle schools, high schools, home schools, community colleges, universities, after-school clubs, and outreach programs from the U.S., Canada, Venezuela, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Macao, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Russia, and Egypt.

Competitors’ mission tasks

Student teams piloted their ROVs to complete a variety of underwater mission tasks, prepared and presented an engineering report to a panel of volunteer judges, and created a poster display aimed at the general public.

Students were encouraged to think like entrepreneurs and manage their teams like companies, a process that helps them develop the teamwork, creative thinking, and problem solving skills that are valued in today’s global workplace. Teams were evaluated on the design, construction, and performance of their ROVs; their ability to communicate what they learned; and how they put their knowledge to use in designing and building their ROVs.

Teams competed in either the RANGER or EXPLORER class, depending on the sophistication of their ROVs and the mission requirements. Teams from California won first place in each class. A complete list of winners appears below.

MATE’s impact over its history

With NSF funding, the MATE Center began as an ATE project, and has broadened its mission, expanded its reach and increased its impact over almost 20 years. MATE began with a focus on community colleges, but over time opened up to four-year institutions and high schools. Part of its mission is to develop curricula in marine technology, underwater robotics, marine geospatial technology, career awareness, and ocean observing systems. MATE also offers professional development for high school, college, and university faculty that focuses on a broad array of marine technologies, workplace skills, and pedagogical innovations.

Now an Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) project, led by Zande, is reaching middle-school students and teachers.

The idea behind MATE’s growth is that the ROV competition can be a means to keep students engaged in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects and create a pathway to careers in the STEM workforce. Ocean careers cover a broad range of skills, and MATE provides information on its website about the preparation required for more than 50 different careers, from that of able seaman to electrical engineer to ROV technician. There are also listings for jobs and internships.

The pathway from MATE to ocean careers is well-traveled. “We’ve had students snapped up by industry into $60,000 jobs before they’ve finished their associate degree,” said Deidre Sullivan, director and principal investigator for the MATE Center. “When the Deepwater Horizon oil spill happened three years ago, some of people who were operating the ROVs looking at the damage were graduates of the MATE curriculum.”

“MATE has become a magnet for these kinds of skills,” said David Campbell, program director for ATE. “If a student is interested in this kind of career, most community colleges will train students in electronics and depend on their future employers to train them in marine electronics. MATE is one of the few that’s geared toward marine technology.”

Winners of the 2013 ROV competition

There were three top winners in each class, and a host of other awards.

Explorer (Advanced) Class Winners:

In the Explorer class, the overall first place winner was Jesuit High School of Carmichael, Calif. The team also won an award for being safety-conscious.

Memorial University of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada took the second place prize. Third place was captured by SeaTech 4-H Club of Mt. Vernon, Wash., which also had the highest overall mission score.

Ranger (Intermediate) Class Winners:

Aptos High School of Aptos, Calif. won overall first place in the RANGER class. With 310 out of 320 possible points, the team had the highest mission score, and they also won an award for best technical report.

Second place went to Heritage Collegiate of Lethbridge, Newfoundland, Canada. Third place went to Greater New Bedford Voc-Tech, of New Bedford, Mass., which also won an award for top poster display.

NSF’s Advanced Technological Education program is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The program was created to improve and expand educational programs for technicians to work in high-tech, STEM fields that drive the U.S. economy. The program is congressionally mandated and focuses on both the undergraduate and the secondary school levels.
— Maria C. Zacharias, (703) 292-8454 mzachari@nsf.gov

Investigators
Deidre Sullivan
Jill Zande

Related Institutions/Organizations
Monterey Peninsula College

Locations
Monterey , California

Related Programs
Advanced Technological Education
Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers

Related Awards
#1104310 Marine Advanced Technology Education Center Resource Center 2011
#0929875 MATE ROV Competitions: Providing Pathways to the Ocean STEM Workforce

Years Research Conducted
1997 – 2013

Total Grants
$2,819,973

Robotic structure under water
Video available View video
Students were challenged to design and build an ROV that could maintain an ocean observing system.

bookmark_borderGlobal Warming Proof

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by the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies

Ocean measurements taken more than 135 years ago during the scientific expedition of HMS Challenger have provided further confirmation of human-produced global warming over the past century.

The researchers also found the thermal expansion of sea water caused by this global warming contributed to around 40 per cent of the total sea level rise seen in tide gauges from 1873 to 1955. The remaining 60 per cent was likely to have come from the melting of ice sheets and glaciers.

“Our research revealed warming of the planet can be clearly detected since 1873 and that our oceans continue to absorb the great majority of this heat,” said lead author Dr Will Hobbs, a researcher at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

“Currently scientists estimate the oceans absorb more than 90 per cent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases, and we attribute the global warming to anthropogenic causes.”

