Earth System Observer

Analysis and observations about the science of our complex planet

Undergraduate students scouring internet for global warming articles

September 08, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System Observer

I’m teaching my Global Environmental Change this semester and the students have been busy reading and putting together response papers to the readings. This past week, I asked the students to find a news article published in 2013 about climate change. Not a hard search really, but I also asked them to evaluate or talk about how they evaluated the expertise of the author of the article. Many of the articles below give a glimpse into what students are thinking about with climate change. Here is the list:

Hurricanes striking coast could decrease with global warming
Cooling Pacific dampened global warming
Summary of IPCC AR5 panel findings
Pacific allies in fight against climate change
Climate change policies in Europe and adverse impacts on African agriculture
Is global warming slowing down?
An advocacy piece centered on Hardball interview with Professor Michael Mann and a Republican strategist
Climate sticker shock related to Arctic melt
Record temperature in Greenland
Germany’s energy outlook
Gulf Stream slowdown linked to faster rate of sea level rise on USA East Coast
Climate change impacts on the energy infrastructure
Global warming primer
MTV rocks the POTUS SOTU 2013 party
Carbon farms reversing global warming
Pause in global warming should not translate to pause in action

Tags: global environmental changeteachingundergraduate research

Ramping up for teaching with NOAA NCDC

August 07, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System Observer

Summer is a time of dedicated research for me. Finished one project, waiting for peer reviews on that manuscript, tinkering with twitter, planning out research conference travel in the next school year, and working on a grant proposal to NSF. The season of the classroom is nearly here though, so I’m slowly re-allocating my hours to teaching. A great early-career workshop for university and college faculty that I attended the last week of July helped me get into gear with teaching again. I need a workshop like that every summer!

Another way I start to think about teaching is to begin to browse through the data that I want to bring into the classroom. One site I haven’t visited in months, but that I prolifically visit throughout past school years, is the NOAA NCDC time series plotter. I had the pleasure of visiting the numbers again tonight and remain very impressed by NCDC outreach and transparency efforts. The new addition to the time-series plotter (which you can use to produce climate-relevant analysis at different spatial and temporal scales) is a slightly more friendly user-interface, and a few features that I think most stats people will really appreciate. Yes, it’s not a super fancy analysis package, but the statistical analysis you can do just via the webpage now includes two new options. One is the option to display the anomaly against a different base period rather than always using the 20th Century average. In other words, you can choose a base period of 1951-1980 like NASA GISS tends to use or you can play around and see what the effect of a different base period is. The other new option is a display of a trend line for any period. The first thing you can do with this is see how temperature (for example) trends in the early part of the century compare to the trends in the latter part of the century. Or you can mimic the cherry picking that climate data is sometimes a victim to and choose very specific start and end points to produce a trend that amplifies an argument you are making (“look, it’s getting colder!” or “look, it heating up super fast”). one exception to all this great online analysis is that it only applies at the “super” level for data in the contiguous USA. someday, i’ll ask NCDC scientists why this can’t be done for Alaska and Hawaii, and why the global analysis tools are more limited. either way, an exciting development in my virtual friendship with NOAA NCDC.

Tags: climatedata analysisdata visualizationNCDCNOAAnorth carolinateaching

Life expectancy reductions in the polluted air of China

July 10, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System Observer

Shockingly little has been published in the peer-reviewed literature about the air pollution in China, although there has been plenty of press coverage. I talked a little bit about the US Embassy twitter data and how fires polluted the air over Beijing*. The health impacts of the exposure of humans to sustained levels of unhealthy or hazardous air pollution levels is widely expected to increase mortality rates due to cardiorespiratory failure and increased instances of cancer. The question then is raised: What hard evidence exists that proves this hypothesis? Modeling studies seemed like they would have to suffice. Until now.

Researchers from China, Israel, and the USA just published what I would call a very important study that concludes that elevated particle pollution in Northern China compared to Southern China has reduced life expectancy by 5.5 years. They took advantage of a dataset that emerged as a result of a Chinese policy employed from 1950-1980 that provided free coal for heating for everyone living north of the Huai River that runs right through the center of China and shown as the black line in the figure below.

