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Archive for the ‘Water Ressources’ tag

Rain on Saturdays

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Air temperatures in Germany vary with a weekly cycle: wednesdays are the warmest days, saturdays the coldest. These results were produced by Bernhard Vogel and Dominique Bäumer at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, as is reported by Die Tageszeitung. They point out that this is not a local phenomenon, since they found the same phenomenon at fairly remote stations, in the German Alps for example. Additionally they argue that such a strict weekly phenomenon could not originate in nature, and they blame little particles in the air (aerosols) that are emitted mostly during work-days from factories and traffic. Similar results were subsequently found in China and in the USA.

Saturday Rain

Rain on Saturday

Die Tageszeitung proceeds to describe how this is not unanimously accepted in the scientific community. Harrie-Jan Hendricks Franssen from the ETH Zürich. He compared Swiss data from Zürich and Lugano with the German data used by Vogel and Bäumer, trying to figure out if precipitation and temperature behaved similarly in Switzerland as in Germany as reported by Vogel and Bäumer. Lugano is south of the Alps and hence should be influenced from different weather mechanismns than Germany. Additionally, Lugano is located in the vicinity of Milano, which exhibits Smog frequently.

Both Lugano and Zurich never showed a persistent weekly cycle for precipitation and sunshine duration for the investigated period. In addition, only 4 of the calculated 28 anomalies for the period 1991 – 2005 (2 stations x 2 variables x 7 weekdays) were statistically significant (statistically 1.4 anomalies are expected). Only one of the four statistically significant anomalies had the same sign as observed by BV07. The anomalies were analyzed further in a Monte Carlo study. The stochastic simulation experiments suggest that none of the anomalies was significant; even the largest anomaly (the anomaly of Saturday precipitation in Zurich of 18.0%) occurred in 9% of the experiments due to purely random effects. In addition, for 21% of the stochastic experiments a weekly cycle in precipitation in Zurich is found due to random effects.

Vogel and Bäumer respond on Hendrick’s finding in a comment published also in the Geophysical Research Letters. Die Tageszeitung points out that there are additional studies being conducted in Spain and in the USA, all to evaluate the role that aerosols in the air play related to weather. It’s great to see that sometimes research is well published in newspapers for the public!

Written by Claus

August 23rd, 2008 at 5:53 am

World water week in Stockholm

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This week is World Water Week, an international conference held in Stockholm, Sweden. The motto for this year’s meeting is ”For a Clean and Healthy World” and the focus is on water, sanitation and development. The official website contains loads of interesting information.

Written by Patrick

August 18th, 2008 at 1:36 pm

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A Terrible Choice: Crops or Water?

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Global food shortages have placed the Middle East and North Africa in a quandary, as they are forced to choose between growing more crops to feed an expanding population or preserving their already scant supply of water.

read more | digg story

Written by Patrick

July 21st, 2008 at 7:18 am

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Advances in Water Well Drilling

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I first read about EDI Exploration Drilling International GmbH when my girlfriend read the “VDI news” this weekend. I saw the picture of a nice drill rig, and instantaneously I was reminded about my drilling days, and hooked (great layout! :-)).

Drill Rig

It seems like those EDI guys had a pretty smart idea: the “fluid finder”. On the picture this thing looks like a Waterloo Profiler, but bigger. They put it just above the bit when they drill mud rotary. It saves time when they want to pump water out of the hole: They don’t need to jack all the drill rods out of the hole, but can just drop a pump inside the drill rods, and use the “fluid finder” as a screen. According to the VDI-article, it seems like it’s mostly used for exploratory holes. I think it can save time and money, but I’m not sure how valuable it is for scientific / environmental projects. Although unfortunately, I’ve never seen it live.

Written by Claus

June 30th, 2008 at 8:03 am

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Water in the News

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White House sits problems out (does not open email from EPA)

Six months ago, the EPA was told by the US Supreme Court to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment. The EPA answered that question in an email to the White House, stating that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled. The White House decided that this email officially has never been opened. Now, six months later, the EPA is writing a new watered down letter. Reported by the New York Times, via scientificactivist

NASA: “world’s only hope is drastic action”

NASA scientist James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, has warned the US Congress 20 years ago about the negative effects of Global Warming. He just did it again.

The year of Hansen’s original testimony was the world’s hottest year on record. Since then, 14 years have been hotter, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

All Chinese Water is Funneled to Beijing

Wired is reporting on how much water is needed in Beijing, especially for the upcoming summer Olympic Games, that in the vicinity of Beijing more and more wells are running dry.

