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  • Africa’s soil diversity mapped for the first time

    Africa’s soil diversity mapped for the first time

    Atlas drawn up by international experts aims to expand understanding of soil and how Africa can manage it sustainably

    MDG Soil Atlas of Africa View larger picture

    One of the maps from the Soil Atlas of Africa, edited by the European commission, 2013. Photograph: European commission

    A team of international experts has drawn up the Soil Atlas of Africa – the first such book mapping this key natural resource – to help farmers, land managers and policymakers understand the diversity and importance of soil, and the need to manage it through sustainable use.

    They say that despite soil’s importance, most people in Africa lack knowledge about it, partly because information tends to be confined to academic publications read only by scientists.

    “There was an existing database on soil that had not been updated by soil science experts from Africa, so we asked them to provide us with new information, which we translated into a form understandable to key stakeholders,” said Arwyn Jones, a member of the soil team at the land resource management unit of the European commission’s joint research centre, which produced the atlas.

    The project began four years ago, and involved experts from the European commission, the African Union (AU) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The atlas was released at the meeting of the AU and EU commissions in Addis Ababa last month.

    Robert Zougmoré, regional programme manager for west Africa at the Cgiar research programme on climate change, agriculture and food security, says the atlas displays the diversity of African soil for both agricultural and non-agricultural purposes.

    “We documented all the different types of soils and mapped them so that our decision-makers at national and regional levels can use the maps to decide where to invest in terms of food production and urbanisation,” he says. “Using the atlas, we can identify regions such as central Africa, some parts of west Africa, and southern Africa where a type of fertile soil called vertisol – which maximises crop yields – can be found in greater quantities.”

    Zougmoré tells SciDev.Net that most African countries have national soil bureaus that are inadequately resourced, making it difficult to generate new soil information. He is now calling for more support from African governments.

    Peter Okoth, a Nairobi-based natural resources consultant, says: “Regional users [of the atlas] have the opportunity to know about trends, problem hotspots and patterns of soil distribution”. But he cautions that unless users are properly trained, they may find using the atlas challenging.

    Pedro Sanchez, project director of the Africa Soil Information Service (Afsis), and a soil expert at the US-based Earth Institute at Columbia University, welcomes the atlas as an “important tool”. But he points out that because the atlas is not interactive, users may find it difficult to determine relationships between soil properties and their impacts.

    “We are also working on another interactive, web-accessible digital soil map that covers all the non-desert areas of Sub-Saharan Africa,” says Sanchez, adding that Afsis hopes to complete this project by the end of the year.

    • Download the Soil Atlas of Africa (part one, part two, part three). The atlas is also available as a printed copy from the EU’s publication office.

  • OPINION: City’s sea-level plans don’t hold water

    OPINION: City’s sea-level plans don’t hold water

    By Bob Carter  

    May 23, 2013, 10 p.m.

    AROUND Australia, the Lake Macquarie City Council is among the most recalcitrant when it comes to paying attention to the science that underpins the global warming and rising sea-level issue.

    The council appears to have learned nothing from the defeat of its former plans (based on utterly unrealistic science) to tamper in the property rights of more than 10,000 coastal properties by imposing section 149 certificates on them.

    Nor has the attitude of councillors been chastened by the O’Farrell state government’s dumping of the former Labor government’s unrealistic coastal planning guidelines.

    Instead, the council is now marshalling its powers again to force a Local Area (sea-level) Adaptation Plan on the communities of Marks Point and Belmont South.

    Whilst adopting the trendy label of adaptation (which is most certainly the needed, cost-effective way of managing all Australia’s climate hazards), a reading of the allegedly new plan confirms that it  simply represents  a rebadged version of Lake Macquarie City Council’s previous interfering planning.

    Do councillors really think that the public is so stupid that they cannot see through such an obvious ploy?

    As many Newcastle and Lake Macquarie residents  know, the bottom line  is the measurement of what sea-level is actually doing, rather than  computer projections about what it might do in the future.

    The highest quality, long-record tide gauge on the central NSW coast – that at Port Denison, Sydney Harbour – records an average rate of sea-level rise of between 0.5millimetres and 0.9millimetres a year  over the 20th century (as calculated, respectively, by Boretti and  the National Tidal Centre). Even the larger of these two figures is low, being just half of the acknowledged global rate of rise of 1.8millimetres a year.

    So far as is known publicly,  the Lake Macquarie City Council is relying still upon the unrealistic coastal flooding maps that were prepared using their August 2008 figure of an assumed sea-level rise of 0.91metres by the year 2100.  The flooding maps that were produced assuming one metre or more of sea-level rise by 2100, and which have been the basis for the public discussion since then, represent computer-generated virtual reality that has little to do with the likely 100-year-future real world.