This is Figure 1 from the Chen et al. (2013) study published in PNAS. The PDF of their work is available for free - open access - by clicking on the figure. The annotation is my own summary of the key finding.

This is Figure 1 from the Chen et al. (2013) study published in PNAS. The PDF of their work is available for free by clicking on the figure. The annotation is my own summary of the key finding.

What they found was that particle pollution concentrations were 55% higher in Northern China due to the availability of free coal. This strong and significant difference between the north and south as a result of the Huai River policy (as the researchers call it) set up an experimental control scenario on a large enough scale (population wise) that the statistics were robust. The statistical model combined the particle concentration difference with proximity to the Huai River, detailed mortality statistics from a program in China called the Disease Surveillance Points (DSPs), and a number of other possible factors that may influence mortality to prove with high confidence that their results were robust. The life expectancy of the Chinese citizens north of the Huai River (which includes Beijing, Lanzhou, and Xian) is on average 5.5 years less than those of citizens living south of the Huai River. The decrease in life expectancy, the research shows, was almost entirely attributable to the 55% increase in particle pollution concentrations. The paper is worth reading, especially given the current state of Chinese air quality referred to above.

*I mentioned the effect of smoke from agricultural fires on Beijing particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations, and there has been a lot of internet discussion of the US Embassy twitter feeds documenting PM2.5 concentrations in now 5 major urban centers of China that are geographically distributed from Shenyang in the Northeast to Beijing and Shanghai in the East, and Chengdu in central China, and finally in the south in the city of Guangzhou which is north of Hong Kong. PM2.5 refers to the mass concentration of particles with diameters less than 2.5 micrometers or 0.0000025 meters and is without a doubt the most devastating form of particulate matter air pollution for the human body. This stems from the simple idea that smaller particles can be inhaled more deeply into the respiratory system. Smaller? Smaller than what? Well, other categories of PM also exist. PM10 refers to mass concentrations of particles with diameters less than 10 micrometers, or 10 millionths of a meter or 0.000010 meters. Still very small. Then there is the less precise category of total suspended particles (TSP) which presumbably includes some fraction of particles greater than 10 micrometers in diameter while also including the mass of the smaller particles. Typically, PM10 and TSP are closely related because particles larger than 10 micrometers tend to fall out of the atmosphere much more quickly. Regardless of the PM (PM2.5, PM10, TSP), they are all bad.

Tags: air qualitychinacoal

Earth observations gallery

July 07, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System Observer

I used to really like photography. A big chunk of my senior year in high school and freshman year in college were spent in a dark room experimenting with developing processes and photograph creation. Film cameras are a thing of the past essentially (although I still have my Nikon and old photo gear that was woefully incompatible with the new Digital SLR bodies), but imagery is not. Data visualization is a huge force on the web, and imagery is constantly thrown our way from the more traditional camera and from cameras in space. The exploratory power of all this information is staggering (one example here). All that being said, I think it’s important to step back and just view some of the imagery emerging from these sources. I don’t have webpage links for these, and I’ve enhanced contrast and color in some cases but take a look. Which evokes the most visceral sense that you are connected to a global community? Data, nature, both?

[Show as slideshow]

The images are all cropped to an aspect ratio of 16:9 or HDTV. Let me know if you want more information about the photos/images.

Tags: data visualizationimages

Activity on twitter

July 05, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System Observer

I haven’t posted anything here for about a week – an eternity in the land of constant chatter (the internet). I’m working on a couple of publications, which take a lot of concentration, so that’s my main excuse. My secondary excuse is that I’ve been prowling around the twitter-verse. Science talk on twitter has been active! Hard to quantify, but just seeing how much many prominent climate scientists (defined by publications, say), advocates, and climate-related groups are posting makes me think that some of discussion that twitter is a good venue for quickly disseminating science are on the right track. Facebook always felt stilted to me and seemed more like something you do with friends and family then the general world. Twitter feels different, but like I said, it’s hard to quantify. The best hashtag I’ve been witness to has been #ActOnClimate in response to President Obama’s speech announcing his administration’s Climate Action Plan (PDF with more details) and also since then. #ActOnClimate was trending high all afternoon on the day of his speech, for example. So my recent posts have been at the level of tweets and that’s about it. Here is a snippet of my activity.