Changing Climate Can Trigger Wars

Weird has a piece on how changing climate can trigger wars

Written by Claus

June 25th, 2008 at 7:16 am

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Food Prices Rising

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Food production is related to water because food does not grow without water. Since a little while rising food prices are on my radar screen. At first I thought, wow finally somebody (the UN and media covering the story, MSNBC, f.ex.) is talking about it. Then I saw another hockey stick curve, and those sure attract attention, not only since Al Gore’s talk. Then I saw this news-site, telling me how food is rationed in the US. This was the point when I decided to dig a little deeper — why is food getting more expensive?

Rising Food Prices

(from the Economist)

I found this really great german blog post, including great answers and links to other resources, where Don Dahlmann asks

Can somebody explain to me why on a global scale food is getting a) short and b) expensive right now? I’ve googled a bit, but I didn’t find a thing that would have helped me to understand. What’s behind this? Creating artificial shortages by companies with the goal of increase profits? An ecologic problem?

The funny thing is, you can read all those great resources, but I can still not find the real reason, or a real reason for that matter.

  • It seems to me if it was just population growth and hence more people eating more meat (“western standard”), then the cost increase for wheat would have been not that abrupt.
  • I also don’t think that the single reason for cost increase is farmers converting their crops to “bio-fuel”, because I think this is a western (US, and Europe to some extent) phenomenon, and prices also increase in other food-producing countries.
  • Is it a water distribution problem? Generally, there is enough water in the US and Europe for farming. Granted, some of the farming practices in the US (Mid-West or California) are not vastly sustainable, but generally there is water.
  • Is it a climate change phenomenon — were there any severely bad harvests on a global scale last year (due to extreme weather conditions happening)?
  • The food-companies are mentioned sometimes, but are also not linked conclusively to the recent cost-increase.

All in all, there seem to be a variety of reasons. Has the sum of all of them been enough to reach the “tipping point”? But, it seems to me, we are missing something! So I’m asking the same question as Don did, again: What is it?

Update [2008-05-18]: Here is the official explanation of the UN

Written by Claus

April 29th, 2008 at 1:52 am

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Barcelona is Importing Drinking Water by Ship

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The Independent reports how Barcelona is “importing” drinking water with ships. This is a first to me!

Seems like the Independent is onto very novel stories: it also reports that the major of a Russian town of 70,000 suggests abandoning it and settling at a new place — the current location is just too polluted

Written by Claus

April 13th, 2008 at 12:36 pm

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Info on Droughts

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Even the US based National Groundwater Association (NGWA) has put a collection of drought related information together. Another piece of evidence that seems to suggest that a) the US-Southwest/Midwest has water problems, and that b) extremes get more and more important.

Written by Claus

February 15th, 2008 at 2:31 am

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Weired – Water Stories

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Convert Water

Wired has some pictures from Orange County’s (California) latest groundwater replenishment system. For $480M it converts 70M gallons of dirty water (sewage) into drinking water.

Western Water Crisis

Weird has another water story, also on the western parts of the US: Climate change is anticipated to severe the water crisis there.

Irrigation – but what crops

Another Weired story: not only how irrigation is done is important, also the crops play a role (who would have thought).

Written by Claus

February 13th, 2008 at 10:34 am

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Climate Change: Groundwater and Latest Report

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Climate Change and Groundwater

On a global scale, water levels are rising. The author of a recent Spiegel article claims that the effects of increasing saltwater intrusion has been neglected so far. Well… the US National Groundwater Association (NGWA) has saltwater intrusion covered since quite a while in their list of “Current and potential impacts of climate change” (part of this document). However, the author continues to mention that guys at Ohio State modelled how far saltwater extends from an ocean’s shore inland. And they found out that saltwater stretches further under continents than one has thought before.

Another point the author makes, one that I completely agree with, is that people don’t see the effects that global climate change has on groundwater resources. And people depend largely on groundwater. The author quotes a number from the USGS, according to which half of the US population derives its drinking water from groundwater

Latest UN Report

The latest UN report regarding Climate Change (and here) is a summary of the three reports that were published earlier this year. This summary will be the basis for discussion at the climate conference in Bali in December. Generally, the pictures painted in this summary-report are fairly dark: inundations, draughts, infectious diseases are all going to increase in magnitude and frequency.

Written by Claus

November 18th, 2007 at 3:49 am