    Before attempting to impose any further coastal planning regulations regarding sea-level rise, the council needs to prepare flooding maps based upon the assumption of presumed rises of five, nine and 18centimetres out to 2100. These numbers represent the recent and 100-year-average rates of sea-level rise on the central NSW coast, and the 100-year average rate of global rise, respectively.

    When these new and realistic flooding maps have been released and discussed publicly, then, and only then, will it be time for Lake Macquarie Council to reconsider its  coastal planning policy.

    Professor Bob Carter is a fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs and chief scientific adviser with the International Climate Science Coalition.

  • Weather disasters on the rise and taxpayers are getting the bill

    Weather disasters on the rise and taxpayers are getting the bill

    by Kate O’Connell, in Rochester, NY
    May 23, 2013 — The impact and severity of weather events like the tornado that hit Oklahoma City are increasing due to a changing global climate, according to research from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

    And more of the related economic burden is being carried by taxpayers. In 2012, federal spending directed toward disaster response for storms, wild fires, floods and drought reached nearly $100 billion, the NRDC report says, beating out funding for education and transport.

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    Reported by

    Kate O’Connell
    Reporter, The Innovation Trail

    Laurie Johnson, chief economist for the NRDC’s climate and clean air program, says not only is the damage from severe weather increasing, but those costs are being met with federal dollars.

    “Increasingly the insurance industry is getting out of the business, because it’s not good business. So, as the private insurance industry has been pulling out of the market, starting with Katrina really, the government has had to step in and to take care of these disasters.”

    In 2012, she says, the costs amounted averaged out to roughly $1,100 per tax payer, including those not directly affected by disasters.

    Tim Dodge from the Independent insurance agents and brokers of New York says it’s true that in the national context, insurers are less likely to cover damage from weather disturbances.

    But, he says it’s different in upstate New York.

    “Upstate has its vulnerabilities but we’re not as vulnerable as other parts of the state and other parts of the country and so insurance companies, all things being equal, will be more inclined to continue writing insurance policies up here that they might not be so eager to do in other parts of the country.”

    Dodge says as weather events grow increasingly severe, and with the Atlantic Hurricane season beginning on June 1st, people in the North-east need to get insurance and be prepared.

     

    Reporting by the Innovation Trail is supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Visit innovationtrail.org.

  • Weather Service systems crumbling as extreme weather escalates

    Weather Service systems crumbling as extreme weather escalates

    By Jason Samenow, Published: May 23, 2013 at 11:14 amE-mail the writer

    nws-logo1As painfully obvious from the recent events in Oklahoma, tornado season is in full gear. Meanwhile, hurricane season is a week away.  Yet budget woes and multiple system failures at the National Weather Service in the past week, not to mention staffing shortages, are raising concerns that its ability to warn the public of hazardous weather could crack at any time.

    In the past 5 days alone, a telecommunications outage near Chicago made it difficult for NWS forecasters to issue warnings, a major weather satellite failed, the website for the entire NWS Southern Region went down, and a NWS official in tornado alley declined to launch a weather balloon citing budget concerns.

    These problems are symptomatic of insufficient funding and dated infrastructure, advocates for more generous NWS budgets say. What follows is an overview of the problems NWS has encountered, just since Sunday.

    Telecommunications outage

    Late Monday evening, just hours after the Moore, Okla. tornado carved a deadly, 17-mile path, a Verizon telecommunications outage occurred at a facility outside Chicago, affecting 6 forecast offices according to Chris Vaccaro, a National Weather Service spokesperson.

    At the forecast office serving Chicago in Romeoville, Ill., when forecasters attempted to issue a severe thunderstorm and flash flood warning for the Windy City, systems went down. Forecasters were unable to disseminate the warnings according to Eugene Izzi, a forecaster at the office and also a representative of the National Weather Service Employees Organization (NWSEO), a labor union.

    “We and our neighboring offices lost internet and we were unable to transmit any products, we only received some limited data (our own radar, but no other sites) and we were essentially left crippled,” explained Izzi in a Facebook post.

    The Romeoville office contacted its secondary back-up office in Milwaukee and, over the phone, dictated the warning information.

    “Thankfully, it was a run of the mill ordinary marginal wind event for our county warning area,” Izzi said. “Think of how close this was to being a catastrophe. If this had happened hours earlier during the Moore tornado, I shudder to think of the results.”

    The cause of the outage is unclear, but Vaccaro stressed it was “not related to any failure of NWS equipment.”

    Dan Sobien, president of the NWSEO, questioned why there was no back-up.

    “If NWS has to rely on Verizon to get its warnings out, then it’s doing something wrong,” Sobien said.