Science, global warming, and education news:

Dynamics of a still mysterious part of the Earth that is above sea level (of course the oceans have many more mysteries!):

Back to my roots with aerosol research and the myriad of dampening effects these little particles have on phenomena:

Are eating habits going to be forced to change? I’m not 100% convinced of this, but I am 100% worried if climate science suggests that hamburgers have to go!

go to @brianmagi for more. If you have your own climate action plan going in the Charlotte area, I’d love to hear from you on twitter or email.

Tags: climateglobal warming

Beijing air quality and agricultural fires

June 28, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System ObserverResearch News

As I browsed through my favorite twitter feeds which includes @BeijingAir and the other US Embassies, I saw there was some really really poor air quality in Beijing. The US Embassies in China tweet particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) concentrations in the atmosphere on an hourly basis and also provide 24 hour average PM2.5 per the (USA) EPA regulatory methods. Namely, 24 hour PM2.5 is what’s regulated by the EPA in our country, and since US Embassies are US territory (as I understand it from The Simpsons Bart vs Australia episode), then US-relevant metrics are tweeted in addition to the hourly data. I tweeted about the very poor air quality in Beijing today

and

The second tweet was an tribute to an Onion article saying something like EPA tells people to stop breathing but I couldn’t find a link. Ok. So after I sent out that 2nd tweet, I began to wonder: What the heck is going on in Beijing? PM2.5 is above 400 ug/m3* for hours on end during the day and the 24 hour average PM2.5 just got tweeted as nearly 300 ug/m3. This is extremely hazardous, both on the EPA scale of Air Quality Index (AQI) and on the scale of I-Cannot-Breathe-Long-Enough-To-Finish-This-Sente… (no link to that scale). As the title of the post implies, the answer is related to burning practices – and I think it’s worth more that a couple of tweets. I’m asserting that the main problem is emissions from local/regional agricultural fires. This touches on my own research into fires and the peculiar human-influenced fire seasonality as a function of where you are in the world. Now, take it easy, I tell myself. Why? Every scientist loves to talk about science, but we especially love talking about our own research. I’ll try not to go on and on, is what I’m saying.

How can we do a first-order (read as “informal”) test of this hypothesis? First, let’s check satellites. There is some very accessible information from NASA that can be used to study problems that aren’t in the data-rich part of the world or in the parts of the world where I don’t even know what the characters are for “fire”. NASA has a satellite called Terra reporting data since November 2000. From this page, I googled the lat-lon of Beijing (40 N, 116 E) and created my own custom satellite image of Eastern China with the approximate location of Beijing marked.

Satellite image from MODIS sensor on the NASA Terra satellite for June 28 2013. Beijing location is approximate.

Satellite image from MODIS sensor on the NASA Terra satellite for June 28 2013. Beijing location is approximate.

Right away, you see there are clouds. But there are also signs of gray-ish haze very similar to my research page header up at the top (smoke pouring off of southern Africa). So smoke is a distinct possibility. Now we can use data from the same NASA satellite (Terra) and same sensor (MODIS) but using a different wavelength of electromagnetic radiation. Namely, the parts that we feel/sense as heat – or thermal infrared radiation. Turns out, NASA has a whole team of scientists looking at this data and there is a data product called the Thermal Anomaly product. Something more “operational” (meaning it’s available at a semi-regular and rapidly updated way, like weather data is for weather forecasting models) for global fires is available at the same NASA website as I used to get the image above. Here’s the global view of fires
Global fire activity from the last 10 days ending on June 28 2013.

Global fire activity from the last 10 days ending on June 28 2013.

Clearly, fires are active in Eastern China – so we’re almost at the bottom of the mystery of why @BeijingAir is not the place for breathing deeply right now. You can download a map file showing fires from the last 48 hours for different regions by going to the KML tab and opening the KML file in Google Earth. I downloaded the “Russia and Asia” KML file and produced this
Active fires from the MODIS sensor on the NASA Terra for the 48 hours ending on June 28 2013.

