Water & Energy Cycle

The Water and Energy Cycle Focus Area studies the distribution, transport and transformation of water and energy within the Earth System. Since solar energy drives the water cycle and energy exchanges are modulated by the interaction of water with radiation, the energy cycle and the water cycle are intimately entwined.

The polar sea ice cover is very dynamic and is forced by winds and ocean currents. This image of the Arctic sea ice cover on March 1, 2003, obtained from the Aqua Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E), shows the combination of both temperature and the emissivity of sea ice at 89 GHz. Patterns of leads (linear openings in the sea ice) appear darker than the surrounding thick sea ice. Generally, these areas of thin ice have a higher temperature because of the warmer sea water below. The 89 GHz channel used in generating this image provides the highest spatial resolution of about 5 km. Even at this spatial resolution individual ice flows can be observed. The green, brown, and white areas over land indicate increasing elevation. The dark circle over the pole is an area that is beyond the field of view of the instrument. Credit: NASA GSFC, Alvaro Ivanoff.

The long-term goal of this focus area is to enable improved predictions of the global water and energy cycles. This key goal requires not only documenting and predicting means and trends in the rate of the Earth's water and energy cycling as well as predicting changes in the frequency and intensity of related meteorological and hydrologic events such as floods and droughts.
In the past decade NASA's water and energy research projects have yielded significant advances in our understanding of key Earth system science processes. For example, we have been able to improve rainfall quantification, as well as greatly improve hurricane prediction capability. However, many issues remain to be resolved. In the next decade this focus area will move us toward balancing the water budget at global and regional spatial scales, provide global observation capability of precipitation over the day's cycle and important land surface quantities such as soil moisture and snow quantity at mesoscale resolution. We are working on improving cloud-resolving models for use in climate models. We will gain knowledge of the major influences on variability in the water and energy cycles.

Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems

The Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Focus Area addresses the distribution and cycling of carbon among the land, ocean, and atmospheric reservoirs and ecosystems as they are affected by humans, as they change due to their own biogeochemistry, and as they interact with climate variations. The goals are to: quantify global productivity, biomass, carbon fluxes, and changes in land cover; document and understand how the global carbon cycle, terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and land cover and use are changing; and provide useful projections of future changes in global carbon cycling and terrestrial and marine ecosystems.
Throughout the next decade, research will be needed to advance our understanding of and ability to model human-ecosystems-climate interactions so that an integrated understanding of Earth System function can be applied to our goals. These research activities will yield knowledge of the Earth's ecosystems and carbon cycle, as well as projections of carbon cycle and ecosystem responses to global environmental change.
Examples of the types of forecasts that may be possible are: the outbreak and spread of harmful algal blooms, occurrence and spread of invasive exotic species, and productivity of forest and agricultural systems. This Focus Area also will contribute to the improvement of climate projections for 50-100 years into the future by providing key inputs for climate models. This includes projections of future atmospheric CO2 and CH4 concentrations and understanding of key ecosystem and carbon cycle process controls on the climate system.
Both physical and biological processes in the ocean affect the carbon cycle. In addition, physical processes influence the net production of biological oceanography.

China Mobile capex to rise 22 percent in 2014, aims to sell 100 million 4G devices

(Reuters) - China Mobile Ltd's capital expenditure will increase 22 percent to 225.2 billion yuan ($36.34 billion) this year, the company said in a presentation on Thursday, as it pumps money into developing its mobile networks.
This will include building more than 500,000 base stations in 2014, to help bolster its high-speed 4G service launched in December.
China Mobile also plans to sell 100 million 4G devices such as smartphones and tablets this year, according to the presentation, which was released after the firm's 2013 earnings results.
Revenues from SMS and MMS messaging shrank 6.5 percent in 2013 while voice sales shrank 3.4 percent, as these formerly lucrative sources of income have been replaced by services like Tencent Holdings' WeChat, which are carried on a user's mobile data plan.
(Reporting by Paul Carsten; Editing by Matt Driskill)