The Challenger expedition, from 1872-1876, was the world’s first global scientific survey of life beneath the ocean surface. Along the way scientists measured ocean temperatures, lowering thermometers hundreds of metres deep on ropes made from Italian hemp during its voyage.

Researchers combined these data with modern observations and used both in state-of-the-art climate models to get a picture of how the world’s oceans have changed since the Challenger’s voyage.

“The key to this research was to determine the range of uncertainty for the measurements taken by the crew of the Challenger,” said study co-author Josh Willis, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“After we had taken all these uncertainties into account, it became apparent that the rate of warming we saw across the oceans far exceeded the degree of uncertainty around the measurements.

“So, while the uncertainty was large, the warming signal detected was far greater.”

Uncertainties around the Challenger’s measurements were caused by the limited areas measured during the voyage; the actual depths the thermometers descended to and the likely natural variation in temperature that could occur in each region during the voyage.

To get the most reliable results the researchers used the most conservative estimates after taking into account the maximum possible variation caused by these uncertainties.

“Because we took the most conservative outcome, we are likely to have underestimated the true temperature rise,” said Dr Hobbs.

“A simple analysis of our results suggests we may have underestimated the warming by as much as 17 per cent. In fact many of the stations most prone to bias were in the Eastern Pacific – a region showing one of the strongest ocean warming trends – so the true warming may be even larger than that.”

In addition to determining the increase in temperatures, the measurements from the Challenger expedition revealed the amount of thermal expansion in sea level rise in the oceans before the 1950s. Prior to this research, climate models offered the only way to estimate the change.

“This research adds yet another suite of compelling data that shows human activity continues to have a dramatic influence on the Earth’s climate,” said Dr Hobbs.

bookmark_borderOh No Snow

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BOZEMAN, Mont. – Warmer spring temperatures since 1980 are causing an estimated 20 percent loss of snow cover across the Rocky Mountains of western North America, according to new research from the U.S. Geological Survey.

The new study builds upon a previous USGS snowpack investigation which showed that, until the 1980s, the northern Rocky Mountains experienced large snowpacks when the central and southern Rockies experienced meager ones, and vice versa. Yet, since the 1980s, there have been simultaneous snowpack declines along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, and unusually severe declines in the north.

The new study has teased apart and quantified the different influences of winter temperature, spring temperature, and precipitation on historic snowpack variations and trends in the region. To distinguish those varying influences, the researchers implemented a regional snow model that uses inputs of monthly temperature and precipitation data from 1895 to 2011.

“Each year we looked at temperature and precipitation variations and the amount of water contained within the snowpack as of April,” said USGS scientist Greg Pederson, the lead author of the study. “Snow deficits were consistent throughout the Rockies due to the lack of precipitation during the cool seasons during the 1930s – coinciding with the Dust Bowl era. From 1980 on, warmer spring temperatures melted snowpack throughout the Rockies early, regardless of winter precipitation. The model in turn shows temperature as the major driving factor in snowpack declines over the past thirty years.”

Runoff from Rocky Mountain winter snowpack accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the annual water supply for more than 70 million people living in the western U.S., and is influenced by factors such as the snowpack’s water content, known as snow water equivalent, and the timing of snowmelt.

The timing of snowmelt affects not only when water is available for crop irrigation and energy production from hydroelectric dams, but also the risk of regional floods and wildfires. Earlier and faster snowmelt could have repercussions for water supply, risk management, and ecosystem health in western watersheds.

Regional snowpack accumulation is highly sensitive to variations in both temperature and precipitation over time. Patterns and sources of these variations are difficult to discern due to complex mountain topography, the different influence of Pacific Ocean climate, like La Niña and El Niño, on winter precipitation in the northern versus southern and central Rockies, and the brevity and patchiness of detailed snow records.

In the study, the regional snow model used by Pederson and his USGS colleagues Julio Betancourt and Greg McCabe allows estimation of snow water and cover variability at different latitudes and elevations during the last century regardless of the absence of direct and long-term observations everywhere. Recent snowpack variations also were evaluated in the context of snowpack evidence from tree-rings, allowing the scientists to compare recent observations to measurements from the past 800 years.

McCabe, co-author of the study, explains that “recent springtime warming also reduced the extent of snow cover at low to middle elevations where temperature has had the greatest impact.”

“Both natural variability in temperature and anthropogenic warming have contributed to the recent snowpack decline, though disentangling their influences exactly remains elusive.” Betancourt said,

“Regardless of the ultimate causes, continuation of present snowpack trends in the Rocky Mountains will pose difficult challenges for watershed management and conventional water planning in the American West.”

The study, “Regional patterns and proximal causes of the recent snowpack decline in the Rocky Mountains,” is available from Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.