    Major weather observing satellite fails

    On Wednesday, the weather satellite that keeps an eye on the sky over much of eastern North America and the western Atlantic ceased operating.  The satellite, known as GOES-13, had failed one time earlier last fall and was restored.

    As a temporary solution to the current outage, NOAA switched its other primary weather satellite, GOES-15, which focuses on the West Coast and parts of the Pacific, into “full-disc mode” to provide broader coverage and fill the gap left by GOES-13.

    But meteorologists warned the quality of the substitute imagery would be compromised due to the larger viewing angle.

    “The satellite coverage from GOES-15 results in distorted images of the eastern U.S. and the western Atlantic and would be a significant concern for forecasters and the public at large going into the Atlantic hurricane season,” wrote AccuWeather meteorologist Alex Sosnowski.

    NOAA said that a European satellite provides high quality substitute imagery in the gap region and it plans to turn on its backup satellite, GOES-14, today to resume dedicated coverage there.

    But if GOES-13 cannot be fixed and GOES-14 encounters technical difficulties, there is no backup (aside from relying on European data) until NOAA’s next generation weather satellite GOES-R is launched in 2015. And that launch has encountered delays.

    In February, the Government Accountability Office classified the possible satellite gap among the top 30 challenges facing the Federal Government.

    Southern Region websites down

    Since Wednesday evening, National Weather Service websites for the entire Southern Region have functioned only intermittently. This has limited public access to forecasts and warnings. The Southern Region covers a huge area from Florida to Oklahoma including areas under a heightened risk of severe weather today in Texas.

    Although the website operations have been spotty, the public can (and could) still access forecast and warnings for these areas from NWS’ main portal, weather.gov.

    Last fall, during and following Hurricane Sandy, the website for the Eastern Region of the NWS experienced an outage and was out of commission for several days. The NWS post-storm assessment recommended: “NWS needs to develop redundancies in web services prior to the 2013 hurricane season to ensure backup in case of equipment failure.”

    We are awaiting word from the National Weather Service on the cause of the current problem and the status.

    (Update: The websites came back online late this morning and have remained in working order.)

    Special weather balloon launch opportunity turned down

    Just hours before several tornadoes touched down in Oklahoma on Sunday, the Midland, Texas, an official at the National Weather Service forecast office turned down a voluntary opportunity to launch a midday weather balloon to sample atmospheric conditions, citing budget concerns.

    Morning and evening balloon launches are mandatory. Forecast offices may initiate “special” midday balloon launches when severe weather is expected in the region to provide additional data. Several offices in the Plains, including Norman, Okla., released special launches during the Sunday and Monday severe weather outbreaks, although Midland passed on the opportunity.

    “Given our budget (cough) situation, I’ll decline,” typed Brian Curran, Science Operations Officer at the Midland NWS office, into the agency’s internal chat system.

    Midland was not in an elevated risk zone for severe weather at the time.

    Chris Vaccaro, an NWS spokesperson, said the decision not launch the balloon had “no effect” on subsequent severe weather watches and warnings.  He also stressed Curran’s decision was a personal one and “not a direction.”

    But Dan Sobien, president of the NWS Employees Organization, said he thought the data would have been a useful input to forecasts and that to decline the request was unusual.

    “I’ve never seen [a balloon launch request] shot down like that before,” Sobien said. “Not for budget reasons.”

    Broader implications

    In addition to these budget and technology systems issues, forecast offices are short-staffed. There is a 10 percent vacancy rate within the NWS, and hiring is frozen as a cost savings measure motivated by the sequester.

    Related: Hiring freeze hobbling operations at local Weather Service office

    The Department of Commerce had also proposed four days furlough days for NWS forecasters, a move that was challenged by Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Va.) Wednesday.

    “The severe weather events in Oklahoma this week have further convinced me that we should not take any chance that avoidable furloughs might result in a degradation of weather prediction and forecasting services,” Wolf said in a letter to Rebecca Blank, acting secretary of the Department of Commerce.

    The NWS Employees Organization has persistently voiced objections about vacancy rates, the furlough plan, hiring freeze, tight forecast office budgets and aging technology infrastructure.

    “The NWS is falling apart, it’s not funded correctly,” said Dan Sobien, NWSEO president. “The NWS has been neglected for a decade.”

    Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society, used the Oklahoma twister’s aftermath to express significant concerns about the various troubles facing the NWS.

    “I, and other colleagues, have repeatedly warned that we are risking lives with bad decisions on weather funding, staffing, satellite capacity, etc.,” Shepherd wrote on his Facebook page.

    “We need a national response, sound policy/decisions, no posturing on sequester/budgets,” Shepherd said.