Plasma Plume Keeps Earth Safe From Solar Storms

Earth has a magnetic field, which begins at the core and stretches far out into space. Typically, this magnetic field is a useful shield for solar activity. However, if the Earth's magnetic field bumps up against the sun's magnetic field, all types of madness can ensue, including geomagnetic storms, or space weather that can affect the International Space Station.
This meeting of the magnetic fields is known as magnetic reconnection. During this process, the sun's electrical currents can enter Earth's atmosphere, and in the process, some of our own magnetic field gets stripped away. A new study from MIT and NASA, published in the journal Science this week, explores how a plume of plasma adds extra reinforcements to keep us earthlings safe during solar activity.
The plume is not terribly unlike a river, with particles that flow through a stream. "This higher-density, cold plasma changes about every plasma physics process it comes in contact with," MIT Haystack Observatory associate director John Foster said in a statement. "It slows down reconnection, and it can contribute to the generation of waves that, in turn, accelerate particles in other parts of the magnetosphere. So it's a recirculation process, and really fascinating."
Since space weather events create radio wave distortion, scientists at the Haystack Observatory have been analyzing radio signals to determine plasma particle concentration, using the data to map the plasma plumes from Earth. While they have been performing the research for 10 years, the researchers note that this is still just an estimate. So the team matched the Earth-based research with space-based data, monitoring a solar storm last January. Three spacecraft crossed one point in the magnetic field where a plasma plume was estimated to be. Data from those craft confirmed that dense plasma plume, which extended to the place where Earth's field met the solar storm.

Computer Programmers: Help NASA Spot Earth-Threatening Asteroids

I'm a writer. My barely-out-of-college kid brother is a computer programmer. Only one of us has the skills to save the world from asteroids. (Okay, spoiler, it's not me.)
NASA is calling on coders to develop software that automatically spots asteroids in photos taken by large ground telescopes. The software has to work better than existing software, which depends on comparing telescope photos of the same patch of sky, taken at different times, to determine which objects in the photos move. In a description of the contest, NASA's Tournament Lab says, "The winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computers."
The winning solution(s) will also win a total of $35,000 in prizes, according to statement from Planetary Resources. The asteroid-mining company signed an agreement with NASA to manage the contest, which is called Asteroid Data Hunter.
The contest is part of NASA's Asteroid Grand Challenge, an overall program to develop ways to detect if an asteroid threatens Earth. The agency already has plans to capture an asteroid and send astronauts to study it. The point of the Asteroid Grand Challenge is to partner with organizations outside of NASA, including citizen scientists, for asteroid-impact prevention.
You can find out more about what NASA wants for its asteroid-spotting software on the contest's website. There are also links there for registering for the contest, which opens March 17.

Big Pic: A Hypergiant Star And Its Clingy Companion

The astronomer who discovered the size of this star says it's shaped like a peanut, but we disagree; that one "lobe" is much too large. Perhaps that's because the larger star is, in fact, one of the 10 largest stars ever discovered. Its diameter is 1,315 times that of Earth's sun.
Astronomers have seen the star, named HR 5171, before. In a new study, however, an international team of scientists learned much more about it. For example, they discovered that HR 5171 is a binary system with a small companion star that touches and orbits the larger star. The astronomers also calculated HR 5171 A's (the bigger star's) surprising size. The star is almost twice as large as scientists expect for stars of its type.
HR 5171 A is a yellow hypergiant, a type of star that's rare in our galaxy. Like its type-mates, HR 5171 A is big, bright and unstable. It's about 1 million times brighter than the sun. Over the past four decades, it's been cooling, enlarging and expelling material outwards.
The team made its new observations from data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer. The astronomers also analyzed archival data extending back 60 years, to learn what HR 5171 A has been doing over time. They published their work today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. You can see the full text of a version of the paper on the arXiv, where they posted it publicly before it was peer-reviewed.

What's the latest cosmology gossip? According to the Guardian, the field is awash with rumors that next week, American scientists will announce the detection of gravitational waves: incredibly small ripples carrying energy across the void of the universe.
Space.com reports simply that at a press conference scheduled for 12:00 noon EDT on Monday, March 17, "[A] team of scientists will unveil what they bill as a 'major discovery' in the field of astrophysics...at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics."
Predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves are speculated to be “an echo of the big bang [sic] in which the universe came into existence 14bn year ago,” writes the Guardian, which caught an echo of the intense excitement that seems to be swirling among scientists with these and other quotes:

"If they do announce primordial gravitational waves on Monday, I will take a huge amount of convincing," said Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist from University College London. "But if they do have a robust detection … Jesus, wow! I'll be taking next week off."
..."If a detection has been made, it is extraordinarily exciting. This is the real big tick-box that we have been waiting for. It will tell us something incredibly fundamental about what was happening when the universe was 10^-34 seconds old," said Prof Andrew Jaffe, a cosmologist from Imperial College, London, who works on another telescope involved in the search called Polarbear.

This seems to be a fantastic moment in time to be a physicist. In addition to this possible discovery of gravitational waves, theorists are still digesting data gathered in 2012 from the Large Hadron Collider, including proof of the existence of the elusive Higgs particle. That's the story covered in the engrossing new film “Particle Fever,” which you should definitely go see.