Atmospheric
Thanks to compliance with the Montreal Protocol, the ozone layer is beginning to recover and that means Antarctica is about to experience more warming and an increase in snowmelt, a new study in Geophysical Research Letters predicts.
Based on space-borne microwave observations between 1979 and 2009, the study suggests that Antarctic snowmelt levels should revert to higher norms as one of the climate drivers, the SAM (Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode), subsides as the damage to the ozone layer is repaired.
"When the SAM is in a positive phase – meaning that the belt of winds is stronger than…
Yes, what's up! Here we go. Climate change and ozone depletion affect one another in complicated ways. In simple terms, "the ozone hole" pertains to the Southern Hemisphere. However, reductions in ozone content in the stratosphere above the Arctic have been recorded during the northern winter untill early spring (January through March) in recent years. These reductions, about 20-25%, are much smaller than those measured in each southern spring (September through December) over the Antarctic ozone hole, the big one.
Ozone (O3) occurs in two different regions…
As the world's oceans warm, they are absorbing less carbon dioxide, a new study in the November 25 issue of Geophysical Research Letters has found. With the oceans currently absorbing over 40 percent of the CO2 emitted by human activity, this could quicken the pace of climate change.
Jeffrey Park, professor of geology and geophysics at Yale University, used data collected from atmospheric observing stations in Hawaii, Alaska and Antarctica to study the relationship between fluctuations in global temperatures and the global abundance of atmospheric CO2 on interannual (one to 10…
A new study of Antarctica's past climate reveals that temperatures during the warm periods between ice ages (interglacials) may have been higher than previously thought. The latest analysis of ice core records suggests that Antarctic temperatures may have been up to 6°C warmer than the present day. The study also found that during the last warm period, about 125,000 years ago, the sea level was around 5 metres higher than today.
The findings, reported this week by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Open University and University of Bristol in the journal Nature could help…
A study published today in Nature Geoscience says that increasing atmospheric CO2 emissions continue to outstrip the world's natural ability to absorb carbon and claim that drastic cuts in fossil fuel emissions are the only way to mitigate climate change.
The authors report that over the last 50 years the average fraction of global CO2 emissions that remained in the atmosphere each year was around 43 per cent - the rest was absorbed by the Earth's carbon sinks on land and in the oceans. During that time the fraction has likely increased from 40 per cent to 45 per cent, suggesting a decrease…
Like most mountainous areas, Bowron makes its own weather system and it appears you get everything in a 24-hour period. In fact, whatever weather you are enjoying seems to change 40 minutes later; good for rain, bad for sun. Wisps of cloud that seemed light and airy only hours early have become dark. Careful to hug the shore, we are ready for a quick escape from lightening as thundershowers break.
Local weather, and more importantly, wind, comes from a mixture of factors. Knowledge of the topography, the relative temperature of land and lake we paddle help predict how windy and soggy our…
Thousand ha of land is lying as wasteland between Ahamedabad to Bhavnagar but Prosopis juliflora , Salvadora prominent. On inland wasteland areas CSMCRI has done very good Jatropha cultivation. Now the technology for biodiesel has been perfected and patented its ideal plant for wastelands provided proper agotechnology is employed. However Salicornia is good for inland marshes while Salvadora is well supported in saline areas of extreme nature. There is need to colonise wasteland using a combination of petro crops, oil yielding plants and wasteland colonizers
With the COP15 conference fast approaching, the world's political leaders are gearing up to hash out a global agreement that will save us from ever increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the unstoppable climate change that will follow.
New research published this week in Geophysical Research Letters, however, may complicate their plans. The new research, conducted by a professor of Earth Science at the University of Bristol, shows that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of CO2 has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of CO2 having risen from…
While it's generally accepted that melting polar ice due to global warming is bad, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey are reporting this week that the loss of ice in the world's southernmost region could actually be slightly slowing the pace of climate change.
Large blooms of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are flourishing in areas of open water left exposed by the recent and rapid melting of ice shelves and glaciers around the Antarctic Peninsula. This remarkable colonization is having a beneficial impact on climate change. As the blooms die back phytoplankton sinks to the…
Countries vary across the globe in releases of greenhouse gases (GHG). For example, eight countries -- USA (23.5), Canada (22.6), Czech Republic (13.7), UK (10.6), Spain (10.1), Switzerland (7.3), South Africa (9.0), and Thailand (5.6) -- released in 2005 their portion of per capita carbon dioxide emissions in metric tons as shown inside the parentheses. The data are from the World Resource Institute and exclude bunker-fuel emissions and land-use change. Just USA, EU, Canada, Czech Republic, Switzerland, South Africa, and…