    Jason Samenow is the Capital Weather Gang’s chief meteorologist and serves as the Washington Post’s Weather Editor. He earned BA and MS degrees in atmospheric science from the University of Virginia and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

  • Greiner resignation signals ‘no-confidence’ in O’Farrell

    Greiner resignation signals ‘no-confidence’ in O’Farrell

    By state political reporter Liz Foschia, ABCUpdated May 24, 2013, 4:54 pm

    NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell is facing accusations that departures at the top of Infrastructure New South Wales amount to a vote of no-confidence in him.

    In State Parliament yesterday, Mr O’Farrell announced the resignations of the advisory body’s inaugural chairman Nick Greiner and chief executive Paul Broad after just two years.

    Mr O’Farrell says it is the right time to transition to a new leadership but State Opposition Leader John Robertson claims Mr Greiner, a former NSW Premier, and Mr Broad are moving on because they are frustrated with the Government.

    “Nick Greiner has been all over town critical of Barry O’Farrell for building the North West Rail Link, for building CBD light rail, rather than building the major infrastructure that will grow the economy in NSW,” he said.

    “This is nothing more than his judgement of Barry O’Farrell after just two years.”

    Greens MP John Kaye fears Mr Broad’s new job as chief executive of Snowy Hydro will put the privatisation of Snowy Hydro back on the agenda.

    Infrastructure NSW and the state Commission of Audit have both recommended the State Government consider options for privatising the power generator, but Mr O’Farrell says it is not Government policy.

    “This is bad news for those of us who are committed to ongoing public ownership of Snowy Hydro,” Dr Kaye said.

    “Paul Broad is a self-confessed admirer of Jeff Kennett and his privatisation program.

    “Now he’s been appointed to the CEO of Snowy Hydro one can only assume this is yet another step towards privatising the national icon.”

  • Mount Everest’s glaciers shrinking at increasing rate, say researchers

    Mount Everest’s glaciers shrinking at increasing rate, say researchers

    Glaciers on or around Everest have shrunk 13% in 50 years with the snow line 180 metres higher than it was 50 years ago

    Base Camp at the foot of Mount Everest

    Researchers say they suspect that the decline of snow and ice in the Everest region is a result of changes in global climate. Photograph: Rafal Belzowski/Getty Images

    Global warming is melting snow and ice on the world’s highest mountain at an accelerating rate, researchers have claimed.

    A study by a team led by a Nepali scientist at the University of Milan has found that glaciers on or around Mount Everest have shrunk by 13% in the last 50 years with the snow line 180 metres higher than it was 50 years ago. The glaciers are disappearing faster every year, it says.

    The 60th anniversary of the first ascent of the 8,848 metre (29,028ft) peak by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay will be celebrated next week.

    The researchers say they suspect that the decline of snow and ice in the Everest region is a result of changes in global climate caused by human-generated greenhouse gases. However, they have not yet established a firm connection, Sudeep Thakuri, who led the team, said.

    The landscape around Mount Everest has changed dramatically since the world’s highest mountain was first climbed. Mountaineers now report more rock and less snow and ice on well known routes. The ends of glaciers around the peak have also retreated by an average of 400 meters since 1962, the new research found, and some smaller glaciers were now nearly half the size they were in the 1960s.

    The researchers used satellite imagery of the peak and the 713-square-mile Sagarmatha national park around the mountain as well as long-term meteorological data.

    Small glaciers of less than a square kilometre (about 247 acres), are vanishing fastest, registering a 43% decline in surface area since the 1960s, Thakuri said.

    Specialists in Kathmandu said the rate of change through the Himalayas was variable. Though clear in places such as Nepal, at the eastern end of the chain, the situation was different in Pakistan and further west, said Arun Shrestha of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu.

    “The glaciers are in retreat but rates are different,” he said. “It is quite rapid in the east Himalaya but in the west some are advancing while others are in retreat.”

    Other research suggests the ice of the main Khumbu glacier which flows down from Everest is less thick than it was previously.

    The issue of the future of glaciers in the Himalayas is highly controversial. A United Nations report in 2007included a false claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.

    Though all say there is a change, scientists working in the field urge caution over any estimates, saying data is insufficient especially when looking at a small area.

    “It is very difficult to scientifically say what are the trends on one particular mountain,” Shrestha said.

    The impact of climate change on the Himalayas will have consequences across south Asia and beyond. Rivers such as the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra depend to some extent on seasonal glacier melt. Countries across the region are already suffering acute water shortages.

    “The Himalayan glaciers and ice caps are considered a water tower for Asia since they store and supply water downstream during the dry season,” said Thakuri. “Downstream populations are dependent on the melt water for agriculture, drinking and power production.”

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