Active fires from the MODIS sensor on the NASA Terra for the 48 hours ending on June 28 2013.

where you can see that my Google Earth has the Beijing Embassy location saved as a placemark. Regardless of the clouds, the pollution from the fires is certainly pouring into the atmosphere over Beijing and affecting surface air quality to the point that the AQI values are nearly off the scale again, but this time, it is not because of the combination of meteorology and emissions from fossil fuel consumption.

The winter and spring months – the months related to the very poor air quality referred to in the report above and here – are plagued by deep near surface temperature inversions that act to inhibit mixing. What does this mean? Well, if pollution is emitted from cars and factories in Beijing in the winter-spring, it will tend to stay in the first 500 meters (1800 ft) above the ground – roughly. The pollution gets trapped. On a day without a temperature inversion, the pollutants emitted are probably about the same, but mix into a much deeper atmosphere (say about 2000-3000 meters, or about 4-6 times deeper layer). The pollution is thus more dilute. I haven’t checked meteorology in the case of todays very poor air quality, but I suspect the effect of meteorology (even if mixing is deep and efficient) is overwhelmed by the emissions from all the fires southeast of Beijing.

What kind of fires? Or why are they burning? Great question! Are these forest fires like the lightning-triggered fires plaguing the Western USA right now? No! When you mask out the Terra MODIS fire data in a way that you only look at data from land that is mostly cropland (agriculture) in Eastern China, then you find something related to our findings in the Biogeosciences paper.

Fire season for land that is mostly agriculture (cropland in Eastern China) and land that is mostly non-agriculture (forests, grasslands). This is based on the average over 10 years of data from MODIS. More analysis like this in the link to my paper below.

Fire season for land that is mostly agriculture (cropland in Eastern China) and land that is mostly non-agriculture (forests, grasslands). This is based on the average over 10 years of data from MODIS. The region considered is roughly Mongolia and China. Other parts of the world look much different – more analysis like this in the link to my paper below.

The figure above shows that while the land with a low fraction of cropland (less than 20%) tends to burn in July-August, the land with a high fraction of cropland (greater than 80%) tends to burn in (you guessed it) June-July. As the caption states, these “average” seasonalities are based on over 10 years of Terra MODIS fire observations. When you average 10+ years of Junes for the low and high fraction of cropland, you get the data point in month six for blue and green curves above. In other words, the fires are right on schedule, Eastern China! Hopefully for the citizens of Beijing, the burning will be short-lived and meteorology will transport the smoke away and dilute it down with clean air in the process.

All that being said, a full scientific analysis of the air quality requires much more than this post offers. Sensitivity, ground-based analysis, meteorological analysis, and actual counting of the fires among other things would be required to prove with a much higher degree of confidence that my hypothesis does not fail, but usually scientists make hypotheses because they observe an event/phenomenon that is consistent or inconsistent within some sort of framework. In this case, what I saw in China air quality was inconsistent with what I understood about the meteorology there (for this time of year) and consistent with the work I did with colleagues regarding fire seasonality.

*The unit of concentration for PM2.5 is micrograms per cubic meter which is often written as ug/m3 even though the “u” should be the Greek letter “mu” which itself means “micro” which is one millionth and “m3” should be “m” with a superscript “3” to indicate “cubed”)

Tags: air qualitydata analysisdata visualizationfirefire seasonalityNASApublications

The Climate Change Speech transcript and video

June 26, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System Observer

Here’s an update from my post yesterday about the Climate Change Speech. Link to the video on Youtube via whitehouse.gov. The video is downloadable (mp4) so you can show students how a speech embodies leadership on an issue that will, in my opinion, define this and the next generation. Link to the transcript of the speech at Georgetown University.

When I review the transcript, I think about the speech Margaret Thatcher gave to the UN in 1989. Thatcher opened her speech about global warming with the voyages of Charles Darwin. Obama opened his speech with the voyages to space by US astronauts.

