planetwater

For all the European and particularly German crowd out there: Wetteronline.de has a novel feature out, at least novel to me. You can have cloud-cover and precipitation forecast, on a map covering most of Europe, and you can choose at what time, up to 20 hours into the future. The trial version is free and excludes current conditions.

Screenshot of the cloud and precipitation forecast at wetteronline.de

update Sunday; June 13, 2010:

Looks like they removed the feature that allowed you see precipitation forecasts. That’s too bad!

• Giant #sinkhole in Guatemala (NatGeo): http://bit.ly/cFEgKm – very cylindrical! #

• There's a wonderful discussion on #risk and #extreme events going on at "dot earth": http://nyti.ms/aMNxMO #
• While Stephen Wolfram mentioned him, here's Benoit Mandelbrot: http://bit.ly/cvGMKq #
• this guy built a Turing Machine, and here's the video: http://bit.ly/9YAH8L #
• Stephen #Wolfram on #computing and finding the "rules" for our universe: http://bit.ly/9JITdh #
• thoughts of #oil #spills as #geospatial problems: http://bit.ly/d2FLsp #
• Guido on #scientific computing using #python http://bit.ly/bn8nSw #
• #uncertainty estimates desired for #ash #cloud @modelling: http://bit.ly/crttrO #

It might be highly uncertain, but some people thing that about four million (4,000,000) liters of liquid (or whatever it is classified as) flow out of the hole of the BP drilling – per day.

Certainly, that’s a big number, but how does it compare to other numbers?

• beer: Germans like beer, and drink a lot. On average between 1991 and 1999 about 11.6 Million liters – per year! That means, that a volume equivalent of the annual beer production of Germany gushes into the Gulf of Mexico in three days

• manure: I recently visited a company called “Eisele” that builds agricultural equipment. Among other things an unbelievably huge tank wagon.

About 20,000 liters fit into such a tanker wagon

About 20,000 liters fit into such a vehicle. If you do the math, you’ll realize that every day the contents of 200 such waggons pour into the Gulf! 8 per hour! 1 every 7 minutes!

Mind you this is happening now since 5 weeks! That’s the beer production of Germany of 12 years! For the zoo of the city of Nuernberg, since many years, the city is trying to build a huge tank for dolphins. Let’s say comparable to sea world. However, they plan it to be so huge, that it costs too much money, and hasn’t been built completely. Using the numbers in this pdf, the volumes of about 26 such incredibly expensive “dolphin tanks” have been dumped into the Gulf. It’s still mind-boggling.

update Friday; June 4, 2010:

• There is a NYTimes article from early may that states the daily volume of oil that gushes into the Gulf of Mexico is 5,000 barrels which equates to 587,000L which is 6.8 times less than the 4 million liters.
• The Exxon Valdez Oil spill caused 11 million barrels of oil to destroy the environment (source), which equates to 41,640,000 liters. If you take the 4 million liters a day as the flow rate of the Gulf’s current leak, then you would have an Exxon Valdez every 10 days, we’re at least in week 6, that’s about 4 Exxon Valdez so far.