Content about Environment

Grid computing is helping scientists to design cheaper and greener plastics for everyday use.

Read about how the EpiCollect application can help field researchers gather data.

Image of the Week - Google Street View lands in Antarctica

The above picture is of Half Moon Island in the South Shetlands. You can see a 360 degree panoramic view of the island by pressing the arrows in the top-left hand corner of the picture. It has a certain ‘cool’ factor in more ways than one, don’t you think?
Original courtesy Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering, for Google Earth and Maps.

The ubiquity of Google knows no bounds. Their Street View service, first introduced in 2007, with its 360-degree panoramic street-level images has now captured views of our planet’s most southern-most continent – Antarctica.
Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google Earth and Maps, took the Street View images or ‘vacation photos’ while travelling to Antarctica on a cruise ship. More information about his trip can be found here.

Announcement - Registration open, Computing and Astroparticle Physics-ASPERA, Lyon, France

Photo courtesy ASPERA

Registration is now open for Computing and Astroparticle Physics-ASPERA, to be hold in Lyon, France from 07 October to 08 October 2010.
Astroparticle Physics has grown in a few years from a field of a few charismatic pioneers transgressing interdisciplinary frontiers to a global science activity projecting very large infrastructures involving hundreds of researchers each. In particular, the large infrastructures proposed in the ASPERA Roadmap will face challenging problems of data collection, data storage and data mining. In some of these, the cost of computing will be a significant fraction of the cost of the infrastructure and the issues of model of computation, data mining complexity and public access will be extremely challenging.
In the Lyon workshop these issues will be addressed, along with data storage and analysis models developed in neighboring fields such as part

Feature - Surfing for earthquakes

Aftermath of Haiti earthquake. Image courtesy UN Development Program

A better understanding of the ground beneath our feet may come from research by seismologists and an organization called RAPID—a group of computer scientists at the University of Edinburgh.
The very structure of the Earth controls how earthquakes travel and the amount of damage they cause. Therefore, a clear picture of this structure would be extremely valuable to earthquake planners — but it requires the analysis of huge amounts of data.
To help, the RAPID team developed a system that performs the seismologists’ data-crunching, and have made it easy to use by relying on an interface familiar to all scientists: a web browser.
Seismologists measure vibrations in the Earth at hundreds of observatories across Europe, which allows them to study earthquakes as they travel across countries and continents. By measuring the speed and strength of the vibrations at d

Feature - The sun never sets on the GreenStar Network The GSN project is lead by Quebec Ecole de technologie superieure in Montreal. In this picture, the team behind the GreenStar Network pose next to the Communications Research Centre Canada's GSN node. From left to right: Martin Brooks, Mathieu Lemay, Michel Savoie, John Spence, Bobby Ho. Image courtesy of John Spence. When the sun sets on the Communications Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada, the solar-powered computational jobs might be sent across the high-speed connection to the Cybera data center in Calgary, where it’s still bright and sunny. And when the sun stops shining in Calgary, if the wind is blowing at the wind-powered BastionHost facility in Truro, Nova Scotia, then the jobs could be sent back east. Most forms of renewable energy are not reliable – at any given location. But Canada’s Green Star Network aims to demonstrate that by allowing the computations to follow the renewable energy across a lar

BP oil spill: Scientists mobilize to create new disaster response science

The Gulf's wildlife is increasingly being affected by the spill. Image courtesy of NOAA.

Less than two weeks after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion killed 11 and began leaking between two and four million liters of oil per day, the calls started coming in. The oil would soon reach the Louisiana coast, where it would do untold amounts of damage to the local marshes, wetlands, and channels. Could the team that successfully modeled hurricane storm surges along the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas coastlines help?
“We started working on the project fairly quickly, probably around the 10th of May,” said Clint Dawson, head of the Computational Hydraulics Group at the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.
With the highly accurate descriptions of the Gulf of Mexico’s coastline Dawson and his colleagues previously used for hurricane si

Video of the Week - Simulations show scenarios for oil spill

This animation shows one scenario of how oil released at the location of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may move in the upper 65 feet of the ocean. This is not a forecast, but rather, it illustrates a likely dispersal pathway of the oil for roughly four months following the spill. It assumes oil spilling continuously from April 20 to June 20. The colors represent a dilution factor ranging from red (most concentrated) to beige (most diluted). The dilution factor does not attempt to estimate the actual barrels of oil at any spot; rather, it depicts how much of the total oil from the source will be carried elsewhere by ocean currents. For example, areas showing a dilution factor of 0.01 would have one-hundredth the concentration of oil present at the spill site.
The animation is based on a computer model simulation, using a virtual dye, that assumes weather and current conditions similar to

Feature - Ecological forecasting in NEON

TOP: NEON's proto-tower just north of Boulder, Colorado, where the project is testing equipment. The site is already producing a real-data stream.
BOTTOM: Hongyan Luo conducts tests at the base of NEON's test proto-tower.
Images courtesy of NEON, Inc.

Massive independent networks of environmental and ecological data stations distributed across the globe could launch environmental science into the petascale era, transforming the way scientists look at our planet.
In the United States, the National Ecological Observatory Network is poised to begin construction later this year.
“What NEON is about is measuring the effects of climate change, land use change, and invasive species on continental scale ecology. And we’re doing that in order to enable ecological forecasting,” said Michael Keller, the chief of science at NEON.
Ecological forecasting, like weather forecasting, uses extensive data sets over large areas and pe

Link of the week - Climate Wizard

A screenshot of the Climate Wizard website.

Now anyone can play with climate models using an online tool called Climate Wizard.
Climate Wizard is an interactive website where visitors can browse maps of historical climate data and future predictions of temperature and precipitation.
“Climate Wizard does not simulate future climate. Rather, it analyzes General Circulation Models in a way that makes them more accessible to non-climate scientists,” said Evan Girvetz, a Senior Scientist with The Nature Conservancy Global Climate Change Program.
General Circulation Models are a type of mathematical model of the general circulation of a planetary atmosphere or ocean.
“The Climate Wizard takes climate projections from 16 GCMs, each of which are 3-dimensional databases of latitude, longitude, and time,” Girvetz said. “It analyzes each of them to determine the rate of change over time for each grid cell, then combines the maps of

Feature - FOOTWAYS takes its first steps

Footways started quite literally in the back of someone’s garage. Image courtesy Igor Dubus

Google, Hewlett Packard and Apple all had humble beginnings in the back of someone’s garage. Could the same be true in the back of a garage in Orleans, France?
“I had never seen a router/switch in my life, I had to get into VPN, network, perl scripting. I also had problems with electricity supply and consumption — this was my home, not a dedicated IT room,” says Igor Dubus.
This was only the beginning. Having built a 96-node cluster in his garage to run computer models as the coordinator of the FOOTPRINT project (iSGTW ran an article about FOOTPRINT earlier this year,) Dubus launched his own start-up company, called FOOTWAYS. His goal is to develop this “garage-cluster” into a 12,000-node high performance computing center dedicated to pesticide modeling.
FOOTPRINT, an EU project, seeks to minimize water contam