President Obama said on a hot summer day (92 F air, 67 F dewpoint means about 96 F heat index) in Washington DC in June 2013

On Christmas Eve, 1968, the astronauts of Apollo 8 did a live broadcast from lunar orbit. So Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, William Anders — the first humans to orbit the moon -– described what they saw, and they read Scripture from the Book of Genesis to the rest of us back here. And later that night, they took a photo that would change the way we see and think about our world. It was an image of Earth -– beautiful; breathtaking; a glowing marble of blue oceans, and green forests, and brown mountains brushed with white clouds, rising over the surface of the moon. And while the sight of our planet from space might seem routine today, imagine what it looked like to those of us seeing our home, our planet, for the first time. Imagine what it looked like to children like me. Even the astronauts were amazed. “It makes you realize,” Lovell would say, “just what you have back there on Earth.”

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in November 1989

During his historic voyage through the south seas on the Beagle, Charles Darwin landed one November morning in 1835 on the shore of Western Tahiti. After breakfast he climbed a nearby hill to find advantage point to survey the surrounding Pacific. The sight seemed to him like “a framed engraving”, with blue sky, blue lagoon, and white breakers crashing against the encircling Coral Reef. As he looked out from that hillside, he began to form his theory of the evolution of coral; 154 years after Darwin’s visit to Tahiti we have added little to what he discovered then.

What if Charles Darwin had been able, not just to climb a foothill, but to soar through the heavens in one of the orbiting space shuttles? What would he have learned as he surveyed our planet from that altitude? From a moon’s eye view of that strange and beautiful anomaly in our solar system that is the earth? Of course, we have learned much detail about our environment as we have looked back at it from space, but nothing has made a more profound impact on us than these two facts.

First, as the British scientist Fred Hoyle wrote long before space travel was a reality, he said “once a photograph of the earth, taken from the outside is available … a new idea as powerful as any other in history will be let loose”. That powerful idea is the recognition of our shared inheritance on this planet. We know more clearly than ever before that we carry common burdens, face common problems, and must respond with common action.

And second, as we travel through space, as we pass one dead planet after another, we look back on our earth, a speck of life in an infinite void. It is life itself, incomparably precious, that distinguishes us from the other planets. It is life itself—human life, the innumerable species of our planet—that we wantonly destroy. It is life itself that we must battle to preserve.

I could read those words over and over again and never feel any less attached to the idea of a global community and the potential role that science can play in achieving this goal. After yesterday, the goal seems attainable.

Tags: climateglobal environmental changeglobal warmingquotesUSA

Interactive USA wildfire map from Climate Central

June 25, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System ObserverResearch News

Amazing what a team of scientists, techs, and a pile of data will bring you. I tried to embed a great map interface by the group at Climate Central here, but it didn’t work so here’s a screenshot of the information the interactive map provides when you zoom into one of the large fires affecting the USA right now (this one near Los Alamos, New Mexico).climatecentral-firemapGo to their widget here or to the more detailed posting about the widget here. Essentially, Climate Central is posting updated USA (or maybe North America) fire locations with really useful (and frightening) details as they roll in from daily reports by fire and land managers. Respect and praise for this great product of the intersection between science, technology, and public outreach. I wish the fire crews the best as they battle against an unforgiving enemy.

Tags: fireglobal environmental changehuman-fire interactionslightningUSA

May 2013 climate in North Carolina and the world

June 24, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System Observer

With global warming and all of the impacts, it’s very important to constantly consider the question of time and space scales. May 2013 is a good example for those of us living in the Southeastern USA or North Carolina. Namely, North Carolina’s normal-to-cool spring is not at all indicative of how the global temperature is evolving. Let’s see how we can quickly use NOAA NCDC graphs to figure this out.

Global warming refers to the increase in average temperature of the entire Earth. The last part – the entire Earth – is the spatial scale. And that’s a huge spatial scale! When a scientist talks about global warming or that global warming has been detected, you have to step back and say WOW. What on Earth could warm an entire planet? coal_fired_power_plantOver long time scales, of course there are a number of possible reasons (changes in the Sun, Earth’s orbital shape/proximity around the Sun, plate techtonics), but these take so long, they aren’t relevant to the concept of global warming. Even my statement that What on Earth could warm an entire planet? should be more precise and say something like What on Earth could warm an entire planet over a relatively short time period? The simplest, if somewhat incomplete, answer is the combination of greenhouse gases and aerosols emitted into the atmosphere from human activities. Period.

May 2013 analysis of global temperatures are trickling out. NOAA NCDC as always has a wonderfully complete report of climate news for May and for all previous months. My favorite part is the plethora of hyperlinks. NOAA NCDC should really be commended for their public outreach! Here is one of the figures from that webpage201305where you can see how different the Southeast USA is from the world in May 2013 – the world is shades of red, while the Southeast USA is shades of blue (cooler than normal). We’ve had a very pleasant spring in North Carolina. Pull back on the temporal (time) scale to see the March-April-May seasonal average201303-201305 and you can see that the cool spring extends well beyond May in terms of the anomaly. By this, I mean that the blues become deeper when you consider a three month period (March-April-May) and that implies without any quantitative work that March-April were more cooler-than-average. Pull back slightly further to the year-to-date rankings201301-201305and here you see that the Southeastern USA and in fact most of the USA and even Alaska have been right at the climatological normal (which for NCDC is the average temperature from 1981-2010). The short story is that North Carolina below average temperatures for the period from January to May, March to May or just plain old May are not indicative of global temperatures. The real question is why?

Tags: climatedata analysisdata visualizationglobal environmental changeglobal warmingNCDCNOAAnorth carolinaUSA

Twitter and science

June 14, 2013 by Brian Magi
Categories: Earth System Observer

I’ve been starting to use twitter – mainly to supplement my research interests. I have zero confidence in facebook as a useful platform for anything remotely scientific or supportive of science, but twitter somehow seems different. The first twitter account I followed was @BeijingAir early this calendar year as reports of ridiculously bad air quality emerged yet again. I was quickly impressed by this informal but rigorous reporting of hourly (!) air quality relevant metrics such as particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations.twitter-scienceI even started to develop discussions around the US Embassy in Beijing twitter feed in my Atmospheric Chemistry class this past Spring semester, drawing comparisons between my published research from Africa (of essentially PM2.5) and the measurements reported @BeijingAir. I haven’t read my course reviews yet, so I don’t know whether my students liked these discussions or the problem sets that I made related to twitter. I liked it though because it was current and relevant in questions of applied atmospheric chemistry and thinking about our global society. The problems in our backyard are relevant, but I love to think that we as a global civilization can solve problems in a collective way. This philosophy is a natural fit with the concept of social media, and my opinion is that twitter is a better fit than other social media.

Then while I’m flipping through one of my various science digest emails over lunch one day, I see this article and realize that there is apparently a collective move of scientists to employing twitter as a serious way to connect. The figure above was posted in that article and you can click and see the higher resolution version. The analysis in that post resonates with how I’m thinking about twitter – namely it allows the science I do to have the potential to be much more relevant. Given that many undergraduates leave the university without even knowing what it is that an “assistant professor” does or what the difference is between an “assistant” and “associate” professor (or that the difference exists), I would say it is critical that the academy makes sure that the future minds walk away from their college degrees with some idea of what it is the professionals in front of the classroom or giving seminars are doing. Most of us assistant professors, for example, are not sitting around after classes stop for the summer drinking margeritas, but in all this surveying of people about climate change and global warming, I haven’t seen questions probing this awareness of what the academy is. Thin Ice actually touches on this topic in terms of what it is an Earth scientist does and why.

Which brings me back to twitter. The graphic above has the key points that I will watch for in twitter: 1. 45% of followers are non-scientists, media, general public, and 2. median twitter following is 730 times median department size. The other points are pretty darn good too! If you want to see what I’m tweeting, thinking, following, etc., visit my twitter feed @brianmagi. I’ll continue to sort through ideas and thoughts and announcements on my personal webpage and blog, but twitter will be great during the academic year when teaching takes a big chunk of my time.

Tags: air qualityclimateinterdisciplinary researchteaching